Student-athletes find “joyful work” in community service

By Cyndee Fontana-Ott

For more, see "Leading Through Service" in the Fall 2024 issue of Pacific magazine coming in November.

Lydia Manu was no stranger to community service when she enrolled at Fresno Pacific University. Ryas Vang was less familiar but extremely eager.

For these two members of the Sunbird Men's and Women's Basketball Teams, community service and engagement is an important facet of their college years. Giving back, they say, also provides another opportunity for personal growth, leadership and understanding.

Lydia Manu

Manu arrived at Fresno Pacific with a background in community service through her Bay Area church. The commitment has only grown as she enters her fifth year on campus majoring in computer science.

"I think it's really helped me to have a heart for people and to get outside of myself," she says. "Sometimes being in college and having your own bubble, I get so focused on my own problems or what's going on around me that I forget the bigger picture in life."

Manu ticks off some of her favorite projects, ranging from home-building with Habitat for Humanity to playing with elementary school children to sorting produce at the local food bank.

Community service, she says, "helps reset my spirit and helps me grow not only with my faith with God, but also in relationships with people. It honestly gives me that gratitude, thankfulness and love for those around me."

This joyful work also is a chance to build camaraderie within a team that always competes-whether that is on the basketball court or racing to beat the average pace for constructing boxes on a community service project.

"Every time we serve it is a blast and it doesn't matter what we're doing," Manu says. "We love to just be with one another."

Ryas Vang

"It helped develop my views of what the community actually looks like-the people in it, the diversity of it-and how to just really make an impact in the community, which kind of domino effects into the world," says Vang, a Clovis West High School graduate now in his senior year as a nursing major at FPU.

With a near-singular focus on college, Vang had little time for volunteerism in high school. Now, he looks forward to hours spent reading and playing with children or helping with an Every Neighborhood Partnership banquet, for example.

"When you sign up to become a student-athlete here you're getting an experience that not only transcends your athletic performance but also your performance in the classroom and your overall perspective of the world," he says. "There is a true culture that is based on community."

PHOTO: Members of the Sunbird Women's Basketball Team pose in front of a house they helped build as part of their volunteer work. Lydia Manu is front row, second from left, wearing a cap. (FPU photo)

Author

Category

• Student Focus

Share