When she was in the fourth grade, sophomore Adena Rochelson volunteered at St. Lucy’s Food Pantry with her mother and sister. She noticed an empty shelf where personal care items were held. Each visit, the shelf remained empty.

“I couldn’t imagine being in middle school and having to go to school without brushing my teeth or washing my face or my hair,” Rochelson said. She started using her allowance and birthday money to try to fill that shelf.

For Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients, accessing toiletry items can be difficult, Rochelson said, since the program only allows food to be purchased. With this in mind, Rochelson’s commitment to filling the St. Lucy’s Pantry shelf sparked a nearly decade-long project, called Operation Soap Dish.

Since 2009, Operation Soap Dish has collected 61,000 household and personal care items for those in need. Rochelson’s vision has expanded beyond St. Lucy’s Food Pantry and now distributes items to more than a dozen locations in the northeast, including Temple Concord Food Pantry, Vera House and The Samaritan Center.

Now, Operation Soap Dish has joined forced with Syracuse University Enactus, a student-run organization dedicated to developing community outreach projects. After spearheading the project for years, Rochelson said she felt Enactus could help offer a sustainable solution and get more college students involved.

During one meeting, members of Enactus discussed how some SU athletes have been looking for ways to give back to the community, despite traveling so often. They saw Operation Soap Dish as an opportunity to advance the project’s mission while also giving athletes an opportunity to give back.

Through Enactus, Operation Soap Dish works directly with the Syracuse Student-Athlete Advisory Committee to encourage the university’s hundreds of athletes to collect personal care items during their travels.

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Ian Meier, the vice president of project development for SU Enactus, said the items are collected at various athletic facilities on campus. To maximize the number of items collected by the athletes, Meier said they’ve been in contact with team managers and team captains, reminding them before they leave for trips.

“Since these athletes are traveling so much, they’re bringing their own soap and everything, so they’re not using the hotel soap,” Meier said. “And usually … that hotel soap would just be disposed of.” Collecting the unused products, he added, helps someone in need while reducing the amount of waste the hotel produces.

Enactus will host a volunteer event on Friday at noon to count and sort the donations received from student-athletes and then deliver the items to The Samaritan Center. Enactus is open to students of all majors, Meier said, and currently has about 100 student volunteers across all of the organization’s projects.

This year, Enactus has also worked to grow Operation Soap Dish by reaching out to Clean the World, an international organization that helps recycle and distribute soap left behind by hotels. Meier said this partnership is still a work in progress, but he hopes that this can help connect Operation Soap Dish to hotels in the Syracuse community by assisting them with waste reduction.

With the success the project has seen in Syracuse, Rochelson said she has been looking to expand to other colleges in upstate New York, such as Le Moyne College and Colgate University.

Although Operation Soap Dish was Rochelson’s original vision, she said the project is a community effort, adding that volunteers and others involved have been instrumental in the project. In addition to serving the Syracuse community, Rochelson said one of her main goals is to provide opportunities for others to give back.

While she’s not positive of what she wants to do after college, Rochelson said she intends to carry her passion for community engagement like this beyond graduation. For her, Operation Soap Dish is about more than “just a bar of soap.”

“When you think about when you wake up in the morning, and you take a shower, you feel really confident and you feel really good about yourself,” she said. “So giving people that sense of confidence and dignity with something that I’m so very passionate about has really connected me to the project.”

Published on March 17, 2019 at 10:18 pm

Contact Haley: hrober03@syr.edu