Calvin To Celebrate 40 Years of Service

March 1, 2006 == MEDIA ADVISORY

The Service-Learning Center at Calvin College will celebrate its 40th
anniversary from 6 to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 9 in the Great Hall of the
college's Prince Conference Center.

The 40th anniversary bash will feature 1992 Calvin graduate Jennifer Marcum,
currently the executive director of Safe Haven Ministries, a Grand Rapids
organization providing support and refuge for victims of domestic violence.
Marcum worked for the Student Volunteer Service (predecessor of the
Service-Learning Center ) from 1988 through 1992.

"It's a celebration of a program that takes students out of this relatively
detached college environment and into the city of Grand Rapids," says
Service-Learning Center director Jeff Bouman of the upcoming event.

Calvin's Service-Learning Center (SLC) has blossomed since its genesis in the
mid-1960s, as has the mission behind the service it provides. It began in the
fall of 1965 as Kindling Intellectual Desire in Students (KIDS), a tutoring
program in the city's schools.

Down through the decades, the center grew its staff and expanded its programs,
adding mentoring relationships, emergency moving services, hospital
volunteering, blood drives, Big Brother and Big Sister programs and work study
opportunities.

In 1993, the name was changed to the Service-Learning Center, a shift that
signaled a more significant change on the part of the college, Bouman says, a
recognition that service should be integrated into the college curriculum.

"For 27 years, students did it for no credit," Bouman explains. "We still do
everything we've done since 1965, but now we have between 35 and 50 courses
each semester which integrate service-learning."

An education course that places students in literacy-building partnerships at
Alexander school and a biology course that teaches students to eradicate
non-indigenous Michigan plant species are two examples of this approach.

"The mechanism is in place for faculty to think beyond their textbooks," he
says. "Faculty are pointing students toward the community as a text."

Contact Bouman at 616-526-8610

For the whole story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2005_06/slc40th.htm

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Received on Wed Mar 1 12:44:34 2006