Carnegie Foundation gives award to college for community engagement

By Brianna Morrell
January 13, 2015

Cabrini students Mackenzie Harris, Nick Cipollone and Abby Pressimone learn from a Guatemalan worker how to lay cinder blocks for a future home.
Cabrini students Mackenzie Harris, Nick Cipollone and Abby Pressimone learn from a Guatemalan worker how to lay cinder blocks for a future home.

The Carnegie Foundation award is a nationally recognized honor.  It goes to colleges and universities that demonstrate exceptional leadership in community service.

Students and faculty are no stranger to community service and making sure they are always considering the common good for in their community. Over the years, Cabrini has worked to make partnerships with almost 85 organizations to achieve this. This, along with many other attributes of the college, are why Cabrini’s renewal of the Carnegie Award in 2015 was made possible.

“Our college is so focused on a social justice mission and on an education of the heart, and we have now been recognized for that by a national group,” Tom Southard said. “We are not only living it out, but it’s proven we are living it out. Our commitment to our mission, our commitment to our work and that is pretty cool to get that validation and recognition that our faculty, staff and students help us do.”

Southard works in the Wolfington Center, which applied for the Carnegie Award renewal this year and previous years.  He stresses how much of a team effort this recognition is and says that not one area of the college deserves it more than any other. For the seventh year, Cabrini has been awarded with this nationally recognized honor.

“This is a campus-wide recognition. There is not a student, faculty, or staff member who is not involved somehow with community partnerships and extracurricular engagements so it’s really exciting for us,” Southard said.

Cabrini’s dedication to making sure social justice is apart of its curriculum is believed to help students in their professional lives post graduation.  “By learning about social justice, by considering equity, by considering how we work with other people, by considering how our actions impact others, we’re just better people. We really are able to think about the world, and that is just so important, in general,” Southard added.

Southard believes a social justice education will help students better understand the world more, which is key to leading a successful professional career.

Without the work of the students with their community service and knowledge of social justice, the Carnegie award would be out of reach. Students learn information about social justice within almost every course that is offered at Cabrini.

Students learn about social justices within Engagement with the Common Good classes, which are required each year. Cabrini also offers many trips and options for students to become a part of the movement and to learn more about what social justice really means and how to help out by lending a helping hand and giving services to the community.

Throughout the school year and summer, students and alumni are able to participate in trips to help others in need. These trips give students the time to be able to recognized what they are doing for their community and other communities around them that they may not particularly be a part of. “It’s amazing to see how the community gets involved and as a student it drives me to become more involved and help the community help others,” Rachel Redmond, sophomore chemistry and biology major, said.

Each student during their time here at Cabrini is touched with the topic of social justice. The goal at Cabrini is to include social justice in the curriculum, so not only that students are being taught about the topic but students learn different aspects of social justice. “Social justice is taught in ECG classes and it’s interesting to see how people are affected all around the world with the community service that is given to them,” Malley DeSanto, sophomore communication major, said. “The whole curriculum as you can see has many points of interest for those looking into becoming more involved with social justice for the common good,” DeSanto said.

Within the Cabrini undergraduate catalog, the college also offers a minor in social justice and the curriculum is based on how “justice matters” within the world we live in today.  The college teaches every student no matter what background they come from the importance of community engagement.

 

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Brianna Morrell

Hey I'm Bri! I'm a junior digital com major with a minor in graphic design. I am the social media and marketing editor on The Loquitur. Besides Loquitur, I am also apart of WYBF as the engagement director for the station. When I'm not running around the com wing, I enjoy sleeping and spending time with my friends!

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