Alongside traditional 4-year higher education institutions, community colleges have proven their strong potential to positively impact their local communities over the years through driving local economic growth, providing accessible and affordable education, and meeting specific regional workforce demands. Nationwide, numerous community colleges are bolstering these impactful initiatives by integrating service-learning models into their curricula to foster greater civic engagement, with GivePulse emerging as the preferred platform to power service-learning programs, community engagement, experiential learning, co-curricular volunteering, and student/faculty success initiatives at scale.
Amongst the growing list of community colleges taking on service-learning are Portland Community College, Tulsa Community College, and Miami Dade College. Continue reading to delve into their perspectives from a recent webinar regarding their use of GivePulse to enhance service-learning initiatives across their respective campuses.
Portland Community College (PCC) initiated their Community-Based Learning (CBL) program as a part of the academic affairs office to provide district-wide support across all disciplines, while primarily focusing on professional development and assisting instructors with resource acquisition and program implementation. To facilitate this work, PCC utilizes a professional development continuum with three "buckets": introduction, development, and engagement, in order to accommodate educators at every stage of their curricular community engagement process.
The CBL program includes a year-long cohort called the "Community Engaged Institute for Social Change," involving faculty and student organizers, where faculty receive an incentive stipend of approximately $2,000 for their participation. To guide this work, PCC uses two primary knowledge sources: “Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection” by Deepa Iyer and “The Student Companion to Community-Engaged Learning: What You Need to Know for Transformative Learning and Real Social Change” by David M. Donahue and Star Plaxton-Moore.
“‘Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection’ is a great tool to talk about our roles in our ecosystems and in our communities… and ‘The Student Companion to Community Engaged Learning is a great piece intended for folks to use with their students in the classroom, but it's also a great reference piece for faculty especially if CBL isn't their whole entire class; they can at least take pieces from this book and apply it and share it with their students.”- Hannah Nacu, Program Coordinator for the Community-Based Learning program at Portland Community College.
PCC uses GivePulse to track partners, manage course registration, and facilitate collaboration between faculty and community partners through the CBL program.
“Our use of GivePulse has been game-changing! We adopted the platform in 2018, and it has been amazing; I went from spreadsheets to this robust platform, and I would tell people at the beginning it was a wonderful tool for me to really track and figure out who our partners were, what faculty were engaging with us and just use that as a database for our program purposes.- Hannah Nacu
Hannah also highlighted how the usage of subgroups on their GivePulse platform serves as a powerful tool for community building. PCC has a community of practice that holds three subgroups: The Community Connector, where contacts and users from CBL-affiliated groups are added, including affiliates who aren’t on the GivePulse platform; the Faculty group for faculty engaging in community-based learning; and the Advisory Council.
“The great thing about putting all those folks into one subgroup is that we can have faculty post kind of a “call for partners” as events and so they will post collaboration opportunities and community partners can find those directly so it goes both ways; community partners can share what their opportunities are, but faculty can as well.” - Hannah Nacu
Tulsa Community College (TCC) is the third-largest higher education institution in Oklahoma, serving approximately 20,000 students per semester. Auggie Valadez serves as the Volunteer Coordinator in Career Services at Tulsa Community College and oversees all volunteer services and service learning programs at TCC. While most colleges and universities typically house their volunteer initiatives under offices such as academic affairs, civic engagement, and others, TCC houses their volunteer work under Career Services. This method strategically links volunteer opportunities with career exploration.
“I tell this story all the time, but I was probably about a month in helping my first student and they wanted to be a surgeon; we got them to volunteer at St. Francis here in town, they saw blood for the first time and passed out and so it was a good time at that time to have the talk of like ‘is this what you want to do’ and so we kind of realized this was a great way for career exploration as well to get them involved in the community.” - Auggie Valadez
Their main service-learning initiative is the "Tulsa Achieve" scholarship, which requires students to complete 40 hours of volunteer service annually. The Tulsa Achieve scholarship program has been around since 2007 and has been very successful over the years, notably reaching over a million accumulated service hours by the 2023-2024 academic year!
TCC uses GivePulse for their volunteer services and digital badging for micro-credentials and certifications of the Tulsa Achieve scholarship.
“Not only have we been using it [GivePulse] for our volunteer services but also the digital badging platform on there and it has been very helpful to help our students get more involved with our continuing education courses as well as other certificates we provide here at TCC”- Auggie Valadez
About 30 years ago, Miami Dade College (MDC) received a “Learn and Serve” grant that helped them get started with academic service learning and adopted GivePulse in 2022 to build infrastructure for its Institute for Civic Engagement and Democracy.
“As far as getting GivePulse, we spent more than a year looking at most of the platforms that are out there and to us it was clear that GivePulse was the gold standard and we went with them and it's really been a game changer for us”- Josh Young, College-wide Director for the Institute for Civic Engagement and Democracy at Miami Dade College.
MDC's service-learning programming is framed around Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (CLDE) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Along with that, MDC’s initiatives are designed to address the crucial “Civic Empowerment Gap”. The Civic Empowerment Gap is defined as “the persistent disparity in civic knowledge, skills, political efficacy, and participation across different demographic groups.”
“Because just like the reading gap, the math achievement gap, you know this [civic empowerment gap] is a really serious issue that our community college students face and it has serious implications for our local national and global communities.”- Josh Young
A key initiative of theirs is the "Civic Action Scorecard," which features 108 different civic actions categorized into five areas from which specific impactful actions can be selected and acted upon. Students use GivePulse to submit documentation and reflections for these actions to earn bronze, silver, or gold awards.
“We've actually had almost 19,000 civic actions completed the last two and a half years through the GivePulse platform, students use their phone and some of the actions only take five or ten minutes…some can take longer and students earn a digital badge we call the civic action award that shows up under the GivePulse transcript.” - Josh Young
MDC refers to their Givepulse page as “The Changemaker Hub”, where they have about 100 non-profit partners and host programs such as the AmeriCorps Vista program, campus partnerships, and their community service work-study program.
“I mentioned we had 19,000 civic actions, imagine trying to track that using paper; we had 43,000 Times where students went in and uploaded service hours impact, all kinds of impacts, scorecard over 214,000 hours of service, so I just want to thank GivePulse for all your support and they've really been phenomenal as far as being responsive and helpful.”
- Josh Young
As community colleges continue to expand their role as catalysts for civic engagement and community impact, service-learning has emerged as a powerful strategy for connecting academic learning with real-world experience.
Institutions like Portland Community College, Tulsa Community College, and Miami Dade College demonstrate how intentional community partnerships can enrich student learning while addressing local needs. By leveraging platforms like GivePulse to streamline engagement, track outcomes, and showcase impact, community colleges are not only strengthening student success but also building more connected, resilient, and engaged communities for years to come. Schedule a demo with our team to learn how to use GivePulse to enhance service-learning initiatives at your campus.
About GivePulse
GivePulse's mission is to enable everyone in the world to participate and engage in lifting their community to new heights. We do so by providing a platform to list, find, organize, and measure the impact of service-learning, community engagement, philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and volunteerism.
Founded in 2012 in Austin, Texas, GivePulse works with 650,000+ groups, including colleges and universities, nonprofits, businesses, K-12/school districts, and cities and municipalities. Together, we connect millions of people in an effort to create positive social change.
Ready to see how we can help you achieve your community engagement goals? Schedule a demo with GivePulse today.