Bev Pfluger '06 greets everyone with a smile and positive attitude. That quality alone makes her the perfect fit for her position as the community engagement coordinator for the Lynchburg College Center for Community Development and Social Justice.
All year long, Bev takes on a variety of tasks to help the LC community serve others. One of these recent undertakings was her work in bringing a group of 38 LC students to St. Lucia to help with under-served populations on the island.
"I assisted Dr. Glenn Buck in supervising the students and organizing their curriculum as well as what was actually going to happen down there," Bev said.
What did happen was that LC students from nursing, education, and international relations majors worked with St. Lucians doing everything from getting children caught up on their studies to measuring their height and weight.
"Students got to see the honeymoon side of the island, but also saw the harder part of the island and got to have a lot of interactions with the locals whether it was in the markets or working with them while doing assessments," Bev said.
She feels that the service learning experience was a huge success, but helping to organize this trip was just one of the many things Bev has accomplished in her position. She also works with 25 students in the Bonner Leaders Program and organizes more than 900 hours of community service for each student.
Bev also interacts with and helps professors who want to make service a part of their classes' learning experience. This commitment to service is what attracted Bev back to LC after graduation.
As a student, Bev was a part of many organizations including the Catholic community and the Student Judicial Board. She served as a Connection Leader for incoming freshmen and was a member of the Bonner Leaders Program. "I was actually a part of the first class to go through the program under the leadership of Lisa Whitaker," Bev said. She worked as a student in the Bonner program to help students believe they can make a difference in their communities.
This passion for helping others seems to have reverberated down to her two younger sisters. Her sister Natalie just graduated from LC with a degree in psychology, and her youngest sister Michelle will be coming in as a freshman and plans to study nursing. Bev's parents, Glenn Pfluger Jr. '82 and Yvonne Bobiak Pfluger '82, are also LC graduates.