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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

MCC Named to Presidential Honor Roll for Community Service


For the second consecutive year, the Corporation for National and Community Service has honored Monroe Community College with a place on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for exemplary service efforts and service to America’s communities.

“We’re extremely proud that our students exhibit a strong sense of social responsibility,” MCC President Anne M. Kress said Thursday when the honor was announced nationally. “Promoting literacy among area children, introducing entrepreneurship to youths, assisting Rochester-area senior citizens, transforming an impoverished village in Sudan – our students did all this and more, with support and guidance from our equally dedicated faculty and staff. We believe that service and partnerships are how the challenges of our time will be met.”

Launched in 2006, the Community Service Honor Roll is the highest federal recognition a college can achieve for its commitment to service-learning and civic 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.

Monroe Community College is one of only five community colleges in New York state to earn a place on the Community Service Honor Roll. Last year, more than 20 student clubs and organizations at MCC completed at least one community service project during the academic year; most completed more. Their efforts included a Habitat for Humanity project, clothing drives, book collections and fundraisers. During that same period, 1,843 MCC students, who were enrolled in 103 different Service-Learning course sections, contributed 43,371 hours to a wide variety of community projects. They helped youths learn to become savvy entrepreneurs and developed workshops for afterschool programs on personal and cyber safety issues. They tutored, developed literacy kits, and assisted community members in financial planning and income tax preparation.

“Our nation’s students are a critical part of the equation and vital to our efforts to tackle the most persistent challenges we face. They have achieved impactful results and demonstrated the value of putting knowledge into practice to help renew America through service,” said Patrick Corvington, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service. “Congratulations to Monroe Community College and its students for their dedication to service and commitment to improving their local communities.”

Overall, the Corporation honored six schools with Presidential Awards. In addition, 115 were named as Honor Roll With Distinction members and 621 schools as Honor Roll members. In total, 742 schools were recognized. A full list is available at "
https://www.nationalservice.gov/honorroll".

Well-deserved kudos go to Susan Bender, program coordinator at the Center for Service-Learning; Marilyn Rosche, director of Rochester AmeriCorps; Campus Center Director Betty Stewart and Assistant Directors Shirley Batistta-Provost and Jodi Oriel; DCC Campus Center Associate Director Rick Sadwick; and MCC faculty and staff members who worked with the students and provided detailed information for the honor roll application.

The Honor Roll is a program of the Corporation, in collaboration with the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Campus Compact and the American Council on Education. The President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll awards will be presented during the American Council on Education annual conference in March and the National Conference of Volunteering and Service conference in June. 

The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that engages more than 5 million Americans in service through its Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America programs, and leads President Obama's national call to service initiative, United We Serve. For more information, visit
"https://www.nationalservice.gov/".

Hency Yuen-Eng
College and Community Relations
02/26/2010