What We Do & How it Connects to the College’s Mission & Strategic Initiatives

Affirming central goals of the College, the Underwood Stryker Institute engages students, faculty, and community members in sustained partnerships that foster collaborative learning and civic participation in a diverse, democratic society. By forging a link between service and learning, the Institute works to strengthen our communities, invigorate the educational experience, and promote students’ informed and ethical engagement to build a more just, equitable and sustainable world.  

Mission Statement (2001)

We collaborate with our constituencies on and off campus so that students learn from and with “our richly diverse and increasingly complex worlds.” By addressing community-identified issues such as educational equity, health, food justice, sustainability, women’s and girls’ empowerment, juvenile justice, community arts, and neighborhood development, students critically analyze and solve public problems collaboratively; engage with the cultural, ethnic, racial and economic diversity of our city; draw upon, integrate  and apply multidisciplinary knowledge, including experiences abroad;  and acquire the skills, outlook, and ethical grounding to live as curious and responsible global citizens, lifelong learners, and leaders. 

Our programs center authentic relationships, conceive of “students as colleagues,” encourage cultural humility, and employ a critical service-learning perspective that focuses on social justice and social change, particularly through the use of structured reflection, which is a core requirement in all of programs.  Over 70% of students participate in course-based or co-curricular service-learning (or both) during their careers—about 550 students per year.

We work with the following groups to help achieve our mission statement. 

Faculty: Encouraging and supporting them to develop and assess high quality service-learning courses that integrate community-based work. We broker partnerships; manage logistics; and provide research and guidance (and expenses, as possible).  The College offers about 25 different S-L courses.

Students: Enabling over 400 students each year to participate in co-curricular S-L programs and projects every week, and to participate in structured reflection to make meaning of experiences.  Many (about half) serve as volunteers, but we pay about half with funding from endowments, grants and federal work study.   We also recruit, train, employ and provide ongoing staff support to 25 – 30 student leaders, Civic Engagement Scholars, who coordinate all of our co-curricular programs --  complex projects in which their peers work at least three hours per week and participate in structured reflection.   We have over 100 students on our payroll.  We also offer 12 – 20 six-week local Community Building Internships each summer that we devise with our community partners and fund through ACSJL and CCPD.

Community members: Developing and evaluating reciprocal and sustained partnerships that build capacity and promote social change with over 40 different organizational partners and citizens’ groups, engaging thousands of people each year.

Across the institution: Collaborating with colleagues in First Year Experience, Student Development, ACSJL, Experiential Education, Alumni Relations, Advancement and others to maximize opportunities for  S-L experiences to be connected and integrated within student and alumni  learning and lives.   We also rely greatly on Facilities Management to help coordinate transportation, and Business Office/Payroll.