Calvin Gets Grant for Service-Learning Database

October 1, 2004 == MEDIA ADVISORY

A new online database will make service-learning opportunities even more
accessible to the Calvin College students who participate in them.

The database, which is funded by a $1,750 Venture Grant from Michigan Campus
Compact, will list the between 200 and 300 organizations (social service
agencies, schools, clinics, churches and other non-profits) where Calvin
students already serve and learn.

"It will make it easier for them to connect with service opportunities that
fit who they are and what they want to do," says Jeff Bouman, director of
Calvin's Service-Learning Center.

The grant will pay for student workers to create the database, which will be
accessible through KnightVision, Calvin's online community. The online resource
will be available to Calvin's students, faculty and staff and alumni.

The idea for the database grew out of a Campus Compact training session where
students mapped Calvin's service-learning resources. Calvin graduate Greg
Veltman, who was Bouman's research coordinator last year, helped write the
grant to put Calvin's service learning online.

"It's characteristic of the kind of thing service-learning engenders in
students," says Bouman. "Initiative, civic participation and thinking beyond
themselves."

Calvin's longstanding tradition of service-learning includes such annual
events as StreetFest, which annually puts 900-1,000 first-year students to work
stocking food pantries, painting, cleaning alleys and serving in variety of
other ways in the Grand Rapids area. Calvin students also tutor, serve as Big
Brothers and Big Sisters and perform stream cleanup, among other service
activities. Calvin even offers several service-learning spring break trips,
through which students may serve on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico or work
at a home for at-risk girls in Tennessee.

Calvin is especially impressive in the area of academically based service
learning - incorporating service learning into the classroom. The college's
nursing students perform blood pressure and blood sugar screenings, do
inoculations and teach nutrition at local clinics and neighborhoods. Education
students serve as reading buddies and tutors in area schools. And the list
goes on.

"Almost every department has at some time incorporated academically based
service learning," Bouman says. "Philosophy, economics English- you name it.
There isn't a discipline where it doesn't apply."

In fact, Calvin students are more likely to participate in academically based
service-learning than students at private, four-year colleges nationwide. A
recent survey of graduating seniors showed that 79 percent of Calvin students
had taken one or more courses that incorporated community service and
service-learning, compared with 51 percent of those at peer institutions.

Contact Bouman at jpb4@calvin.edu or 526-8610

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Received on Fri Oct 1 14:44:14 2004