of Nazareth undergraduate students participate in community engagement, addressing local and global challenges
The Weider staff connected 800 students with 70 organizations/partners for service experiences, social innovation design, changemaking resources, social justice action, and exploring jobs with impact (2022-23).
Washington Monthly, NASPA (the leading national association of student affairs administrators in higher education), the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, and the Carnegie Foundation have recognized Nazareth's sophisticated, successful approach to community engagement.
We enhance students' college experience by offering a variety of community service opportunities, academic service-learning courses, and other community engagement initiatives — locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.
Nazareth is nationally recognized for leading the way for colleges engaged with the community. Nazareth's latest innovative efforts include the New American Colleges & Universities Civic Engagement Collaborative as well as the Clinton Global Initiative University.
Community engagement at Nazareth University is a form of experiential learning in which students participate in individual and/or collective actions that are designed to identify and address issues of public concern. It can be for credit or not for credit. Students “test out” concepts and theories and become agents of their own learning in transformative ways while exploring their roles in the local and global communities through reciprocal and mutually beneficial partnerships with community-based organizations.
According to The Pew Charitable Trusts:
Civic engagement can take many forms, from individual voluntarism to organizational involvement to electoral participation. It can include efforts to directly address an issue, work with others in a community to solve a problem or interact with the institutions of representative democracy. Civic engagement encompasses a range of specific activities such as working in a soup kitchen, serving on a neighborhood association, writing a letter to an elected official or voting. Indeed, an underlying principle of our approach is that an engaged citizen should have the ability, agency and opportunity to move comfortably among these various types of civic acts.
Source: Michael Delli Carpini, Director, Public Policy, The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The programs page outlines many opportunities for non-credit bearing civic engagement opportunities. The Center for Service-Learning outlines opportunities that are credit-bearing engagement opportunities.
Community engagement activities are one way that students fulfill the experiential learning core requirement at Nazareth College.