Can you combine activities on the Common App?

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, often met the same weakness in the middle of an activities page: three or four entries that were each a little thin. A few hours a week at the library's homework club, a weekend shift at the food bank, a holiday drive at a shelter.

Listed one by one, each tells a reader that the student did a small thing once in a while, and together the separate lines start to suggest a student who drifts. That impression is often unfair, because the real commitment behind those lines can be substantial, and it costs the page slots it could have used for something better. There is an honest way to let a reader see the truth, and readers in that office welcomed it.