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This article is from the EMU News Archive. Current EMU new is available at www.emu.edu/news
At EMU, Spirit Of Service Catching On
By Heather Bowser, Daily News-Record
At Eastern Mennonite University, volunteering isn’t just something students do for charity — it’s a requirement.
Three years ago, the university revised its "Global Village Curriculum," a campus-wide effort to study cultures around the world and in the local community.
Since then, the number of classes and professors that require community service has increased "dramatically," EMU officials say.
Now, almost half of the 900-member undergraduate student body will participate in some form of community service every semester, says Deanna Durham, EMU director of community learning.
"The local community provides just as much education about global context as the semester abroad program does," said Durham. "We learn from the community and they learn from us. Volunteering is how we start that process."
Volunteer Classes
These days, the global curriculum has expanded so much that for the first time, volunteer-based classes called "community learning courses" are available in every department on campus, Durham said.
For example, students in environmental chemistry will clean up Blacks Run and international business students work with refugee resettlement. Forty-eight such classes are available during this school year.
"Volunteering is a unique opportunity to experience Latin American cultures in ways that we can not do it in the classroom," said Moira Rogers, an EMU Spanish professor who also teaches one of the volunteer-based classes.
For the last four years, Rogers has required her students in all her classes to perform service activities such as mentoring Spanish-speaking elementary students, or babysitting school-age children while their Spanish-speaking parents attend English classes. Her service class is always packed, she said.
"It’s a shame to keep them in the classroom," Rogers said. "When they’re in the community, students learn things that you can not teach them from a book. The community is part of the learning processes."
Gung-Ho For Service
Professors aren’t the only ones gung-ho about service.
At a volunteer fair at EMU on Thursday, 48 service groups lined the hallways to recruit students. This year’s fair was the biggest in the three years that EMU has held the event, Durham said.
And volunteer recruiters were chomping at the bit for their attention, attempting to lure students with candy and other goodies.
"Having them is fabulous," said Fern Nisly, a Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community volunteer recruiter. "The volunteers seem to make the world larger for the residents."
Theresa Horst, a recruiter from the Lindale Mennonite Church Child Care Program, agrees.
"The children love having them come," Horst said. "We hear the children say, ‘I have to go today, the EMU kids are coming.’"
And students like it too. "Yeah, volunteering is time consuming, but it’s good for us," said EMU freshman Mary Shank, an 18-year-old Harrisonburg resident who signed up to be an "adopted grandchild" at VMRC. "As a Mennonite, service is a big part of our religion, but its more than that. Service is also a big part of our community."
