CU Service Learning

The University of Colorado at Boulder was awarded a place among 81 of the "Great Schools with Outstanding Community Involvement" as compiled by Campus Compact and The Princeton Review in their book "Colleges With a Conscience"!

MISSION

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." —George Bernard Shaw

“What forms of passion might make us whole? To what passions may be surrender with the assurance that we will expand rather than diminish the promise of our lives?”
The quest for knowledge that enables us to unite theory and practice is one such passion. To the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears. —bell hooks

Service learning relates academic study to work in the community in ways that enhance both. We learn best and most deeply by constructing knowledge and rooting it in the immediacies of our personal experience.

William James wrote: “No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends” and Zora Neale Hurston has one of her characters say in another vernacular: “Yuh got to go there to know there.”

Service learning courses attempt to help students understand the world through changing it and vice-versa. They seek not just to recruit students to work in soup kitchens but to ask and begin to answer the larger questions of why there is hunger in our society. Such courses transcend the notion that the university is a detached, self-contained unit by discovering and creating vibrant relations with the world outside of it.