Reed visited the university to speak at the UW Center of Experiential Learning’s (EXP) Spring Celebration of Service and Leadership, as part of his annual spring tour of college campuses statewide to promote civil engagement in young adults. The event honored more than 100 UWstudents for their participation in community service.

UW senior James Gannon, Carlson Center student stories coordinator, was honored at the celebration for his video, “Voices of Community Service from the University of Washington,” which won the North Carolina Campus Compact 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day of Service Technology Contest. Gannon is this year’s Carlson Civic Fellow, a position that requires him to focus on documenting community involvement among undergraduate students. He decided to film students partaking in community projects on the MLK National Day of Service.

Michaelann Jundt, director of the Carlson Center, said that after seeing Gannon’s video, Reed’s office contacted her and asked if Reed could come to campus as part of his civic tour to talk with and honor UWstudents for their commitment to promoting civic engagement.

Reed’s objective on his tour is to encourage the state’s youngest voters to participate in elections because they are the segment of the population with the lowest voter-participation rate in Washington.

“This [event] was a great opportunity to capture a wide spectrum of service that UW students are doing,” Gannon said.

Gannon’s video featured three groups of UW students who spent MLK day working to help others, one of which worked at the Small Faces Child Development Center, a child-care center, to build the facility a wall for security purposes.

The competition that Gannon won was held by the North Carolina Campus Compact, an organization that promotes colleges and universities to strengthen communities by producing civically engaged graduates.

“I hope that we can help students realize how important it is for them to be involved with their community, and how voting is a key way of being engaged citizens,” Reed said yesterday to students. “I also hope to make them aware that their vote does matter.”

“There have been several elections in which the winning candidate won by only a few votes, which just goes to show that every vote indeed counts,” Reed said.

The Spring Celebration of Service and Leadership was put on by various organizations within the EXP, including the Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center; the Mary Gates Endowment for Students; Jumpstart Seattle, a program in which student volunteers help low-income children in preschool build communication skills; and the Pipeline Project, which provides UW students an opportunity to tutor and mentor a variety of students, from kindergarten to high school.

Some students involved in the celebration were part of the UW’s Service Learning Program, in which students enrolled in certain classes are required to or are given extra credit for volunteering with a local organization. EXP partners students with various work depending on what is available and what the student wants to do. A student previously involved in volunteer work can count those hours toward service learning.

The celebration featured a gallery of student projects in which the honored students showcased their community service work.

UW senior Nicole Guenther showcased her project, the Homeschool Advocacy Program that assists home-schooled high-school students in the process of applying to college. As a former home-schooled individual, Guenther said these students lack some of the essential information one needs to apply to college. For example, without counselors and resources that public schools provide, home-schooled students do not have full access to information about financial aid and scholarships.

“We want to make sure that, regardless of how informed their parents are, these students have the information they need,” Guenther said, as she described that she worked with various UW admission counselors to create a template for home-schooled students who must create their own transcript in order to apply to college.

Jundt said that doing community service is beneficial for students because they are able to learn about their society and apply concepts they learn at the UW to real situations.

“[Volunteering] makes you a true member of the community,” she said. “Service learning can be a really great experience. It’s a rich area for doing lots of learning.”

Josephine Garcia, a UW senior and director of the Student Health Consortium, was at the event promoting the ASUW-sponsored Women’s Health Week, happening this week. She said the program hopes to break down a stigma surrounding women’s health so females can talk freely about their bodies and feel confident.

“We want to empower women to make health their top priority,” Garcia said. “And build a community and open space for people to talk about [the female body].”

Ed Taylor, vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs, began the event by expressing how wonderful and important service and leadership are to communities and to the UW.

“This is one of my favorite events,” he said. “It is about the mission of the University of Washington … teaching, research and service are interdependent upon one another and [that] is what makes us a public university.”

Students also spoke about their experiences volunteering, and what they have gained from it.

One of the speakers, UW senior Sarah Lee, is majoring in psychology with a minor in education, learning and societies and has spent four years working with preschool students through the Jumpstart Seattle program. She said that her passion for teaching children was solidified by her volunteer experience, and that she plans to pursue a career as a special-education teacher.

“It’s really inspiring to see students who people may think are too hard to work with exceed the expectations of everyone and do things no one would have thought possible,” she said.

Reed said that he is “deeply impressed” with the community work that students at the UW are doing and that he thinks visiting colleges is valuable.

He said, “Visiting campuses allows me to share stories and to let students know why it’s important and worth their time to vote and be active, involved members of their community, whether it’s on campus or in their hometown.”