Realizing that promoting civic responsibility and fulfilling our civic mission requires time, resources, and the commitment of dedicated professionals, Miami-Dade Community College (M-DCC) established a Center for Community Involvement that has a full-time college-wide Director and three full-time campus directors. The role of the Center is to promote and administer service-learning, America Reads, and community involvement activities at our six campuses. In addition to the full time directors, each Center is staffed by part-time coordinators, a “”Service-Learning Faculty Coordinator,”" student ambassadors, and a number of student assistants. Creating this infrastructure is the most critical element in systematically responding to higher education s civic mission and allows us to create a number of promising practices.

Faculty, Student, Community Involvement in Service-Learning:
Service-learning has become an integral and widespread teaching-learning strategy at the college that involves more than 100 faculty and 3,000 students each year. These students contribute, on average, more than 60,000 hours of service to several hundred community agencies. Extensive training is offered to both college faculty and community partners to ensure program effectiveness.

Contact: Joshua Young, College-Wide Director, Center for Community Involvement, jyoung {at} mdcc(.)edu

CCI web site: www.mdcc.edu/cci/