“Men and women for others” may be just another Jesuit slogan for many students, but for Meg MacWhirter (SFS ’05), the phrase became the core of her Georgetown experience.

The affable “Service Queen” of the Hilltop has overseen the expansion of Hoya Outreach Programs and Education, or HOPE, as well as assisting in the expansion and development of other service projects. This long list includes working with the FOCI pre-orientation program, the SFS social action committee and starting up a lunchtime forum where students and faculty discuss important issues at Georgetown. All these positions naturally led to a spot on the Volunteer and Public Service Advisory Board, an administrative group which supervises all the service-based organizations on campus.

MacWhirter has heeded the call to serve throughout her life, organizing fundraisers and other charitable events in her hometown of Bethesda, Md., since she was a child. Her experience living close to Washington, D.C., made her conscious of the challenges faced by the area’s underprivileged, an awareness she brought to other students.

Entering Georgetown as a freshman, MacWhirter says she felt a desire to continue with her service projects with a sense of habit – it’s what she’d always done. Unaware of the university’s existing service programs, MacWhirter rallied people to help her continue a high school project in Southeast D.C., going door-to-door in the dorms to enlist support.

“My first project when I got here was a program I was continuing from high school where we did events in Anacostia with some kids in an education center there,” she says. “I didn’t know that there were any structures at Georgetown to be able to support continuing that work, so I wandered around Village C and got people to donate toilet paper and money and stuff like that.”

Soon, however, MacWhirter discovered the variety of campus organizations and became one of the leading organizers.

“It was exciting to then realize how many great structures there are here and how much support Georgetown does give to the efforts that students make to work with the community,” she says.

MacWhirter spent much of her sophomore and junior years developing HOPE and transforming it from a simple institution with 30 members into a larger, more flexible and multifaceted organization that offers variously weekly activities open to any students wanting to volunteer without having to make a sustained commitment.

“HOPE really filled a need that Georgetown had at that time,” MacWhirter says. “It’s great to see the match there of an organization like this that provides different timings of events without huge commitments and to see how Georgetown students . rose to take the challenge and to say `Yes, this is what it means to be here.'”

MacWhirter takes special pride in a recent initiative called “Mission Possible,” a series of lunchtime talks focused on evaluating the role of the mission statement in students’ lives and how students connect with the statement in their everyday lives. Past topics have included a discussion on serving others and learning about diverse backgrounds of different Hoyas.

While it was originally intended to test the relevance of “men and women for others,” MacWhirter says that “it kind of moved also into looking at how different all of our experiences are.”

Although her time at Georgetown has run out, MacWhirter’s commitment to serving others will continue. She has received a nomination for the Peace Corps and will begin serving soon, although she does not know where she’s headed. Even if the move to volunteer abroad seems to follow logically from her lifetime of helping and her SFS education, MacWhirter insists that this marks a new phase.

“Convincing freshmen to sign up for a service project and teaching about HIV and AIDS in a village in Haiti are going to be totally different experiences,” she says. “But I think I’ve learned a lot of skills here that will be relevant. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.”

Whatever new adventures MacWhirter may embark on, the need to serve will continue to inform her outlook. She feels confident handing over the reins of her Volunteer and Public Service activities to the next generation. Georgetown’s challenge to serve the greater community will still remain with her.

“For me, I’ve always felt that Georgetown’s challenge for me was to live that `men and women for others’ statement,” she says. “I like the way that professors sent us off with a message: `If you understand this, if you see these problems and challenges then you have the tools; let’s respond.’ I really feel that call and see that as part of how Georgetown sees itself and its mission. That’s one of the reasons why I applied, but I don’t think I appreciated quite how much of that is here as I do now.”