Minnesota volunteers visit Washington

A group of 35 high school students from Minnesota made a stop in Washington Friday morning to perform volunteer work. The students are on a service trip to St. Louis and are making stops along the way. The group is known as ?Students Today Leaders Forever? (STLF) and is based in Minneapolis and has chapters in Wisconsin, North Dakota, Nebraska, Illinois, Michigan and Oregon.

The students who visited Washington Friday are from two high schools near Minneapolis ? Heritage High School and Minnetonka High School. They left Minneapolis Wednesday after school dismissed for spring break they rode the bus to Ames. They spent Thursday cleaning up a campground named Hickory Grove by clearing trails and cutting down invasive bushes. Their next stop was Iowa City, where they spent Thursday night. They arrived in Washington Friday morning and plan to make a stop in Jacksonville, Ill, where they will help out at a nursing home. They will travel to St. Louis where they will do their main service project before heading back home Sunday.

The students broke up into three groups upon arrival in Washington. One group raked leaves and did other chores at Redlinger Field. One group cleaned up Sunset Park, and another group worked at PAWS ?N? More Animal Shelter.

Jabir Ahmed, 17, is a junior in high school and this is his first year in STLF. He said he became a member of STLF because he wants to ?pay it forward.?

?We volunteer to help people and communities get better,? he said. ?Right now, we?re raking the leaves off the baseball fields to get ready for the upcoming baseball season.?

Mohamed Nur, 17, also a junior, said he joined STLF for the same reason. He said he?d like to go on other service trips in the future.

Luke Huttner, 16, is in his second year as an STLF volunteer. He said he?d been on the bus so long and had been making so many stops that it was hard for him to remember where he was.

?It?s all kind of a blur,? he said.

Hannah Winge, 19, is one of the group leaders and attends Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. She has been an STLF volunteer for five years.

?We pick cities along our route to do service projects in,? she said. ?We choose the community based on its level of need and how far it is from the route. We try to pick cities we haven?t been to on other tours.?

Winge said STLF was started by four freshmen at the University of Minnesota.

?They were sitting around in their dorm one day, and they said, ?We?ve got to do something awesome,?? she said. ?They got a bus full of all their friends and 40 of them went on their first tour. It spread from there, and now it?s in the middle schools, too.?

Winge said of the stop in Ames that the group did ?a week?s work in three hours.? She said the group spent Thursday night reflecting on the day?s activities. Luke Jones, 17, and Mitch Levin, 15, have been in STLF for two years and were among those raking leaves at Redlinger Field.

Another STLF group began its trip in Nebraska and is headed to St. Louis. It is also making stops along the way to help communities in need.

?We get together in St. Louis and do a big service project,? Winge said. ?We?ll be working in neighborhoods and doing things like yardwork.?