This spring, the Columbia community learned of the two earthquakes in Chile and Haiti that devastated thousands of lives. These disasters inspired students, faculty, and administrators to take action. In January, Columbia joined other universities in the NYC Service Challenge, a program that tracks student participation in volunteer service.

David Stone, the Executive Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, said, "What the mayor's office has done, the Office of NYC Service, is had what we all think is a really friendly and good-natured symbolic competition among the colleges and universities in New York to try and see which is the most civically engaged."

Stone explained how this program, where students log their volunteer-hours on a website, encouraged students to become engaged in taking action for the two recent earthquakes.

"In the cases of natural disasters, quite often what we're doing here at Columbia, is usually raising and donating money. The Service Challenge and the idea of national service taps into the same spirit," said Stone.

Many undergraduates created their own initiatives to raise money for the people of Haiti who are still suffering from the aftermath of the earthquake.

First year Sarah Gitlin, the primary organizer of this initiative said, "As soon as we came back from winter break, we got started and got local delicatessens to donate a lot of these containers and we got some volunteers together to put on the Haiti cards. Then we went out to local businesses and we put these in over 100 stores to collect money from the patrons to send to relief efforts. We were able to send over 9,000 dollars."

Volunteerism also spread to Columbia's graduate schools. Students at the School Of International and Public Affairs helped launch the Chile Ushahidi project in response to the current crisis there.

Anahi Ayala, the Director of the Situation Room of the Ushahidi Chile project said, "Ushahidi is basically a public platform which is based on the principle of crisis mapping, and what we do is collect information from the media but also and especially from networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. We collect this information and translate them from Spanish into English and then we put them on this website, and they appear directly on a map as a dot. This is helpful because you have a lot of range of information coming normally from people."

Although the Challenge ends in April, students intend to further promote volunteering and fundraising. The spirit of service will continue on the Columbia campus through both individual student projects and group initiatives, ready to respond to any future crises with assistance and compassion.