The Service Learning Center (SLC), a team of community partners and HSU students, faculty and administrators, and the student-led Y.E.S. (Youth Educational Services) program have been named to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, according to an announcement from the U.S. Department of Education.
The award recognizes the more than 1,400 Humboldt State students in SLC and Y.E.S. who organized more than 50 projects in 2011 to address issues of sustainability, food security and social justice.
Three principal projects last year were “Halting Hunger in Humboldt County,” which supported Food for People, the Humboldt County Food Bank; the 17th Annual HSU Day of Caring, in partnership with United Way-Humboldt/Del Norte Region; and the North Coast Regional Service Learning Conference, which hosted keynote speaker and HSU Professor Corey Lewis and presented a series of workshops on nutrition, food security, sustainability and service learning. These included sessions on service learning in the so-called STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The U.S. Department of Education said in its announcement: “Preparing students to participate in our democracy and providing them with opportunities to take on local and global issues in their course work are as central to the mission of education as boosting college completion and closing the achievement gap.”
Humboldt State students worked last year with more than 74 community partner organizations and contributed more than 73,000 hours of service.
Scores of HSU academic courses address health, the environment and sustainability. A number of them are conducted as formal Service Learning curriculum.
Y.E.S. is a 42-year old student-led collective of 16 volunteer programs. The SLC promotes various state and national civic engagement initiatives.