The Corporation for National and Community Service has honored Tacoma Community College (TCC) with a place on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for exemplary service efforts and service to Americas communities.
Launched in 2006, the Community Service Honor Roll is the highest federal recognition a school can achieve for its commitment to service-learning and civic engagement. Honorees for the award were chosen based on a series of selection factors including scope and innovation of service projects, percentage of student participation in service activities, incentives for service, and the extent to which the school offers academic service-learning courses.
Almost 900 Tacoma Community College students completed 132,782 community service learning hours in 2007-2008. 700 of these students committed 20 or more hours in one quarter. At least 112 students committed to service-learning that was not connected to one of their college classes.
One service learning project now underway at TCC is the Streams of Accomplishment Student Speakers Bureau project. Student volunteers in this project help students in the college’s ESL/ABE programs share their own powerful stories. One goal is to encourage students to put their personal stories to work by sharing them with prospective and new students, as well as others in the community who might learn and be inspired by them. In another community service project, 26 Fresh Start students completed 750 hours of service as one step in the process of satisfying culminating project requirements for graduation.
The Honor Roll is a program of the Corporation, in collaboration with the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation. The President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll is presented during the annual conference of the American Council on Education.
Recent studies have underlined the importance of service-learning and volunteering to college students. In 2006, 2.8 million college students gave more than 297 million hours of volunteer service, according to the Corporation’s Volunteering in America 2007 study. Expanding campus incentives for service is part of a larger initiative to spur higher levels of volunteering by America’s college students. The Corporation is working with a coalition of federal agencies, higher education and student associations, and nonprofit organizations to achieve this goal.
The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that improves lives, strengthens communities, and fosters civic engagement through service and volunteering. The Corporation administers Senior Corps, AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America, a program that supports service-learning in schools, institutions of higher education and community-based organizations. For more information, go to http://www.nationalservice.gov .
