Nine a.m. on Saturday morning wasn’t too early for the volunteers of Selfless Saturdays to get down in the dirt to help out a local charity.

Participants of the monthly Women’s Resource Center program gardened and cleaned at the Pay-It-Forward House in Sycamore.

Volunteers planted tulips in the front garden and washed the lower level windows. They flipped mattresses, stripped the beds and washed the linens.

Mary Lou Eubanks, executive director of the Pay-It-Forward House, said she was grateful to have a “spring cleaning crew in the fall.”

The Pay-It-Forward House is a non-profit organization that provides accommodations for families of patients in Kindred Hospital in Sycamore. The organization charges $5 per night for families who can’t afford to pay for regularly priced hotels in addition to medical bills. The house runs almost entirely on volunteer help.

Megan Woiwode, coordinator of Selfless Saturdays, said when planning volunteer projects, she researches the charities with which other groups on campus work and tries to help out the projects that don’t receive a lot of attention.

Woiwode said one goal of Selfless Saturdays is to get students involved in the larger community of DeKalb and Sycamore.

“Before I started doing it, I had no idea what organizations were out there and the help they need,” she said.

Elijah Itah, school counseling graduate student, said he enjoys the program because “it’s fun to get out in the community.”

Selfless Saturdays occur once a month, from 9 a.m. to noon. The program is meant for busy students who still want to give some of their time to volunteer, Woiwode said.

The group participates in varied projects, from creating lesson plans for events at the public library to gardening during the warm weather months. Last month, the Selfless Saturdays volunteers worked with the City of DeKalb Neighborhood Improvement Project.

“We try to make it as interesting as possible but still help with what they need,” Woiwode said.

Itah said he sought out organizations on his own with which to volunteer in the past, but he felt more isolated in his work than when volunteering for Selfless Saturdays.

“It [was] an individual experience versus this where it’s very much collaborative,” he said.

Counseling doctoral student Mi Hee Jeon said she also preferred to volunteer with others.

“I am too shy to volunteer by myself,” she said.

Jeon said Selfless Saturdays is a good resource for information about volunteer opportunities.

Several students filled out applications on Saturday to return to the Pay-It-Forward House in the future to volunteer on their own.