“Life is of no use if not used to serve others; for life is measured by love." These wise words came from His Holiness, the late Pope Francis, during the Homily of April 2020. Service to others is not only fulfilling for those on the receiving end of the services, but also for those offering them. At GivePulse, service-learning is at the core of our platform, with over 400+ Higher Education institutions choosing GivePulse to create high-impact experiential learning and service-learning opportunities for students.
As part of a recent GivePulse webinar, we invited two of our partner campuses, Marquette University and Benedictine College, to share more about how they leverage GivePulse functionality to move their mission forward.
How Marquette University Utilizes GivePulse to Fuel Its Mission
As a Catholic Jesuit institution, Marquette University is guided by four values: excellence, faith, leadership, and service. These four values serve as pillars of Marquette University’s service-learning program. Assistant Director of the Service-Learning Program at Marquette University, Eddie Godina, conveys,
"In following the Jesuit tradition of faithful service, what the service-learning program does is help facilitate student academic learning through meaningful service experiences."
Marquette’s service-learning program is operated using the GivePulse platform and is widely referred to on campus as “MU Engage." MU Engage is run by a team of 13 student workers who manage much of the platform's functionality, including creating event templates, assisting with registration, and verifying service hours with community partners. Each semester, about 1,000 students are served by MU Engage across 45 to 55 course sections and approximately 100 partner agencies in Milwaukee.
“One of the things that we talk about is how we want our partners to be co-educators in their [students] educational experience and that is something that we take the time to be very intentional about and we approach our relationships with the community with that delicate delicacy and respect as well.” - Eddie Godina
How Benedictine College Uses GivePulse To Track Overall Impact
Benedictine College was founded in 1858 and was sponsored by the monks of St Benedict's Abbey and the religious sisters of Mount St Scholastica Monastery. The Benedictine Center for Service-Learning was officially established in 2016 with one full-time staff member, Meredith Doyle, Director of the Center for Service-Learning.
GivePulse was adapted by the Center in the Fall of 2019 and operated by Meredith and one student worker. The Center’s day-to-day work is informed by the values of Catholic social teaching, the Benedictine Vow of Stability and the "corporal and spiritual works of mercy". The Benedictine Vow of Stability reflects a lifelong commitment to a specific place and community. In service-learning, this translates to prioritizing hyper-local community partnerships.
“It's not just about justice in between you and your neighbor, but really justice on a societal level as well, so that's where we start to really try to work to respond to those [values] through service-learning both for the growth and and conversion of the individual student and also responding to unjust structures in society and really trying to promote the common good as really expounded upon in the Catholic social teaching tradition.” - Meredith Doyle
According to Doyle, the Center for Service-Learning largely utilizes GivePulse’s heat map tool to view the geographic distribution of impacts, the tagging feature to create its own custom causes and track specific works of mercy, and the custom surveys to generate global reflection questions that foster wonder and awe.
“One of the supports that GivePulse has is a heat map tool and if you're thinking about getting GivePulse, one of the really cool things is you can see the geographic distribution of your impacts on the places where your students are serving and we've really tried to prioritize hyper local opportunities in Atchison in our partnerships as an expression of our Benedict and charism.” - Meredith Doyle
How Can The Adoption of GivePulse Help Enhance Your Institution’s Service-Learning Initiatives?
As service-learning continues to evolve, digital service-learning platforms such as GivePulse offer institutions a powerful way to strengthen their mission while deepening relationships with the communities they serve. By hosting tools for creating service opportunities, capturing and managing reflections, holding assessments, and tracking community partnerships all in one place, GivePulse helps ensure that an institution’s values are not only articulated but actively lived out across campus and beyond. For Catholic colleges and universities, the opportunity is not simply to modernize engagement practices but to amplify the founding charisms that make their institutions unique.
As you look toward the future of service-learning, consider how your institution’s mission, traditions, and commitment to the common good can be better expressed through the acquisition of the GivePulse platform tools and systems. To learn all of the tools GivePulse offers to power service learning, schedule a call with our team.
Check out the special moment when GivePulse’s founder, George Luc, met His Holiness Pope Francis!
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.