The schools, departments, programs and groups at Washington University in St. Louis implement an impressive array of civic engagement and community service activities, both locally and internationally.
The Gephardt Institute for Public Service collaborated with Geographic Information Systems to create an interactive map displaying these activities, entered into Community Counts.
The university’s decentralized nature makes it difficult to share effective practices, collaborate and assess the collective impact. The Gephardt Institute maintains the Community Counts database to track such activities, and it is time to submit initiatives from the 2013-14 academic year.
June 30 is the deadline to provide information. Each new or updated initiative submitted will be entered into a drawing for a $500 grant to support the project.
Every year, the Gephardt Institute collects data about community engagement and service initiatives (defined as organized, programmatic initiatives performed by groups in service to an organization or community and undertaken by WUSTL community members). The data is used for national reporting and assessment, which influences WUSTL’s rankings. To tell the story, Community Counts collects data at an institutional level.
Visit here for further details and to complete the inventory.
The winning initiative from the 2012-2013 data collection is the School of Law’s Clinical Education Program: Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property Clinic, at which law students address transactional matters and provide advice to clients on a full spectrum of intellectual property and nonprofit law issues.
“The Gephardt Institute award recognizes the support we provide to the entrepreneurial community in St. Louis, and we will use the funds to raise awareness of our services to potential clients,” said David Deal, JD, lecturer in law and co-director of the clinic. “We provide free legal assistance with the issues faced by all organizations in the startup phase, while our students develop practical lawyering skills with clients that have the enthusiasm, drive and vision common to social and commercial entrepreneurs.”