Mercer Earns Highest Federal Designation for Community Service

Mercer University has earned the highest federal recognition for community engagement, the Corporation for National and Community Service announced today. For the University’s exemplary service efforts and service to the community, the Corporation named Mercer to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for 2008.

“This award confirms Mercer’s deep commitment to community engagement. It was difficult to select only a few projects for our President’s Honor Roll application because Mercer faculty and students are so involved in community outreach,” said Dr. Mary Alice Morgan, Mercer’s senior vice provost for service-learning. “From individual students working on a Habitat for Humanity house to Mercer’s international outreach through Mercer On Mission, the university models what it means to be a good citizen.”

Launched in 2006, the Community Service Honor Roll is the highest federal recognition a school can achieve for its commitment to service-learning and civic engagement. Mercer was named to the Honor Roll in 2006 for its commitment to community engagement. Honorees for the award were chosen based on a series of selection factors including scope and innovation of service projects, percentage of student participation in service activities, incentives for service and the extent to which the school offers academic service-learning courses.

Mercer’s commitment to community engagement is deeply embedded in all aspects and all campuses of the University, including service-learning, volunteering and University-community partnerships, such as the College Hill Corridor, which began as a student-led effort and has led to the creation of a potential reinvention of the area between downtown Macon and the campus.

Mercer students across the University amassed more than 103,000 hours of community service in 2008 – an average of 14 hours per student – and more than 4,900 students engaged in some type of service work. Community engagement spans across the University’s campuses and colleges: from School of Medicine students’ work with victims of the Imperial Sugar Co. plant explosion outside Savannah; to the Georgia Baptist College of Nursing students’ and faculty’s work with medically fragile children at Camp Kudzu outside Atlanta; to the millions of dollars invested by the University to redevelop the areas around the Macon campus. The University’s efforts reach around the globe as well through Mercer On Mission, a summer service-learning program in which groups of students travel to the developing world to work on projects that reduce human suffering.

In addition to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, Mercer has received a number of awards and recognitions recently for its commitment to community engagement. In October, PreLaw Magazine ranked Mercer’s Walter F. George School of Law at No. 6 in the nation among Public Interest Law Schools. In December, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recognized Mercer for its Community Engagement Classification. Mercer is one of only 195 universities in the nation – and one just three in Georgia – to receive that designation.

“In this time of economic distress, we need volunteers more than ever. College students represent an enormous pool of idealism and energy to help tackle some of our toughest challenges,” said Stephen Goldsmith, vice chair of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees the Honor Roll. “We salute Mercer University for making community service a campus priority, and thank the millions of college students who are helping to renew America through service to others.”

The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that improves lives, strengthens communities, and fosters civic engagement through service and volunteering. The Corporation administers Senior Corps, AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America, a program that supports service-learning in schools, institutions of higher education and community-based organizations. For more information, go to www.nationalservice.gov.

Overall, the Corporation honored six schools with Presidential Awards. In addition, 83 were named as Honor Roll With Distinction members and 546 schools as Honor Roll members. The Honor Roll is a program of the Corporation, in collaboration with the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation. In total, 635 schools were recognized. A full list is available at www.nationalservice.gov/honorroll.

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Carnegie Foundation Selects Mercer for its National Community Engagement Designation

Mercer University has earned national recognition from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for its commitment to community engagement, the foundation announced today.

Mercer is the only college in Georgia, and one of just 119 in the United States, to be selected by the foundation for its 2008 Community Engagement Classification. Mercer joins 76 other institutions identified in the 2006 selection process, including Emory University and Spelman College, the only other Georgia institutions to achieve the classification to date.

“Strong community engagement has long been a Mercer University hallmark,” said President William D. Underwood. “Robust service-learning programs, a culture of volunteerism and major institutional investments in the neighborhoods surrounding our campuses have all contributed to this designation by the Carnegie Foundation. This kind of national recognition is further validation of the institution’s commitment to community engagement.”

The foundation invited colleges and universities with an institutional focus on community engagement to apply for the classification, previously developed and offered in 2006 as part of an extensive restructuring of The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Unlike the Foundation’s other classifications that rely only on national data, this is an “elective” classification – institutions elected to participate by submitting extensive documentation describing the nature and scope of their engagement with the community. This approach enabled the foundation to address elements of institutional mission and distinctiveness that are not represented in the national data on colleges and universities.

This year, 147 institutions applied to document community engagement. Applications were reviewed by an expert advisory team and 119 were successfully classified as community engaged institutions. Mercer was one of only 51 private colleges and universities in the United States to achieve the designation.

“I have long known and taken pride in the commitment to service and community outreach exhibited by Mercer faculty and staff, but even I was surprised by the depth and broad scale of service-learning and community engagement revealed through the process of preparing our Carnegie application,” said Dr. Mary Alice Morgan, co-chair of the application committee and senior vice provost for service-learning. “This designation truly testifies to the ethics of community engagement that are a distinctive part of the Mercer mission and ethos.”

"Mercer has a long tradition of community engagement and learning based on that engagement and is proud to join the ranks of other fine institutions in this new classification, including Duke University, Tulane University and Emory,” said Dr. Peter Brown, chair of the application committee and senior vice provost. “With this national recognition, we will be able to more closely measure our progress and impact, as we pursue our goals of increased community engagement under the University’s 10-year strategic plan.”

In addition to its decades-long commitment to service-learning, which engages students in community service as part of their coursework, Mercer has a long history of partnering with organizations throughout the communities it serves to leverage University resources to advance those communities. Mercer’s partnerships with dozens of agencies and organizations bring in millions of dollars in grant funding to help the community, engage students in service-learning and aid in community-focused faculty research.

Because of those commitments, the foundation selected Mercer for the highest category, “Curricular Engagement and Outreach and Partnerships,” a combination of the two other categories within the classification. In Georgia, only Emory University shares this designation. According to the foundation, to be categorized in curricular engagement, schools must engage in teaching, learning and scholarship that addresses community needs, deepens students’ learning, enhances community well-being and enriches the scholarship of the institution. The outreach and partnerships category describes two different but related approaches to community engagement. The first focuses on the application and provision of institutional resources for community use with benefits to both campus and community. The latter focuses on collaborative interactions with community and related scholarship for the mutually beneficial exchange, exploration and application of knowledge, information and resources. Twenty-one schools were selected in only one category, including Spelman College, which is in the curricular engagement category.

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