Many student organizations encourage their members to serve the community, and Orange Outreach hopes to guide these organizations to reach their service goals.

Orange Outreach, an agency within Student Government, hosted a discussion Tuesday evening attended with 15 service leaders from a variety of student organizations. Participants discussed various aspects of service, such as raising awareness, event planning and fundraising. 

“There are other entities that exist on campus that already do something similar, but Student Government is wanting to provide another outlet for students to serve,” accounting junior McKanie McNamara said.

While Orange Outreach has existed in the past, McNamara said this year’s set of directors hope to increase its presence on campus. 

“Our biggest goal is collaboration,” McNamara said. “We want organizations to talk to each other and share experiences. We also want to equip organizations to do better service, encourage students to get involved and also want to serve ourselves.” 

Kinesiology sophomore Emma Crane, who is the co-service chair of the spirit organization Texas Lassos, said she attended the discussion because she wants to gain insights from other organizations so she can fully achieve her goals as service chair.

“For me, I came in wanting to see how people are implementing things that they are running for officer positions on,” Crane said. “I know a lot of people that ran for service chairs in the past that said they wanted to do all of these things but only ended up doing two out of the 10 things they proposed.”

Neuroscience junior Angela Angelova, Crane’s co-service chair for Lassos, said she gained advice from the discussion and hopes Orange Outreach continues to grow. 

“We all are apart of a bunch of different orgs, whether they are spirit or professional, but when it comes to the actual position you’re in for your org, it can be kind of hard and very ambiguous,” Angelova said. “To be part of a group where it’s a bunch of other people doing the same thing creates new flows of ideas and ways that you can better your own.”

In the spring, Orange Outreach plans to host a collaborative service event where organizations can benefit from each other’s resources and experiences, McNamara said.

“We’re thinking of a collaborative service opportunity where organizations will be forced to collaborate with each other but also be mutually promoting their services and hopefully getting more money,” McNamara said.