Missouri Baptist University is located in St. Louis, MO and is part of the Missouri Baptist Convention with an enrollment of over 5,000 students. Aaron Lumpkin, Director of Faith and Service at Missouri Baptist, helps the university manage their Service Days.
“Our students are incredibly busy but have a desire to serve and meet tangible needs. For this upcoming service project we will be working with Meals for a Million and will have four hours to pack 25,000 meals,” shares Lumpkin. “150-200 volunteers will participate over the course of four hours, and there will be fun competitions and giveaways. The meals that are packed will go to local food banks, local churches for outreach opportunities, and a few will go to our food pantry on campus”
Lumpkin and his team uses VOMO to manage the logistics of these serving days for their students.
For Lumpkin, the challenge has never been a lack of desire to serve. “One thing that was hard when I moved into this role, before we started using VOMO, was that people were desiring opportunities but we did not have a place to promote volunteering. Trying to manage that could easily be a full-time job.”
“We love VOMO. I can’t say that enough.”
Although students desire to serve, Missouri Baptist University didn’t have the staff required to manage a volunteer program full-time. “We don’t have a staff person dedicated to tracking service hours, so we needed something efficient and effective and VOMO has been perfect for that,” says Lumpkin.
One reason why they love VOMO at Missouri Baptist University is that it is helping them amplify a culture of service on campus. “VOMO has created a platform to both promote service opportunities and to provide opportunities for partnerships with local organizations,” Lumpkin explains. “We are also able now to track how students are engaged on campus and in the local community. Last year alone we logged over 4,200 service hours. We have even incorporated VOMO into our Freshman and Senior Seminar courses that require service hours.”
Not only are they encouraging generosity of time on campus, but Missouri Baptist University is seeing the impact of VOMO all over the world. Lumpkin shares, “One really great project we were able to participate in was stuffing backpacks for kids. We then took a team of students to Ghana where they delivered 125 of the backpacks to children in a rural school there. The remaining 375 backpacks went to foster homes and to kids living in shelters in the St. Louis area. VOMO was the platform that enabled all of that to happen.”
With VOMO in place, Missouri Baptist University is excited to see how they can continue to help their students grow into servant leaders who engage well with their community and impact society for the greater good.
“VOMO has played a huge role in that by managing the logistical and administrative aspects of service so that we can focus on cultivating students.”
VOMO provides the recruitment, mobilization, and reporting tools you need to create responsive Volunteer experiences without the back office headaches.