Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) once said, “We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.”

We would like to commend Longwood University for its efforts to build up its students by emphasizing the importance of service and developing relationships with people in the community.

One of these efforts took the form of the MLK Service Challenge on Saturday, Jan. 20, kicking off a week of events celebrating MLK’s memory and mission. The service challenge featured different sites in Farmville and beyond where students could go and serve their community through a variety of different tasks.

In a Herald article last week, Jonathan Page, director of Citizen Leadership and Social Justice Education at Longwood, gave some specifics on what the 120 student volunteers did.

He noted that at the Lankford Student Union on Longwood’s campus, students and staff worked on creating bedding for the homeless.

Meanwhile, at the Andy Taylor Center for Early Childhood Development, students were assembling scooters, tricycles and more for children.

At High Bridge Trail State Park, students engaged in a conservation effort, digging through the snow to pick up trash. They filled up seven bags while also digging out four tires.

Page anticipates the school will help the park even more in the future, adding that the experience there on Jan. 20 was “the beginning of a true, burgeoning relationship between our office and High Bridge Trail.”

One of the other sites students served at was the Wayland Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Keysville. Page said a key part of the students’ service there was simply providing companionship to residents who may not get many or any visitors.

We applaud everyone involved in the MLK Service Challenge, including the 120 students, the school at large and the event’s principal organizer, Quincy Goodine, assistant director of Community Learning & Engagement at Longwood.