Jewish students at more than 80 Hillels around the world came together to celebrate , an international day of volunteering on April 3. Good Deeds Day, which started in Israel in 2007, has become an annual tradition for Hillels. Here are highlights from some of their volunteer projects:

Good Gardening

Gloves, shovels, rakes 鈥� check. More than 80 Baltimoreans weeded beds and planted seeds in the Urban Farm, a communal vegetable garden at Towson University. Among the attendees were students from Towson Hillel, Goucher College Hillel, and University of Maryland Hillel.

Many Mitzvot

Over 100 students participated in a series of volunteer events organized by University of Michigan Hillel. Among the events were a river clean-up and gardening on the 350-acre campus farm. Students also volunteered at Maize & Blue Cupboard, which helps Michigan students experiencing food insecurity.

Beautiful Blankets

University of Connecticut Hillel students packed hygiene kits for those in need, wrote letters to sick patients, engaged in a textbook swap, and swabbed their cheeks to be registered as bone marrow donors for blood cancer patients. The volunteer events were co-hosted with Dignity Grows, Gift of Life, and Campus Wide Initiative.

New Friends

Franklin and Marshall College Hillel organized a Shabbat dinner welcoming Afghan refugees to Lancaster, PA, where the college is based. Students brought travel-sized toiletries for a donation drive to help refugees. This is part of a larger project to support Afghan refugees. Earlier activities included letter writing and making welcome packages with the Jewish Family Services of Lancaster.听

Helping Challah

黑料传送门 80 students from Tel Hai College Hillel, located in northern Israel, baked challah for Ukrainian refugees, students, and elders for Shabbat.

Breaking Bread

黑料传送门 professionals volunteered at Bread for the City, a nonprofit that helps low-income residents in Washington, D.C. Each week, Bread for the City delivers more than 5,000 bags of food and provides free legal services and medical support. The Hillel professionals spent an afternoon packing more than 500 bags of nutritious food for families in need.听

Plentiful Projects

, which serves Jewish students and young adults in Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, and Azerbaijan, hosted over 100 programs and projects in honor of Good Deeds Day. To support Ukraine amid the ongoing crisis, Hillel CASE has assembled food and hygiene packages, housed refugees, held online Shabbatot, and helped in evacuation efforts.

Dynamic Duo听

Brandeis University Hillel partnered with other campus organizations to engage students for Good Deeds Day. More than 50 Jewish students came together to paint puzzles for children and write letters to cancer survivors and senior citizens.听

Oona Wood, 21, served as the Hillel student coordinator for Good Deeds Day. 鈥淕ood Deeds Day is an active display of Tikkun Olam,鈥� said Wood, who is studying politics and Judaic studies.听

Emma Lichtenstein is a senior at Brandeis University.

This piece was originally featured in the Yeshiva University Experiential Jewish Education (EJE) newsletter on March 10, 2016. Learn more about the certificate program at .

The importance of  鈥淛ewish conversations鈥� in engagement work was instilled in me from day one of my job 黑料传送门. However, despite the hours I have spent in coffee shops speaking with students, I now realize that I wasn鈥檛 always sure what that meant. Most of my time that I am one-on-one with students, we discuss their upbringings, Jewish journeys, and how they relate to the Jewish community on campus; essentially we talk a lot about Judaism. If I am lucky, the conversation culminates in a direct connection to a meaningful Jewish experience on campus in which the student can take part. If I am really lucky, I spend my time with a student deeply engaged in Jewish learning, putting our questions and perspectives into dialogue with Jewish texts and ideas.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to escape the Michigan winter and attend the Ezra Fellowship Experiential Jewish Education learning retreat in sunny Arizona. This seminar focused on ways to intentionally and organically infuse Jewish educational moments into our work as engagement professionals. After several days of workshops, I left Arizona with a new understanding that opportunities for meaningful Jewish learning in engagement work are not dependent on luck alone. Bringing Torah into conversations with students requires preparation and foresight, and yet can still feel organic and spontaneous in the moment. Over several beit midrash sessions at the retreat, I sat with colleagues from different campuses processing archetypal conflicts that many of our students face and pieces of Torah from our own back pockets that we felt would resonate with students in those moments.

Then came the best part 鈥� each of us was paired with a student from Arizona State University, and we did what we do best 鈥� we took them out to coffee. With personally meaningful words of Torah buzzing in my ear, I walked around campus with a freshman, discussing her transition to ASU. I was 2,000 miles from Ann Arbor but the conversation was so familiar. After about 15 minutes, I found a relevant opportunity to share a piece of wisdom from Pirkei Avot that I had been learning just hours before with my colleagues. Bringing text into the conversation gave us a forum to probe deeper into what she was saying based on to what degree she felt reflected in the text. I realized in that moment how different my coffee dates could look if regular preparatory learning became a part of my daily Hillel routine. What if I approached one-on-one conversations with the same kind of forethought I have when preparing for the more formal aspects of my job like running fellowship meetings?

Leaving this experience, I returned to my own campus with a little more color in my face and a burning desire to rethink how I spend my time. As engagement professionals, we must ourselves be engaged in active forms of Jewish growth and learning, so that we in turn can share and facilitate that for others. I feel very lucky to be a part of the Ezra Fellowship, which has instilled in me the value of prioritizing my own ongoing learning as crucial to my success as a Hillel educator.

Gita Karasov is the director of engagement at University of Michigan Hillel.