THE SMALL AND UNDISTINGUISHED GATEWAY Plaza-with its hair salon, costume jewelry shop, Big Time Wholesale Store, and local branch of DeKalb Technical College-is just miles away from the stately grey and beige stone buildings and grassy quadrangles of Emory University in Atlanta.

Inside the DeKalb Tech building, almost 22 different foreign flags hang over a comfortable reception area near a “Welcome to Our School” poster that repeats the message in 22 languages, from Albanian to Hmong. “We’re in the heart of immigrant Atlanta. Seventy percent of the immigrants coming to Georgia come here,” says Michael Rich, an associate professor of political science at Emory. Rich also directs Emory’s Office of University-Community Partnerships (OUCP), which coordinates undergraduate volunteers here who tutor recently arrived immigrants in the English language…

…Campus Compact-an organization founded at Brown more than two decades ago to encourage college students to become more active citizens-reports a 60 percent increase in service participation over the last five years, and more than $7 billion worth of volunteer work coming out of its nearly 1,100 member schools annually.