Community Service at UMass Amherst
Discover the Real World
One of the benefits of college is that it gives you the opportunity to give back to your community while exploring your interests and getting loads of practical experience. UMass Amherst provides ample opportunity for community service learning on campus, around the area, or even around the world, and will help guide you along the way. In most cases, you’ll earn UMass Amherst credits while enormously enhancing your college experience.
The best place to begin is the Office of Community Service Learning (OCSL), which will help you identify community service opportunities and tie them into your overall education. OCSL is located in the Commonwealth College (because community service learning is an important part of their curriculum), but it is available to any student at UMass Amherst. Their mission is to promote positive change, intellectual growth, and social justice, and to support UMass Amherst’s land-grant mission to use education to improve the lives of the people of Massachusetts.
A few places that have community service relationships with UMass Amherst:
· AIDS CARE/ Hampshire County
· The Amherst Senior Center
· Berkshire Hills Music Academy
· City Year
· Cooley Dickinson Hospital
· Girls Inc. of Holyoke
· Hitchcock Center for the Environment
· International Language Institute of MA
· Teach for America
There are more details on your options at the Community Service Links page.
You may also provide community service through other sources. There are several Registered Student Organizations with a community service bent, and you can link to them though the RSO site. You may also find that your academic department has a student group that gives back to the community or campus. This is a great way to combine your desire to get involved with your academic and career interests.
Students in fraternities and sororities (i.e. Greeks) also do a great deal of campus-wide community service and reach into the community as well. There is even one Greek organization—Alpha Phi Omega—whose sole mission is community service. You can find them at an array of campus events working to make the UMass Amherst experience even better. There’s more at the Greek Life section.
