Over the past month, the author has watched the deadly march of the COVID-19 virus from across the world and onto our nation's shores. The human toll wrought by the virus has now exceeded 22,000 in the U.S. Coupled with this dreadful loss of human life, the economic and social upheaval the virus has rendered is beyond anything we have witnessed in…

South African education has become used to dealing with an array of new policy and strategy initiatives. Often these policies and strategies appear on the scene only to disappear into the sand later on. When President Ramaphosa announced the Thuma mina initiative in February 2018, educationists would have been tempted to ask questions about the…

Offering examples from her own experiences, the author advises community-engaged scholars (and those mentors and institutions that support them) to always question assumptions with respect to the communities in which they are engaged. She notes that as they work to unfold research programs, they should be sure to listen carefully to the…

A network of volunteers, the International Union for Conservation of Nature Commission on Education and Communication (CEC), present some reflections on their contributions towards the field of education for sustainability from 1992 to the present. Many CEC members have been thought leaders to this multidimensional field, and advocates for a more…

This essay is an excerpt from a keynote speech delivered by Benjamin Barber at the 2nd Annual Summer Research Institute on the "Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education." The speech focuses on six conditions that will impact community service-learning and voluntarism efforts in the years ahead: the ideology of neo-liberalism and…

Local PTAs may see their state PTA and National PTA as just a group to which they have to pay membership dues without getting anything in return. They may not see the state PTA as a resource. Perhaps they are not attending their state convention or the National PTA convention because they do not perceive any value. The author has learned from…

In this article, the author begins by talking about power and his early vocational discernment. He continues by sharing his ongoing vocational discernment and religious education for liberation. Over the past twenty years the author has worked for a Catholic diocese and two Catholic universities. He has also done significant volunteer work in…

The Princeton Teaching Initiative at Princeton University is an all-volunteer group formed to teach for-credit college courses in the New Jersey state prison system. The courses are coordinated with the Mercer County Community College (MCCC), which accredits the courses and maintains the students' transcripts. Volunteer professors, postdoctoral…

Over the past few decades Special Olympics has been criticized within the academic community for failing to provide inclusive recreational services, reinforcing negative stereotypes, misusing volunteers, and lacking research demonstrating positive impacts for individuals with intellectual disabilities and the larger community (Hourcadde, 1989;…

This article presents an interview with Mindy Duitz, president of Learning Leaders, an organization that supports teachers with volunteers in New York City's public schools so they could have more time. Among other things, Duitz discusses the history of Learning Leaders, its services, recruitment of volunteers, and communications strategies for…

Volunteers from the International Reading Association (IRA) participated in the teacher education component of Macedonia's Secondary Education Activity, an initiative to reform vocational/technical education (VET), funded from 2004 to 2008 by USAID. Volunteers offered professional development to VET teachers using a trainer-of-trainers model,…

Commemorative rituals consolidate solidarity by reaffirming one's secular faith and by enhancing emotional energy even without value consensus. Yet, state rituals, especially the ones organized by an authoritarian state, are usually shrugged off and mocked by its citizens. What made the state-sponsored national commemoration so effective? The…

A session that has a theme of outcomes of experiential programs in varied contexts is both exciting and pressing. The three studies in Session IV all addressed relevant issues to experiential programming and all the authors were faced with the empirical challenge of demonstrating how and/or if their programs achieve what they say they are going to…

Hardly anyone can have failed to pick up on the recent flurry of stories in the national press about the Big Society, sparked off by Dame Elisabeth Hoodless's remarks that funds for volunteers are disappearing at an alarming rate, and that this is undermining the very idea of a "Big Society". At the same time, under the government's…

This article synthesizes research on social capital, school outcomes, internet use, and volunteering to argue that e-mentoring--which is commonly practiced over long distances--could become a powerful way to build greater cohesiveness in local communities. Realizing this potential will require a larger-scale and more coordinated approach to…