MCC receives service learning grant from Teagle Foundation
Elliott Adams
MCC has been awarded a $270,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation in an attempt to further integrate service-learning into college curriculum.
The grant will fund a three-year national project to increase civic engagement among student learning for community colleges across the country.
MCC is one of the seven community colleges chosen for the project, other colleges include De Anza Community College in California, Delgado Community College in Louisiana, Kapi’olani Community College in Hawaii, Kingsborough Community College in New York, Queensborough Community College in New York, and Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey.
These colleges will work together to encourage service learning and civic engagement in college education and local communities.
MCC plans to create a network of faculty from varying departments who can integrate service learning into classes and promote civic engagement.
“The grant will help MCC connect meaningful service to academic development,” said Duane Oakes, director for the Center for Community and Civic Engagement.
“We want to create students and faculty who can become better citizens and truly make a difference in our society. By including service learning in classes, not only are the students making a difference in their community, they are also getting hands-on experience that is valuable to their education.”
Earnestine Curry, a student at MCC majoring in social work and minoring in victimology, is highly involved in service learning at MCC and said it’s an experience every college student should have during their education.
“It just makes you feel so good,” Curry said.
Besides having worked over 50 hours at United Way of America, Curry was also involved in creating a database of African-American donors for the Steven L. Pearson Leukemia Foundation.
“We realized that there were no African Americans in the donor database for leukemia and something needed to be done about that,” Curry said. “We worked really hard but it was so much fun. The feeling you get after helping someone is just amazing.”
Valerie LaGrande, also a social work major at MCC, is a civic engagement scholar currently involved in a project to campaign on the issue of human trafficking.
“Though people usually think major sporting events, like the SuperBowl, can be good for the state those events take place in, they can also create a tremendous increase in human trafficking,” LaGrande said. “Thousands of victims, many of them high school age, are trafficked during these sporting events. Currently we are campaigning to raise awareness of this issue and reach out to medical professionals so they know the signs and symptoms of someone who has been trafficked.”
LaGrande said the Teagle grant will greatly help both her cause and the other volunteer projects MCC students are currently involved in.
She also said that this grant will hopefully get more students involved in service learning and will get them to focus on issues in their community.
“I feel that without service learning, students aren’t really applying the knowledge they’re learning in the classroom,” LaGrande said. “You just don’t get the same experience if you’re not doing something hands-on that can also benefit your community.”
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