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The IMPACT Conference, a national student conference focused on community service learning, visited the Western U.S. for the first time in 22 years last Thursday.
Community Engagement Center intern Jason Fuller said about 550 students from universities nationwide attended the event. He said the conference has focused mainly on the East Coast in previous years, and that this year’s event brings the focus back to community service approaches in the West.
“This is an opportunity for the West to actually regain the spotlight in terms of that which we do here in New Mexico and to show everyone what’s really being done everywhere,” he said. “The state of New Mexico has so much more to offer and we have many methods that are foreign to outsiders who are advocates of community service.”
Fuller said the conference was helpful not only to students who came from out of state, but also to UNM’s service learning efforts, which are focused on community gardens throughout the city. He said the center gave and received ideas from conference attendees on how to improve the project. This back-and-forth culminated in a plan to add 10 gardens throughout the city.
Fuller said the center maintains 30 community gardens throughout Albuquerque. He said the gardens, which were first opened in the summer of 2010, aim to decrease hunger in New Mexico.
“New Mexico is ranked as one of the hungriest states in the U.S.,” he said. “The poverty rate here in New Mexico is one of the worst in the states.”
Fuller said the University started to address service learning two years ago by offering community service courses during the spring and summer semesters. He said that although the Community Engagement Center often organizes service learning, other departments, such as the communication and journalism department and environmental studies collaborate with the center.
Stewart Bova, a Virginia Commonwealth University student who attended the conference, said UNM is doing a good job in terms of service learning. He said service learning is an effective way to help impoverished communities.
“People want to volunteer, but if you just do random acts of kindness, it doesn’t really do much,” he said. “But if you create a mutually beneficial partnership, we learn from them and they can learn from us.”
Fuller said that although UNM is already committed to service learning, he urges the University to establish a major and a minor in community service learning connected to UNM’s ethnic studies program because he said the problems that service learning deals with are often connected to issues of race.
Fuller said improving service learning at UNM will make Albuquerque a better community.
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“Once you are able to see individuals eye to eye on many issues, it allows us to treat people like people,” he said. “It allows us to see people for who they are and that everyone is really not that different.”
Although various community service organizations helped to organize the event, which ran Thursday through Sunday, UNM’s Community Engagement Center led the effort.
The center started organizing the event last year. Fuller said the conference demonstrated to other universities that UNM is committed to service learning.
“It puts the University of New Mexico on a platform,” he said. “On Thursday, it was snowing but we still had our community service events. They were all just blown away by that.”
