Even though she was a leader of her Flathead High School class, UM senior Trina Zahller says she really didn’t start to get involved in her community until she went off to college.

There, at Cottey College in Nevada, Mo., she began the first of many “service commitments” by volunteering to participate in College Bound, a program that introduces fifth-graders to higher education. She also started spending several hours a week providing administrative support at a haven for battered women and children.

Since Cottey was only a two-year program, Zahller returned to her native state to finish her undergraduate education at UM, where she is focusing on studies of rural and environmental change. As a recent McNair Scholar — another opportunity for service, in her opinion — she is working on a report about the effects of the United States’ $1.3 billion aid package to further the war on drugs in Colombia.

On any given day you might find Zahller attending classes in her sociology major; planning events with La Raza Unida, UM’s Latin America interest club, or CAJA, a community group focusing on Latin American social justice issues; working at her campus AmeriCorps job; dreaming up school programs to present in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and Black History Month; or applying for service-oriented internships to work on this summer.

As an AmeriCorps volunteer, she served for three semesters as a liaison between the University’s Volunteer Action Services office and the Center for Leadership Development, creating projects such as a daylong leadership seminar for selected Missoula high school students. She also brought the College Bound program each semester to two fifth-grade classes at Missoula’s Franklin Elementary School in Missoula, substantially rewriting the program curriculum to make it more relevant to youngsters.

Zahller says she involves herself in activities well beyond the scope of her course work in order to pass on some of the security and comfort she had growing up, take responsibility for solving some of society’s problems and learn more about the world.

“I think it’s good to have a sense of responsibility about your place, your community,” she says. “If by doing something with your time or your voice you can make your community better, that’s being responsible for the well-being of where you live.”

The middle child in a family of three children born and raised in Kalispell, Zahller says she didn’t come from a wealthy home where everything was handed to her, “but we did have a good life, and if I can make someone else’s life better or more just in some way, then it’s totally worth it.”

Zahller recognizes the positive impacts of volunteering not only on the recipient but also on the people who volunteer. She believes that a spirit of volunteerism is beginning to replace apathy in communities.

“When you see a positive response to your work, you have a sense of pride in yourself,” she says. “In the midst of all the problems [in society], you feel like you can make a difference. If you don’t get involved, you never get to see any of the good things that can happen.”

Zahller is particularly mindful of how stereotypes can cloud the truth and how involvement can break down unfair assumptions. Her time volunteering at the women’s shelter in Missouri, for example, was at first very uncomfortable for her, she says, because the situations she saw were so difficult.

“There were also a lot of misconceptions on the part of the community toward the college and vice versa,” she says. “Working at the womens shelter put a real face on the issue of domestic violence and helped me learn about the realities of the community. Whenever you have contact with people you wouldn’t normally see it’s very beneficial.”

She thinks the same is true for her fellow students now.

“So many people stop by Volunteer Action Services and say they want to do something, make some sort of positive contribution,” she says. “If it’s an hour a week or 10 hours it really improves a person’s outlook on the world.”

As Zahller wraps up her final semester at UM, she is looking forward to spending next year in Australia at the University of Queensland on a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship. This summer she expects to work, as she has in summers past, for the Center for Talented Youth at one of their camps for children aged 11 to 14.

Her ideas for community action and involvement just keep coming, spinning off one another.

“My mom asks me how I find out about the things I do,” she says. “I don’t know. I search them out or one thing leads to another. I guess I just don’t know what to do with free time and I want to be involved in everything.”

For more information call Volunteer Action Services at (406) 243-2586.

— Caroline Lupfer Kurtz