By Mark Terranova, Assistant Director,
Service Learning, The Shriver Center

Last week, I spent two days at a conference for foundations who fund service and civic engagement activities. The focus of the conference was to create a dialog among funders and practitioners on the ethic and practice of service and volunteerism, and how to support, promote, and require such activities. Several trends are emerging in the world of service and civic participation. In an effort to begin a dialog of how these trends affect UMBC, I would like to share some of what I think may be relevant to us.

A large-scale study of civic engagement funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts examined trends among youth ages 15 to 25 and their participation in civic participation and volunteerism. The study founds that compared to other age cohorts, youth are civically engaged at significantly lower levels. The report does suggest however, that youth positively respond to school-based programming designed to encourage more engagement.

The call for "Universal Service" for all Americans was also debated at the conference. As you may be aware, President Bush has asked all Americans to volunteer 4000 hours, or two years of their lives, to strengthen our communities. John Bridgeland, assistant to the President and director of USA Freedom Corps, spoke at the conference about how the federal government plans to support this trend by framing service and volunteerism as a strategy to engage our citizens and to protect our homeland, in ways still being defined by the Corporation for National and Community Service -- the government agency that funds Americorps and Freedom Corps.

How does this affect service at UMBC? Truthfully, I don't know. Many questions are raised by these new trends. How do faculty continue to encourage, support and promote service in their courses? How does the University continue to support civic engagement, an integral part of our vision, through service? How are homeland security efforts supported by volunteerism and service?

We already address these challenges in several ways at UMBC. Students in the Shriver Living Learning Centerchallenge this disengagement of youth by serving for three to five hours each week in the community and meeting once a week for ten weeks to connect their service to policies directly affected the populations they serve. Public Affairs Scholars participate in service-learning for two semesters to see first hand how policies directly affect communities.

I welcome all members of the UMBC community to actively participate in this new dialog on service, as we all move forward in new ways of understanding what it means to be citizens, and what it means to serve others. Please e-mail me at terranov@umbc.edu with ideas on how to expand this conversation, or to find out more about what we are already doing at the Shriver Center and other departments here at UMBC.

For additional information, please see:

www.cns.gov
www.gfcns.org