Every Monday, Rebecca L. Goldberg '00 travels to Blessed Sacrament School in Jamaica Plains to teach second graders about peaceful conflict resolution efforts.

Every Thursday, Goldberg travels to Dorchester to tutor a young Vietnamese child in English.

And every Friday, she again travels to Dorchester for more tutoring.

But while Goldberg volunteers 10 hours a week, she says her civic participation does not extend into the political realm.

"I am civic minded. I want to work in public schools but I wouldn't want to intern on the Hill," she says.

But Goldberg, who could traditionally be labeled 'politically uninvolved,' she says she distances herself from politics--like most students.

In a survey conducted by The Crimson of roughly 300 students, nearly 94 percent of students say they agree or strongly agree that it is important to vote. Yet., only 77 percent are registered to vote and only 22 percent actually voted in elections last year. So, are Harvard students dispassionate ?

Not really. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol says civic engagement extends from volunteering to political action to even going to Fenway Park with friends.

And with over 25 percent of students volunteering through Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), from Mission Hill to the Boston Refugee Youth Enrichment (BRYE) program to CHANCE, Harvard students pour their time more into volunteering--which they say is as valuable as other forms of civic engagement.

Real World Problems

When Vincent Pan '96 arrived at Harvard eight years ago, he became involved with volunteer service through PBHA. Four years later, he founded, Heads Up, a Washington, D.C. program where college students tutor inner-city children.

For Pan, the most immediate way he says he felt he would change his community--at Harvard and Washington, D.C.--was not by agigating for political action, but rather lending a hand.

He initially became involved with the Mission Hill After-School Program, which provides classroom assistance, as well as weekly activities, to children in public housing projects of the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston.

"We would take the bus, and we saw how the neighborhoods changed--passing by the mansions of Cambridge, through poorer neighborhoods of Boston and finally to the housing projects of Mission Hill," Pan, a former PBHA president, says.

"It became clear that resources weren't distributed equally. And not only did they not have the equality of opportunity, but they had obstacles in front of them," he says.