Guam Community College

GCC student wins award for community impact!

Guam Community College is proud to announce that freshman Pre-Nursing student Carolyn Sanchez is a recipient of the Hawaii Pacific Islands Campus Compact (HPICC) 2010 Community Impact Award for a homeless community service project she initiated last semester.

This is the first time that a student from a U.S. territory has been recognized for the award, according to Moneka DeOro, VISTA coordinator for the GCC Center for Civic Engagement. DeOro nominated Sanchez for the HPICC award. HPICC encompasses 16 member institutions around the Pacific, and the award recognizes one student per institution who exhibits outstanding leadership and innovative approaches in their community service or service-learning endeavors both on their campus and within their community.

Sanchez is a full time student, wife and mother, and was recently admitted to the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society. She, her husband Matt Sanchez, and their friend Diana Masga are members of the University of Guam’s Americorps Success Center program. They expanded the satellite GCC Student Success Center by recruiting other tutors to help man it from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. every weekday.

Sanchez’s most inspiring service-learning accomplishments started with a project for her Introduction to Psychology class. She and her group members organized a can food drive on the GCC campus for a local soup kitchen. The success of their drive inspired other classes to follow suit. Over 500 cans and other non-perishable food items were collected throughout the island for various community-based organizations such as Salvation Army and Catholic Social Services. The soup kitchen volunteer experience inspired Sanchez and her group to create a survey and solicit donations to give to homeless members of the community. On November 3, 2009, she and three classmates met at 4:30 a.m. and drove to places where the homeless are known to frequent, to deliver over 20 bags of groceries and other essentials. Their effort made the front page of the Pacific Daily News, focusing media attention on the growing issue of homelessness on Guam. They took their project a step further by picking one of the less fortunate families they met, and soliciting from island businesses to give that family special gifts for Christmas.

“Making a difference starts with me and may end with me, but there’s always so many people in between,” Sanchez said of her award, and of the success of her group’s projects. “It was like everything fell into place to help us out. We didn’t ask for food donations (for the homeless project) because after all we didn’t expect it to be such a big deal to everyone else except (GCC psychology instructor) Mr. Armstrong. We put our money together, bought the food we needed, gathered our surveys and the items from the thrift store and took off. Yes, the idea came from my head, but who knew I would have so many people to help make it happen? Teachers, friends, classmates, the deacon and the sister, the students, faculty and staff who donated to the canned food drive,” said Sanchez.

Winning this award also makes Sanchez eligible for two prestigious national awards: The 2009 Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian Award, and the Frank Newman Leadership Award.

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