Correspondent photos / Sean Barron Wafa Hadi, a Youngstown State University academic adviser, left, and Riley Doan, a YSU sophomore and accounting major, clear weeds from a garden of lavender at the Dorothy Day House in Youngstown as part of the university’s annual Dare to Care Day of Service on Friday.

YOUNGSTOWN — Harry Leith quickly drew a parallel between his military duties and helping to disassemble a display.

“I was an aircraft mechanic and got the planes ready to fly for someone else; I didn’t fly them. These people needed help to move a display for the next exhibit,” Leith, who retired after having served 15 years in the U.S. Navy, said.

Leith also is a business student in Youngstown State University’s Williamson College of Business Administration who joined about 90 other WCBA students, faculty and staff members in the university’s annual Dare to Care Day of Service on Friday at nonprofit sites on and near the campus.

Specifically, Leith and about 14 other YSU students and faculty took down a display to make room for another one, then reorganized a storage area at the Youngstown Historical Center of Labor and Industry, also known as the Steel Museum, at 151 W. Wood St. During the second week of May, the museum will set up the new exhibit to honor the Austintown-based District Three Ohio Nurses Association.

In addition, the museum is one of 11 nonprofit locations at which the groups volunteered that also included Boardman Park, the Dorothy Day House, Inspiring Minds Youngstown, Habitat for Humanity ReStore, Junior Achievement of Eastern Ohio, the YMCA of Youngstown and Beatitude House, Laura Dewberry, a YSU professor of business and nonprofit leadership, noted.

The overarching goals are to fuse business leadership for the students with civic and community responsibility while providing an opportunity for them to glean firsthand insight into the nonprofit sector, she said. Their duties Friday included site cleanups, organizing offices, garden work and assembling exhibits.

Also, the students were able to select where they wish to volunteer, Dewberry added.

While at the Steel Museum, Susan Lowery, an archivist, gave Leith and the others in the group a tour of the facility that included the basement, where a variety of artifacts are stored from the former McDonald Steel Corp., which opened in 1981 in the midst of the larger steel industry’s demise across the Mahoning Valley. McDonald Steel ceased operations a few years ago.

Other items in the basement were a desk and chair that belonged to the late state Sen. Harry Meshel, who served two years as the Ohio Democratic Party chairman and who died Sept. 4, 2017, at age 93.

Valeria Goncalves, a gardener with the Dorothy Day House on Belmont Avenue, was grateful to see a welcome addition to a series of large fenced-in flowerbeds.

“We really appreciate them being here,” Goncalves said, referring to the group of YSU students and staff who busied themselves Friday morning by removing weeds and overgrowth. “The weeding definitely takes us 100 steps ahead.”

Among those who contributed to the 100 steps were Wafa Hadi, an academic adviser in YSU’s Williamson College of Business Administration, and Riley Doan, a sophomore who’s majoring in accounting. The two of them collaborated to get rid of weeds from a corner garden, the centerpiece of which was a lavender plant with a few hints of green.

“This sounded right up my alley,” Hadi said while digging up dandelions and other unwanted plants.

The occasion carried special significance for Doan because it elicited childhood memories of her assisting her grandfather, Michael Kirkwood, in his backyard garden. Kirkwood also attended YSU.

“This is a good day for landscaping, but also to help the community in ways others might not, and to help make others’ day easier than it would normally be,” Doan said about the Dare to Care event.

Others who pitched in included Andrew Kirkland, a YSU junior and accounting major. He spent time raking from a garden a cluster of a common weed called heal-all, which is a low-growing, broadleaf and pollinating plant in the mint family.

The Dorothy Day House serves those who are poor and homeless via offering them meals, showers and other types of hospitality. The facility also takes part in social-justice issues and causes that include working to combat human trafficking.

Also part of Friday’s volunteerism was placing labels on more than 1,500 postcards to be sent to those in Ashtabula, Trumbull, Mahoning and Columbiana counties, as well as western Pennsylvania, regarding an event the Junior Achievement of Eastern Ohio will host, said Alison Huffman and Hana Hakeem of JA.

About a dozen YSU students joined Huffman and Hakeem in a small conference room in the WCBA on Friday for the bulk mailing in which the postcards were being prepared in advance of the JA’s annual Swing Fore Junior Achievement golf tournament, set for July 27 at The Lake Club in Poland, they noted.

YSU’s yearly Dare to Care gathering is the sister event of a similar one each October in which participants partner with the United Way of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley for the annual United We Care volunteer day, Dewberry said.

Last October, WCBA students, staff and faculty sorted and packed a variety of items to stock Care Closets at Austintown Fitch High School.