Winthrop University Earns Place on National Honor Roll for Community Service

Quick Facts

The President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll honors the nation’s leading higher education institutions and their students, faculty and staff for their commitment to bettering their communities through service.

This is the eighth time Winthrop has been selected for inclusion in the honor roll.

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ROCK HILL, S.C. - Winthrop University was named this week to the 2013 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.

The President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll honors the nation’s leading higher education institutions and their students, faculty and staff for their commitment to bettering their communities through service. The designation, one of the highest honors a college or university can receive for its commitment to volunteering, service-learning, and civic engagement, was given to 690 institutions, including 15 in South Carolina.

The 2013 Honor Roll recipients were announced at the American Council on Education’s 95th Annual Meeting "Leading Change" on March 4 in Washington, D.C.

This is the eighth time Winthrop has been selected for inclusion in the honor roll.

“Volunteerism, service learning and campus-based civic engagement remain integral parts of preparing an educated citizenry, ready for leadership in individuals’ chosen communities as well as their chosen professions,” said Winthrop President Anthony DiGiorgio. “Those commitments have been an important part of Winthrop University’s approach for many years, and this honor is annual recognition of that fact.”

During the 2011-12 academic year, Winthrop students helped tend a community garden, promoted literacy and volunteered during a Martin Luther King Day of Service. All three projects are ongoing at Winthrop and continue to flourish. The 2011-12 projects highlights were:

• The Martin Luther King Day of Service involved more than 200 students, faculty and staff who worked on specific projects in the community during a three-hour period on the federal holiday. Some of the efforts included delivering meals to senior citizens, packing bags for hungry children to be given out at schools, picking up highway litter and painting agency buildings.

• Incoming freshmen donated or collected 3,625 books to distribute to area schools. On most Fridays during the academic year, Winthrop students pitched a literacy tent in an elementary school and community center where they encouraged children to play games, read one-on-one and pick out free books.

• The community garden paired Winthrop students with several partners who together picked 400 pounds of produce and helped educate young children about how to plant, weed, harvest and taste vegetables.

Winthrop also houses the S.C. Campus Compact on its campus, which is a coalition of 17 South Carolina colleges and universities working to promote and develop the civic purposes of higher education.

The Honor Roll, established in 2006, is managed by the Corporation for National and Community Service in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, American Council on Education and Campus Compact.

“Congratulations to Winthrop, its faculty and students for its commitment to service, both in and out of the classroom,” said Wendy Spencer, CEO of Corporation for National and Community Service. “Through its work, institutions of higher education are helping improve their local communities and create a new generation of leaders by challenging students to go beyond the traditional college experience and solve local challenges.”

The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that engages more than five million Americans in service through Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, the Social Innovation Fund and other programs, and leads President Obama’s national call to service initiative, United We Serve.

More information about Winthrop's community service efforts can be found at the Center for Career & Civic Engagement web site.

More information on eligibility and the full list of Honor Roll awardees, can be found http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/initiatives/honorroll.asp

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