Think Beyond Your Campus: Engage in Service

As you may have read in one my my previous posts, people across the nation would celebrate MLK Day of Service this past Monday by engaging in community service projects.  Even the First Family joined the action to make it 'A Day ON, Not a Day Off.'

For some of you, it was a one-time thing.

For others of you, participating in MLK Day of Service may become an annual thing.

Then there are others of you who now have an itch to do community service projects more often.  If that is the case, here are some ways you could do it more often:

1. Find the community service center on your campus:  If you want to participate in or even lead community service projects, your university may already have an office that offers that programming to students.  Each university houses or labels these volunteer centers differently.  Wellesley College calls theirs the Center for Work and Service.  The University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign has the Office of Volunteer Programs.  Not every school has a community service center, but it is worth exploring if that is an option for finding projects.
2. Find service-oriented clubs on your campus:  Your school may or may not have a community service center.  Regardless, most colleges offer opportunities to do service projects through student organizations.  Think of Habitat for Humanity.  Also while some clubs, student professional associations, or fraternities/sororities are social in nature, they still could have a service component as well.  That is another way to incorporate service into your extracurriculars.
3. Find opportunities for service learning on your campus:  There are different ways to define service learning.  Scholars like Andrew Furco devote much time and energy into defining it.  For the sake of simplicity, we will say service learning occurs when a college offers courses that allow students to integrate service into their curriculum.  This is easy to find at too few colleges.  If you are at DePaul University, you need not look further than the Irwin W. Steans Center for Community-Based Service Learning & Community Service Studies.  If you attend another college, you may have to dig deeper by consulting with your academic advisor or another campus contact.  While my alma mater the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign did not have a service learning center, I was able to do service learning through a course offered by the sociology department.  I found out about it from a friend, and it was one of the best courses I  took in college.  Find out if your school offers a service learning course that fits your needs.  It just might become one of your favorite courses.  
4. Find service opportunities beyond your campus:  For some of you, doing service might not fit your campus life.  Perhaps you are too busy with a part-time job to do it as an extracurricular.  For others of you, your major might be so rigid that it is not feasible to fit a course with service learning into your class schedule.  I caught the service bug late during my undergrad.  By the time I started to realize what was available on my campus, it was time to think about life after college.  I got a job after school, but I still had the need to serve.  After a couple of years at my first post-college job, I did a year of service with the AmeriCorps program at City Year in Chicago.  After that, I did another year of service with the AmeriCorps*VISTA program at Massachusetts Campus Compact.  Those were a couple of the most impactful years of my career.  In fact, it was in those programs that I first learned about MLK Day of Service.  Research different programs to see if doing a year of service after college is right for you.    

Did MLK Day of Service make you want to serve more?  If so, how do you plan to incorporate more service into your life on campus … or your life beyond campus?