The Lindy Center holds Super Bowl-themed First Friday event | The Triangle

The Lindy Center holds Super Bowl-themed First Friday event

Photograph by Jarvis Zhang for the Triangle

On Feb. 2, the Lindy Center hosted its monthly First Friday event, offering donuts, coffee and Super Bowl trivia to students.

Boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee were spread around the room as students sat at tables and talked with each other and Lindy Center staff. Written on the whiteboards in front of the room were trivia about the Philadelphia Eagles and the Super Bowl. Students also had the opportunity to sign up for the Lindy Center newsletter and learn about civic engagement opportunities on campus.

The Lindy Center for Civic Engagement has been at Drexel University for 15 years, but their student center just opened last year, and their First Friday event started in Spring 2017.

“We were trying to think of ways to get people to know about our center, where we are, [and] know that they are welcome to come by and use the space,” Sandy Vogel, the program coordinator for the Lindy Center, said, explaining how the idea for First Friday came about.

“[The goal is] to have students come to a new place and learn about new resources that they may have never heard of before. Students in the Drexel community [can] meet people who are already civically engaged in their own way and learn how [the Lindy Center] can support their individual civic engagement goals,” Vogel explained.

To meet these goals, each First Friday event has had a different theme, such as Donuts and Dogs, politics and current events, and now the Super Bowl.

Drexel’s president, John A. Fry, this year again said in his convocation speech that he aspires for “[Drexel] to be the most civically engaged university in the United States.”

In attendance at that lecture was Jennifer Johnson Kebea, who is currently the executive director for the Lindy Center.

“[Drexel] thinks about civic engagement along three different dimensions: service opportunities out in the community, how the work is integrated into the academic experience, and the university’s role as an institutional citizen,” Kebea said.

The Lindy Center also serves as an outlet to students who have done civic engagement work in middle school and high school and want to continue their work at Drexel.

“Millenials in general are super interested in being civically engaged and having an impact,”  Kebea said.

This is reflected in the views of the students at Drexel as well.

“More people are volunteering, and according to [our database], those numbers are growing,” Emily Hoing, a student working at the Lindy Center, said.

Previous First Fridays have brought many new faces to the Lindy Center, and this one was no different. This was the first time one student, a freshman engineer, had been in the Lindy Center. Even still, he is civically engaged on campus. For his Civic 101 class, he demonstrates buoyancy using aluminum boats at the Franklin Institute.

First Friday at the Lindy Center continues to educate and inform students about ways that they can be civically engaged on campus. The next First Friday will be on March 2. For more information, students can sign up for the Lindy Center’s newsletter at http://drexel.edu/lindycenter/students/volunteer-opportunities/