When most of us think of Day of Service, we think of just that: a day. A September morning where we gather and go out into the community, hoping to make someone’s day a little brighter and contribute to something bigger than ourselves. It’s an annual staple on campus, and more than 4,000 students are currently signed up to participate in Day of Service next Saturday Sept. 20. But for the Day of Service Directors, the event is far more than just one day.

Unbeknownst to most Day of Service volunteers, the event is a months-long process that has been meticulously planned behind the scenes. Countless hours have gone into every detail from what bus they ride on to the bucket of paint they use at their service site.

Day of Service Chair Victoria Diaz has given her all to overseeing the planning of this event. She spends two to three hours a day on average doing work for Day of Service, but she gives much of the credit for its execution to the Day of Service Committee.

“This has been a full team effort,” Diaz said. “The Day of Service Committee is about 50 people. It has been all hands on deck, everyone has given so much time and energy and effort into making this such an impactful day.”

Rica Monaghan, Transportation Director for Day of Service, works organizing bus and van rentals, as well as mapping out which vehicles will be used to get to each service site. She communicates directly with a bus company, arranging 85 buses for this year’s event along with at least 20 vans.

“It’s really up to us to make sure everything is up and running,” Monaghan said. “We don’t want anything to be delayed because the service sites are waiting for us and if anything were to be delayed, we wouldn’t be able to get out and provide this amazing service that we have been able to do for the past 19 years.”

Monaghan is currently busy matching transportation to each site depending on the number of volunteers going there; she even arranges for multiple groups to share buses for sites that are close together. On Day of Service, she is in charge of check-in for buses and will need to map out the positions of all the vehicles on campus to make sure every group gets in the right bus or van.

Many of the bus drivers who drive volunteers come back to help with Day of Service year-after-year, a personal detail that is not overlooked.

“We’re celebrating 20 years of partnership with some of our service sites, but we have 20 years of partnership with some of our bus drivers as well, which is really cool,” Monaghan said.

Celebrating 20 years also means making updates to the planning process. Ella O’Shea, Supply Co-Director, is in charge of sending out a supply form to all the service sites and working with Lowe’s to purchase the products the sites need. This year, O’Shea’s goal was to improve the supply form in order to increase efficiency, and by the summer the new and improved form was ready to send out to registered service sites and partners. After determining the supply needs for the service locations, Lowe’s delivers the materials to an on-campus pickup spot near the Commons where the sites come to get their orders.

“We have all the orders printed out and we have people essentially go grocery shopping in the tent and go around and pick up everything that the site needed and organize it on a table for them to come pick up,” O’Shea said.

O’Shea and her co-director started meeting with their contact at Lowe’s in the spring to secure these supplies; including wheelbarrows, shovels, gardening tools, cleaning supplies, paint and more. Sites also have the option to add additional, more unique supplies on the form.

“The biggest thing in this role is just being proactive and problem-solving,” O’Shea said. “Getting ahead of issues just makes it run as smooth as possible. That’s why I was so adamant about working on the supply form, just to make things as efficient as possible because we’re working with so many people.”

Starting in January, all of the directors began the planning process, working through the spring and summer on collecting supply inventory as well as site registration and more. Kate Hamel is the Senior Director of Service Sites and Partnerships, a new position this year with a primary focus on emphasizing the partnerships with service sites that have been forged over the last 20 years.

There are 108 off-campus sites registered for Day of Service this year, Hamel and her two junior directors started with a list of 170 sites that have consistently participated in the past. New sites can also be added when they reach out, and this year marks the first time Day of Service will include on-campus sites. These include repainting the mural on South Campus, building chairs for Habitat for Humanity and making sandwiches for site partners.

Once the list of sites is finalized, they are divided between 15 service site captains and eventually matched with groups of volunteers.

“Later tonight they will print out little slips of paper that have each group and how many volunteers are with their group and then also different colored pieces of paper with each site and how many volunteers they can accommodate,” Hamel said of the process. “Then we lay them all out and we spend the whole day basically playing matching.”

One of Hamel’s passion projects this year was organizing 20 site visits for the Day of Service Committee so they could see the direct impact of their work and further the idea of partnership with service sites.

“It’s hard to see when you’re painting a bathroom of a school how that’s going to impact the kids next week, but hearing from the principal of the school telling you how important it is for these kids to have an organized and safe place to go every day, you can actually see that connection,” Hamel said.

She also worked to create a faculty and staff catalog, further engaging them and their families in Day of Service. The catalog includes asynchronous resources, as well as sites they can volunteer at with their department or with their kids. Hamel made sure to make all the sites family friendly.

With so many pieces that need to fall into place, every little detail counts. No one knows this better than Diaz.

“There’s about a million to-do lists that I have on so many different platforms,” Diaz said. “I’ll be sitting in class one day and I’ll be like ‘Wait, do we have enough paint?’ or ‘Did we answer that email?’”

Diaz’s many responsibilities range from answering emails and communicating with group leaders to making sure volunteer t-shirts arrive in time to be sorted. She and the rest of the committee have worked for months to make the day happen, but for Diaz, who grew up very community service-oriented, it is all worth it.

“I genuinely very much care about the day and what we’re doing and this commitment that we’ve made to these partners that there’s going to be volunteers going out on the 20th and serving their community,” Diaz said. “I definitely put so much time and energy into making sure that every single note that I write down, every single last minute thought is addressed or at least talked about.”

Though the planning process is rigorous, the day acts as a celebration of a great deal of hard work and the values Villanova stands for.

“I think it is the most tangible expression of our school’s values,” Hamel said. “We talk a lot about ‘veritas, unitas, caritas’ and I feel like those words are thrown around in a lot of our endeavors as a school, but when you are actually engaging in your community…I feel like if anything is unity and love from this campus it’s that.”

Nine months of time and effort will culminate on Saturday, when more than half the student body is signed up to serve the greater Philadelphia community. Volunteers will join the mission of service the committee believes in so deeply, and every hour of work will have been worthwhile.