Ohio Wesleyan Receives Presidential Award for Excellence in General Community Service

Ohio Wesleyan fosters among its students, faculty and staff a daily commitment to community service. The efforts undertaken by the University were recently recognized as OWU was one of three schools nationwide to be honored with a Presidential Award in General Community Service and one of six schools individually honored overall.

The award is part of the the 2009 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, the highest federal recognition a college and university can receive for its commitment to service-learning and fostering civic engagement.

The Corporation for National and Community Service, which administers the annual Honor Roll award, recognized the university and its students in the category of “General Service” for their impact on issues from poverty and hunger to human rights and environmental justice. Nearly 1,800 OWU students committed more than 45,000 hours in service work, including tutoring economically disadvantaged children, mentoring at-risk youth, repairing hurricane damage, and serving food in area soup kitchens. The university’s students also earned recognition with the Community Stewardship Award and the Keep Delaware County Beautiful program for their community service work. Click here to read the complete description of OWU’s service work.

“Community service is part of the foundation and fabric of Ohio Wesleyan University,” said Rock Jones, Ph.D., OWU president. “Our students spent more than 45,000 hours last year working to help people locally, nationally, and around the world. This recognition by the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll is not the end goal of their collective effort, but a wonderful validation of it.”

The Corporation administers the Honor Roll in collaboration with the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Campus Compact and the American Council on Education. Honorees are chosen based on a series of selection factors including scope and innovation of service projects, percentage of student participation in service activities, incentives for service, and the extent to which the school offers academic service-learning courses. In addition to the top honorees, 115 institutions have been named to the Distinction List and 621 were listed on the Honor Roll. Click here for a full list of Honor Roll recipients.

The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that engages more than five million Americans in service through its Senior Corps, AmeriCorps State and National, AmeriCorps VISTA, AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), Senior Corps, and Learn and Serve America programs, and leads President Obama’s national call to service initiative, United We Serve. For more information, visit Nationalservice.gov.