Mary Price, assistant director of LSA’s Institute for the Humanities, always has been interested in community service. After attending a Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Community Service Day in 1995, she found a new way to volunteer in her free time that allows her to help others through a love of knitting.
Price—along with co-organizers Lisa Bartlett of Michigan Union Graphics and Joanne Nesbit of the News Service—volunteers through KnitWits, a part of U-M’s Project SERVE. The U-M faculty, staff, students and friends in the group knit or sew donated fleece and yarn to provide warm wearable goods to people in southeast Michigan and across the country.
“Volunteering is very important to me, and KnitWits has provided a wonderful opportunity,” Price says. “The three of us have a shared commitment to community service, and we work hard to keep the student connection. We are different ages, backgrounds and work at different jobs. It’s very interesting to each of us.”
KnitWits donates the completed pieces through Project SERVE and Alternative Spring Break programs, sending hats, gloves, scarves and afghans to schools, social agencies and homeless shelters in cities such as Detroit, New York and Chicago, as well as Native American reservations in Michigan and elsewhere.
“You give what you can give,” Price says. “An enormous number of people here at U-M work—and volunteer—behind the scenes, lots of very capable and interesting people. It’s a way to make a big organization much more humane.”
To volunteer with KnitWits, e-mail knitwits@umich.edu.
In her professional life, Price has been assistant director in the Institute for the Humanities since 1988, having joined just a year after the program’s inception. The institute offers research opportunities and fellowships to humanities scholars at U-M, as well as programs that bring together representatives of a wide array of disciplines for discussion, debate and creative expression. She describes her staff colleagues as versatile, jack-of-all-trades people. Her own work is in the area of development and strategic planning with director Daniel Herwitz.
“The institute’s public programs help connect the University to outside audiences,” she says. “People see U-M as an enormous institution, but individual units provide a point of access. We want to help make what’s good about U-M easily available to the public.”
