Offering More Than a Degree

Colleges devise new ways to meet students’ desire to volunteer

The Salvation Army in Charlottesville, Va., is one of thousands of charities nationwide

tapping into a rapidly expanding pool of eager and educated volunteers: college students.

Each year the University of Virginia provides 100 students to fuel the Salvation Army’s efforts to help the needy obtain child care, meals, mentors, and many other services.

Student coordinators also handle most of the related administrative and logistical work for the charity, including recruiting the volunteers and coming up with replacements when scheduling conflicts arise, so the Salvation Army doesn’t have to worry about having any gaps in its services.

U.Va’s efforts reflect a growing trend among colleges to invest time and money in actively encouraging community service, largely in response to strong student demand.

Nationwide, 60 percent of students reported volunteering in some charitable activity during the past year, according to a recent study by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

But while nonprofit groups have long eyed students as potential sources of free labor, some have found that coordinating activities with students can be difficult or time-consuming. Some charities have been reluctant to rely too heavily on students or to give them long-term assignments, for fear of being left short-handed as other demands on a student’s time — classes, exams, sports — grow over the course of the semester.

To help reduce such problems and encourage new partnerships between charities and students, colleges have taken a number of steps, including:

Scholarships. Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., selected its first “Making a Difference Scholars” this year, awarding each of 12 incoming freshman $11,000 a year for four years toward their tuition. Recipients will also receive a $2,500 stipend in exchange for spending a summer working for a nonprofit partnership effort between the university and local leaders to improve housing, schools, and other problem areas in the struggling neighborhood that surrounds the institution. Starting next fall, the university plans to give out 20 of those scholarships.

Internship stipends. Some colleges are helping to pay the living expenses for students who want to spend time working for a charity but cannot afford to do it on a volunteer basis. Such stipends also help charities stretch their budgets. At Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., students can apply for one of several dozen fellowships, ranging from $2,000 to $2,500 apiece, to help pay their expenses while they serve as interns at nonprofit organizations around the country and abroad.

Academic credit. About a third of all college students took a course that required them to do volunteer work in 1998, according to a study published this year by the University of California at Los Angeles.

Bates College, in Lewiston, Me., has taken a lead in such efforts, with a third of the professors who are currently teaching now integrating community-service projects into their courses.

At Southern Connecticut State University, in New Haven, a team of six students in a graduate urban-studies course recently helped the Casa Otonal Housing Corporation design a public-housing complex tailored to grandparents raising their grandchildren. (The students also ended up winning $5,000 for the charity through a design competition paid for by Chase Manhattan Bank.)

College offices. Many colleges now have a community-service office, with paid employees who oversee all of a college’s volunteer activities and provide a single point of contact for charity leaders. Campus Compact, a higher-education group that promotes community service, estimates that 65 percent of its 689 members have such an office, up from 53 percent of members in 1990.

Transportation. Many students arrive at college without a car, making off-campus volunteer assignments difficult if public transportation isn’t easily available. So institutions like Pomona College, in Claremont, Calif., have started providing a free shuttle service to help students get to the charities where they work.

Student housing. A growing number of colleges are setting aside dormitory wings or houses for students who put a high priority on volunteer work. Often the housing is in a prime location or is especially desirable, as a way to reward and encourage students to donate their time.

St. Michael’s College, in Colchester, Vt., offers 14 houses on the edge of campus for students interested in community service. Students in each of the “theme houses” pick a cause they care about — such as homelessness, AIDS, or the elderly — and then organize related service projects.

Other colleges with service-related housing accommodations include Butler University, in Indianapolis; Chicago State University; Elon College, in Elon College, N.C.; the University of Denver; the University of Pennsylvania; and the University of Rochester.

Future Donors

While many nonprofit leaders are enjoying the short-term benefits of college efforts to promote community service on their campuses, they also encourage student volunteerism in the hopes that doing so will lead college graduates to become lifetime volunteers and benefactors.

A research study released last year suggests that college service could indeed influence lifetime behavior. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles found that students who volunteered in college were more likely to continue to do so after graduating — as well as to give money to their alma mater — than those who did not. Students who spent six or more hours a week volunteering during their senior year were nearly twice as likely to volunteer after college as those who were not active in community service.

That’s promising news for nonprofit groups, especially since interest in volunteering by college students shows no sign of waning.

Charities created in the mid-1980’s to specifically encourage student volunteerism — including Campus Compact, Campus Outreach Opportunity League, and Youth Service America — have seen their memberships reach record highs. Campus Compact, for example, grew from three members in 1985 to its current 689 colleges.

Theodore R. Mitchell, president of Occidental College, in Los Angeles, says students now expect the colleges they attend to provide support for volunteer efforts, much the same way they demand “broader bandwidth, higher-speed connections, and more mobile computing.”

Many students also arrive on campus with significant community-service experience. Numerous school districts across the nation have added volunteer time as a requirement for graduation during the past decade. In Maryland, all students must complete 80 hours of community service before graduating from high school, and California is expected to pass a similar measure soon.

Justifying Tax Exemptions

But some colleges also face financial incentives of a very different kind: mounting pressures from cities to justify their property-tax exemptions or risk losing them.

Steve Culbertson, executive director of Youth Service America, says college volunteerism efforts have been “a logical response to complaints that colleges don’t pay taxes” even though they have “all this incredible land and these students who fly in and out and who are drains on the municipalities.”

Clark University’s president, John Bassett, says it was “enlightened self-interest” that prompted the university to revisit its relationship with the economically depressed former mill town where its campus is based.

Mr. Bassett says the university realized several years ago that it had to take a lead role in improving the condition of its hometown. Prospective students and their parents would “drive up to the admissions office, look around, and say, ‘Let’s leave and look somewhere else,’” says Mr. Bassett.

So the university worked with nonprofit, business, government, and other local leaders to create the University Park Partnership, a coalition aimed at improving the nearby Main South neighborhood. So far, the university has spent $6-million from its endowment and has helped raise an additional $30-million for the project.

Clark is one of a number of universities working with local charities and others to come up with a comprehensive plan — rather than piecemeal charitable projects — to help improve the economic and social conditions in their cities. Elizabeth Hollander, executive director of Campus Compact, says such campuses work with local leaders and residents to improve all aspects of their hometowns, including education, housing, health care, and job creation. Other colleges taking such an approach include Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn., and the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Bassett says his next step toward making the university a more integral part of Worcester will be to ask the faculty to consider adopting a graduation requirement that every student do volunteer work for local charities or government agencies related to their academic studies.

Students could conduct research on why local theaters have trouble raising money or why some businesses chose not to move to Worcester, he says, adding, “I would like to see every student graduate with a good sense of the institution’s relationship to its neighborhood.”

High Energy, High Tech

Charities that need volunteers with high energy levels, such as those that work with children, or organizations that need the computer skills so many college students now possess, have particularly benefited from the recent boom in student volunteerism.

In Saginaw, Mich., the local Boys & Girls Club sought out students from a computer-aided design class at Saginaw Valley State, in University Center, Mich., to design a brochure for them. Other local charities have used college student volunteers to update their Web sites or transfer information in old-fashioned card files onto computer databases, noted Georgann Hemker, director of the community volunteer center at the local United Way.

Steve Messinetti, Habitat for Humanity International’s director of campus chapters and youth programs, says charities should remember that college students can provide value well beyond the volunteer hours they log swinging a hammer or performing other manual labor.

They can be highly effective advocates, educating their fellow students, faculty members, and community residents about the housing needs of the poor, he says. Students at some of Habitat’s 632 college-based chapters, for instance, conduct “shack-a-thons,” constructing simple outdoor shelters and living in them for days at a time to dramatize the need for low-cost housing.

He noted that students are often overlooked as donor fund raisers: Some 8,000 students raised $785,000 toward the construction costs of 450 houses they helped build during spring break last year.

Time-Consuming Training

But not all of the recent growth of volunteerism on campuses has translated into productive benefits for charities.

College courses that require charity work, for example, have sometimes resulted in greater benefits for the student or professor than for the nonprofit group.

Ms. Hemker, of the United Way of Saginaw County, says some service requirements are only 30 hours, but training the students as volunteers can take up to 20 hours for some organizations, leaving just 10 hours for actual service. For such charities, “it can be hardly worth the time to do the training,” she observes.

Some colleges are trying to overcome such problems by doing more of the screening, training, and management of volunteers to make sure charities get the kind of help they really need.

The University of Virginia, through its community-service center, has put together an elaborate monitoring system that uses students as volunteer coordinators to help keep tabs on its 3,000 volunteers — a quarter of all undergraduates. Those 140 coordinators recruit, schedule, motivate, and evaluate teams of students.

The intense competition for the unpaid — and time-consuming — jobs as volunteer coordinators is a gauge of student interest in service. Only one in four students who apply is selected.

Those who made the cut include Patricia Lopez, a sophomore, who oversees 35 of the students who volunteer with the local Salvation Army. Ms. Lopez says she is in constant contact with those students, making sure they show up for their shifts at the charity and finding replacements when they can’t. Ms. Lopez also volunteers herself for five shifts of about two hours each week.

“It’s kind of stressful during midterms,” she admits. “But I am doing all right budgeting my time.”

Employees at the university’s central volunteer clearinghouse, Madison House, are constantly refining the services they provide to charities. Last year, for example, they added a written contract that both the charities and the student volunteer coordinators sign that spell out what each expects from the other.

Heather Kellems, coordinator of the Teens Give program at Community Attention, a local residential facility for troubled adolescents, says the contract has helped her think about better ways to make use of student volunteers’ skills and talents.

“I might say, ‘I really want to have the volunteers meet the mission this way,’” she says. But “the program director might say, ‘That may not be doable. How about this way?’”

Madison House also conducts formal evaluations after service projects are completed, soliciting comments from charities on how to improve the program. And it offers an annual training workshop for charities on how best to make use of student volunteers.

“There are a lot of practical things we can work with them on, like the fact that scheduling volunteer assignments in the morning is not a good time for college students,” notes Cindy Fredrick, the executive director of Madison House.

Charity Entrepreneurs

College volunteer offices also find themselves providing advice to students on how to be better volunteers.

For example, students increasingly want to establish their own charitable endeavors. But while such efforts can be welcome, students sometimes leap ahead without fully investigating what the needs are and what nonprofit organizations are already working on the issues.

Judith Kidd, director of Phillips Brooks House, Harvard University’s umbrella office for community service, recalls a group of students who wanted to start a tutoring program to help local teenagers prepare for the SAT. The students proposed using borrowed space at a local community center. But leaders of the community center said what they really needed was more student volunteers to run their existing after-school programs.

So Ms. Kidd worked with the students to craft a compromise that would help the community center meet its needs while still permitting the Harvard students to share their test-preparation expertise. She also put the students in touch with an existing program at a Boston public library that helps public-school students prepare their college applications.

The SAT project “turned out to be a really terrific program,” says Ms. Kidd. “But it took a while before it was wisely using community resources as well as meeting community needs.”

Still, Mr. Culbertson of Youth Service America cautions college-service advisers not to dampen students’ enthusiasm and creativity. “I think we have to be careful that we don’t treat the nonprofit sector any differently from the for-profit sector,” he says. “If we told Bill Gates, ‘There is already an IBM,’ we’d still be in the dark ages in computing.”

Making Careers

While many charities are encouraged that college-service programs are adding plenty of momentum to volunteer efforts, observers say that nonprofit groups would reap more long-term benefits if they did more to persuade student volunteers to pursue careers doing good works.

Colleges and charities need to figure out “how we take these deep interests in service and help students understand that they can make a career out of this,” says Ms. Hollander, of Campus Compact. To help charities better showcase their career opportunities, Campus Compact is considering encouraging colleges to offer nonprofit job fairs.

Says Ms. Hollander: “We need to help students understand how satisfying these careers can be.”