UM students Akash Sundar and Nicole Covington help landscape Oxford Intermediate School as a part of the Ole Miss Big Event, where an estimated 3,000 students dedicate a day of service to the community while building relationships between students and community members. Photo by Kevin Bain/Ole Miss Communications
OXFORD, Miss. – Each year, the McLean Institute for Public Service and Community Engagement compiles service data from across campus to submit an application for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
The Honor Roll recognizes exemplary service efforts and the community-campus partnerships inspiring those efforts, and the University of Mississippi has received Honor Roll recognition for the past five years.
UM students, faculty and staff are extensively involved in the community, serving more than 621,000 hours in the 2014-15 academic year. During the fall 2016 semester, the McLean Institute and the Office of Information Technology began upgrading the Service Directory as a platform for the campuswide reporting of service hours.
“The Service Directory is a place where the University of Mississippi campus community can showcase the important ways in which it serves the community, nation and world,” said Albert Nylander, McLean Institute director. “It is also a clearinghouse where people can find opportunities to become involved.”
The McLean Institute advances transformative service throughout the university and fights poverty through education in Mississippi. To advance campus-based efforts around service and engagement, the institute works with faculty, staff and students to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with community-based organizations across the state.
By documenting these efforts, the institute works to raise the profile of engaged scholarship and service efforts through competitive designations such as the Honor Roll and the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification.
“Our hope is that with broader use of the service directory, we can ensure that we are accurately accounting for all of the incredible work that our students, faculty, and staff are doing in communities across Mississippi and the world,” said Laura Martin, assistant director of the McLean Institute.
“Competitive designations like the Honor Roll and the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification are important because they award best practices for colleges and universities that are working to impact quality of life and channel their scholarship and resources to enhance the public good.”
The directory will be important for Chancellor Jeffrey S. Vitter’s vision for the transformative potential of higher education partnerships and engagement.
“The University of Mississippi is dedicated to having positive local and global impact,” Vitter said. “Scholarly engagement through community service is at the heart of our mission, as is enhancing the transformative power of higher education.”
Members of the campus community are invited to log their service hours through myOleMiss using the “Log Service Hours” function under the Employee or Student tab within the Get Involved section. Or, use the Search within myOleMiss to locate “Log Service Hours.”
The function allows faculty, staff and students to enter service hours associated with various projects. Service projects and hours entered into the “Log Service Hours” area will be immediately visible and can be viewed at https://service.olemiss.edu/. If a service project is not visible, email service@olemiss.edu to request that it be added to the directory.
In an effort to centralize reporting around volunteer service hours and service-learning courses, all members of the campus community are encouraged to use the “Log Service Hours” to report service hours each semester. The Honors College has been using the Service Directory for quite some time, making it easy to access the service hours of students and employees, including a description of service activities as well as a brief reflection on what students learned.
“Logging service hours through my.olemiss.edu will allow the McLean Institute to have the most accurate count of our service efforts, and help us to understand our impact,” Martin said. “Over time, these data can guide our understanding of how to best partner with community-based organizations across the state.”