It’s the morning of April 4, 2026, and a miracle has taken place: I’ve willingly woken up at 5 a.m. on my day off. Normally, I would be taking advantage of a free schedule and sleeping in until eight or nine, but today, I’m meeting COD’s Rotaract Club at 7 a.m. sharp at the La Quinta Cove Oasis Trailhead.

Rotaract Club is College of the Desert’s branch of Rotary International, a service organization with over 45,000 clubs and 1.2 million members around the world. 

While Rotary International is best known for its global work, such as its decades-long fight to eradicate Polio through worldwide vaccination initiatives, COD’s Rotaract Club has been focused on community volunteer work within the Coachella Valley since it began in 2016.

This semester, the Rotaract Club has already joined Habitat for Humanity in cleaning up a local home to help the owners pass inspections, offered their support at a local charity event and read books to elementary school children for Dr. Seuss Day with Reading Across America. 

Now, I am joining the club for their annual La Quinta Cove trail clean-up.

As I pull up to the parking lot, I spot some familiar yellow and burgundy Rotaract t-shirts in a group of seven student volunteers and one Rotarian Advisor chaperone.

We introduce ourselves in an icebreaker circle with our names and our majors, and I’m impressed by the diversity of study fields within the group. There is a business student, a bio science student and an engineering student, just to name a few. 

After we’ve spent a few minutes becoming acquainted with each other, we’re each given a reach extender for picking up trash and a trash bag to put it all in, and we’re on our way.

We take off on the trail not long after 7. The air still has a crisp, salubrious bite to it, and the mountains are radiating gold in the early light. The Cove Oasis trailhead is beautiful, and — credit to our community — largely pristine.

It takes us a while to find anything at all to pick up, but eventually we stray off the trail and start finding shards of broken glass bottles to drop into our trash bags.

All of the students move together and hike along through the desert in a wide, amorphous cloud, but as we individually hunt down trails of glass on the ground, we find ourselves organically floating towards each other. 

The nature of the work creates a very fun dynamic where new groups of friends are produced through Brownian motion: you can be having a great conversation with a couple of students, then one of them drifts away after spotting a nearby bottle to pick up, and they’re replaced by someone else not long after. 

A new conversation starts, totally different and unique to the three of you, and eventually, without even really realizing it, you also float away, finding yourself next to some glass and some club members you haven’t spoken to yet.

The common thread between everyone I speak to is that they’re wonderful to be around. It doesn’t take long to feel like I’ve known them for years. We talk about our hobbies, our favorite movies, our goals and our dreams after graduating. We laugh and explore the desert together and compare bottles we’ve picked up. The hours tick by without any of us even noticing. 

We are definitely doing manual labor — my hand aches for a couple of days afterward from gripping the reach extender — but at no point does it feel like work. It mainly feels like a hike on a beautiful day with a great group of friends, because that is exactly what it turns out to be.

There is also, of course, the pride that comes with doing something good for our community and our planet. It feels good to have left the desert a little bit cleaner than when we arrived. By the end of the four-hour cleanup, there is a full trash bag for every volunteer at the event.

A couple of weeks later, I joined the Rotoract Club to help organize pallets of food and drink donations at FIND Food Bank.

After this event, I ask Mark Fruchtman, the club’s Rotary International advisor, about the qualities he sees in the Rotoract Club members — what motivates a young, busy college student to get up early on the weekends to do volunteer work?

Mark turns around and shows me the back of his Rotary International t-shirt. “Rotarians,” the text on the back reads, “People of Action.”

“The Rotary model is ‘service above self…'” he explains. “We live by that creed; we live to serve.”

He continues: “Some of the most awesome people I have met in my life, I have met in Rotary. People that will blow you away with how wonderful, giving and caring they are for people who are less fortunate.”

After having spent even just a little bit of time with COD’s own Rotoract Club volunteers, I’m inclined to agree with him.

To stay up-to-date with the Rotoract Club and learn about upcoming events, follow @cod.rotaractclub on Instagram.