March/April 2009

Spring Break: Service Gone Wild

Can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Illustration: Gordon Studer

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For spring break fun, can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Rite of Spring: Tequila shots
Righteous Spring: Measles shots. Public health students from the University of Michigan spend their vacation observing a childhood vaccination program in China.

Rite of Spring: Señor Frog’s
Righteous Spring: See more frogs. Life Changing Travel’s Galapagos Islands trip has students building trails, adding native plants, and working at the islands’ research stations.

Rite of Spring: Gaudy cruise
Righteous Spring: Godly crusade. Students spend four days lobbying with the Oregon Right to Life Education Foundation. Highlight: the quiz game “Who Wants to Be a Pro-Lifer?”

Rite of Spring: Contracting stds
Righteous Spring: Preventing them via an AmeriCorps condom distribu­tion and sex ed trip to Charlotte, North Carolina

Rite of Spring: Drama
Righteous Spring: Dharma. A retreat at Virginia’s Radford University includes an ass-numbing 15 hours of silent meditation.

Rite of Spring: Crossing the border
Righteous Spring: Walking the border. University of California-Berkeley students tour the routes used by illegal immigrants coming into the US. ­But instead of following los coyotes, the students are guided by la migra.

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It’s risky, but also unavoidable: A full one-third of the dollars that we need to pay for the journalism you rely on has to get raised in December. A good December means our newsroom is fully staffed, well-resourced, and on the beat. A bad one portends budget trouble and hard choices.

The December 31 deadline is drawing nearer, and if we’re going to have any chance of making our goal, we need those of you who’ve never pitched in before to join the ranks of MoJo donors.

We simply can’t afford to come up short. There is no cushion in our razor-thin budget—no backup, no alternative sources of revenue to balance our books. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the fierce journalism we do. That’s why we need you to show up for us right now.

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