By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM — On the last day of the month, 40 to 50 local Duke University alumni won’t be spending all their time getting Halloween costumes ready or putting out candy for trick-or-treaters.

They’ll be spread out along Ellerbe Creek cleaning it up and working to beautify the nearby Walltown neighborhood.

The local effort is one of a multitude of projects across the nation, in 20 different cities over nine days, where Duke alumni are partnering with local nonprofits in civic engagement efforts.

Duke Alums Engage — modeled on the university’s undergraduate program DukeEngage — will have former Duke students working on one-day projects with Meals on Wheels, Teach for America, the Good Shepherd Center and other nonprofits. They will be working in Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City and Los Angeles, as well as in Durham and other cities.

“The idea is to highlight alumni community service as one of our featured new programs, and to expand and broaden our outreach beyond traditional alumni programming.” said Chris O’Neill, assistant director of regional programs for the alumni association. “Duke alumni clubs have always done community service, but this is an attempt to examine what we’ve done in the past, distill some best practices and see how we can do it really well and consistently.”

The program began last year with pilot projects in five cities. But Duke Alums Engage is more than only about the projects themselves, said alumni officials.

“This is not just showing up and leaving,” said Sam Hull, director of alumni communications. “There is training before the project and there will be an evaluation after the project, and reflection on it, after we are finished. We want everybody involved to talk about it, and get to know the impact they’ve made, and how they’ve done.”

The cities where the projects will take place all have large Duke alumni association clubs — except for Durham.

“There is no Duke club here, but there are a lot of alumni here, obviously,” Hull said. “And as it turns out, this is probably going to be the biggest project, with the most volunteers, of all of them.”

The association decided on the Ellerbe/Walltown project “because we wanted something that would bring together Triangle area alumni,” O’Neill said. “We wanted to connect to the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership and this is a good place to plug in with our volunteers.”

Alumni officials hope to expand the program next year — and perhaps even broaden it to overseas locations.

“We have Duke alumni all over the world,” Hull said. “There’s no reason we can’t do this in many other locations.”