Two thousand DePaul University volunteers will help bring a centennial year filled with celebration, reflection and education to a close on May 15 with a day dedicated to public service. Centennial Service Day will center on hundreds of acts of public service at inner-city Catholic schools and senior citizen housing complexes in Chicago.

The volunteer pool will be comprised of DePaul students, staff, faculty, alumni and friends who will be dispatched throughout the Chicago area. They will participate in a range of public service activities from painting senior citizen apartments to planting gardens to cleaning playgrounds and painting murals. Volunteers will gather at 8:30 a.m. at the DePaul Center, 1 E. Jackson Blvd. downtown, and on the Lincoln Park campus at Alumni Hall, 1011 W. Belden Ave.

"In thinking about how to end this special year, the planning committees wanted something that was typically DePaul," said Tom Fuechtmann, director of the Centennial Office, which is coordinating the event. "Centennial Service Day celebrates our 100-year tradition of community partnership and service to the less fortunate."

One of the major benefactors of the day of service will be Catholic, inner-city schools supported by the Big Shoulders Fund that was created by Joseph Cardinal Bernadin in 1986. DePaul volunteers will be on-site at more than 60 of the 121 Big Shoulders schools providing a range of needed service. The majority of work will involve manual labor.

The projects are as varied as the sites. Students at St. James Elementary School located at 2920 S. Wabash Ave. will have the world at their fingertips after DePaul volunteers paint a map of the world on their playground. At Our Lady of the Gardens, an elementary school located at 13300 S. Langley Ave., volunteers will beautify the exterior of the school by cleaning the grounds and planting flowers. Parents and students at St. Elizabeth, an elementary school at 4052 S. Wabash Ave., will learn computer skills from DePaul volunteers. At Cristo Rey High School at 1851 W. Cermak Rd. in Pilsen, DePaul volunteers will use brooms, mops, paint brushes and elbow grease to help spruce up the school.

Volunteers armed with brushes and paint will also move out in force to paint apartments for senior citizens living in Chicago Housing Authority housing. Because of budget constraints, many of the apartments have not seen a new coat of paint in years. The fresh paint will brighten homes and lift spirits.

The day will end with a picnic on the Lincoln Park campus that includes food and music provided by the School of Music at DePaul. It will be a day that commemorates DePaul’s 100-year tradition of urban service and sets the mold for the future.

"Centennial community service day is a statement DePaul is making to ourselves and to the city of Chicago," said Richard J. Meister, executive vice president of academic affairs. "This day symbolizes what DePaul is about today and what we will be about for the next 100 years."