Resonating to President Barack Obama’s message of “Yes, we can,” personal empowerment to change our society for the better is gaining traction, and creating invaluable opportunities for urban and metropolitan universities to engage with their communities in new and exciting ways. After all, we are the institutions with an organizational mission that places engagement as the centerpiece of our endeavors. And, specifically, CUMU members have a track record of success in this area that extends across the entire membership. Equally as compelling, this generation of college student is more likely to take part in service learning and volunteer activities than their parents, and expects to spend significantly more of their free time doing so.

Case in point: Campus Compact, an organization that both tracks and encourages student civic participation, estimates that annually, college students provide more than $7 billion in service to their communities, in the form of tutoring at-risk youth, caring for the less fortunate, planning and renovation of low-income housing, and conducting research into urban issues. Over the past 20 years, more than 2 million students have participated at local and national levels and the number is rising.

But it’s not all good news. Education Week reports that research findings recently presented to the American Educational Research Association (AERA), indicate that high school students of lower socio-economic means, those who are of ethnic or racial minorities or who are placed into lower-track classes have fewer opportunities to participate in civic engagement than peers who are more affluent. Obviously, this has real implications for our urban and metropolitan institutions who seek to “bridge the gap” in their communities, providing access to many first generation/ethnically diverse/lower income college students, while at the same time, promoting service learning opportunities and partnering with metropolitan service organizations.

According to Education Week, Joseph E. Kahne, education professor at Mills College in California, and research collaborator Ellen E. Middaugh, University of California, Berkeley reported that “80 percent of the students in Advanced Placement government classes said they had taken part in simulations of civic processes – an activity that has been linked to later civic participation – compared with only 51 percent of the students in lower-track government classes.”

The disparity may be easy to explain. According to Kahne, “the number-one predictor of volunteering for students is whether anybody ever asks them.” The future implications are plain, hecontinued, “what you do in school is strongly related to what you do in life.”

So how do we, as metropolitan institutions committed to community stewardship, help K-12 plant the seeds of civic responsibility in diverse student populations (our future enrollees)? Quite simply, we ask and create opportunities.

Since 2005, the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Service Learning Academy has been reaching out to K-12 educators who have an interest in service learning and volunteerism activities, seek an innovative/alternative approach to their subject matter and support community engagement. What began with one engineering class at a North Omaha magnet high school in 2005, has evolved into a multi-school initiative, involving all of the metro school systems, including the parochial/private sector. Projects have expanded from a single, focused classroom activity to seven multi-day opportunities throughout the academic year.

This spring, during our Spring Break Seventh Annual Seven Days of Service, nearly 400 students from the community’s most diverse high schools worked alongside college students, faculty, staff and community leaders planning and implementing projects throughout the city. Nearly 1200 volunteer days were generated (multiple days were given by many volunteers) with a dollar equivalency value of $140,000. Fifteen project sites benefited, ranging from Habitat for Humanity, Salvation Army, Bellevue Little Theater, and Lauritzen Gardens, with sponsorship from national banks, local/regional businesses and non-profits.

While we can put a dollar figure on the work these young people have done, the value added benefit of these students working and learning along side their college peers is, as the ad says, “priceless.” We have begun to track previous high school participants, now UNO enrollees, who continue to serve and volunteer.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “things do not change, we change.” If we are to be the change we seek in the world, then our metropolitan universities have a key role to play in encouraging our young people to invest in causes greater than themselves. Change can be nurtured and encouraged, invested in and promoted . All it takes is a new way to view our role as stewards of our communities.

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