In the spring of 2002, Campus Compact received a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to promote the civic engagement of students across the country. Despite the successes of embedding service-learning into academic courses and a dramatic increase in student volunteerism in communities during the past decade, the nation has continued to watch the continuing decline of student involvement in other civic acts such as voting, participation in political campaigns, and political advocacy.

This campaign is not designed to replace continuing efforts on campuses to promote service-learning pedagogy on campuses but rather to supplement those efforts. The details of the campaign can be found at www.actionforchange.org but we hope here to describe the basic strategy being used and invite you to support the efforts of students as effectively as possible.

The Raise Your Voice campaign is predicated upon the beliefs that:

• Students have civic roles today
• Educators must know more about students’ attitudes about civic engagement and why student involvement in communities has not been accompanied by an increase in conventional political participation.
• Students will more likely become engaged in non-service acts of civic engagement if they begin to speak with one another and collectively begin to learn to trust their voices as they work to understand the issues that underlie all too apparent problems in our society.

Raise Your Voice is designed to:

• Increase college student involvement in public life and connect these actions with a larger national movement around civic engagement.
• Document student civic engagement activities and issues that are important to college students.
• Mobilize higher education in a way that gives more voice to students and makes civic engagement central to student learning.

Details of this strategy and information about how to organize, facilitate and evaluate dialogues and other activities can be found at www.actionforchange.org.

Click here to download this entire resource guide (18 pages) as a 64K pdf for printing: stafffacresource.pdf You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. (or, continue browsing the resource guide by clicking NEXT below)