What is Community Service?
Community service engages students in service with the community as an integrated aspect of a course. Students participate in organized service activities and reflect on those activities to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of their discipline, and an enhanced sense of personal values and civic responsibility. Service-learning engages students in active, collaborative, and inquiry-based learning experiences that meet identified community needs.
Student Benefits of Community Service:
-
Volunteering connects you to others
-
Volunteering helps you make new friends and contacts
-
Volunteering increases your social and relationship skills
-
Volunteering is good for your mind and body
-
Volunteering can advance your career
-
Volunteering can provide career experience
-
Volunteering can teach you valuable job skills
What is Civic engagement?
Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.
A morally and civically responsible individual recognizes himself or herself as a member of a larger social fabric and therefore considers social problems to be at least partly his or her own; such an individual is willing to see the moral and civic dimensions of issues, to make and justify informed moral and civic judgments, and to take action when appropriate.
(American Democracy Project)