In January, nearly 80 student-athletes from Notre Dame’s track and field team joined the staff at South Bend’s Center for the Homeless to build team spirit and share their time, talent and treasure for the benefit of the center’s guests. Through nearly 15 hours of service over four days, the team painted walls, filled three dumpsters with unusable items, shredded out-dated records, organized pantries and dined with guests. True to form for track and field, CFH staff reported that this productive, mutually beneficial service was performed in record time, exceeding expectations for all involved.
Your engagement counts too, even if it happens at a slower pace! Hundreds — if not thousands — of students, faculty and staff are involved in all manner of community engagement each year. This is a proud tradition here at Notre Dame, and part of the University’s Catholic ethos that is performed without desire for fanfare or credit. In many cases, impact from our involvement can be easily perceived, and in other cases, it takes many years to know the outcomes. But whether volunteer work is done as a team-building exercise in your department, as a community-based learning class, through a club, or as part of your research, the Community Engagement Coordinating Council would like to know about your efforts. (See engagement.nd.edu.)
The council will soon submit the University’s re-application to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching “Elective Community Engagement Classification.” This is a designation Notre Dame has held for the past 10 years, and we hope to demonstrate that our community involvement has only grown more productive since our last application.
So we’re on a “Countdown to Carnegie.” By Friday, March 8, we aim to collect more than 300 stories of faculty/staff community-based projects from the academic year 2018 (2017-18). Please help Notre Dame tell our community engagement stories in one of the following ways:
Click engage.nd.edu to enter your project using your university net id and password. Three cash prizes will be randomly awarded to community partners of 2017-18 projects entered by faculty or staff.
Call the Office of Public Affairs at 1-1190 or 1-9423. We’ll enter your project and/or answer your questions.
Invite us to your department or building to solicit projects (email efuta@nd.edu or jcaponig@nd.edu)
We look forward to learning your stories and sharing your experiences with Carnegie, and perhaps in NDWorks in the future.