Two recent articles featured the work of the Bonner Program:
(1) Concord University Alums Create Volunteer Website — from the Bluefield Daily Telegraph:
Jesse Call and Alex Overmiller, AmeriCorps VISTA participants working through a matching grant by the Bonner Foundation, decided recently to link the tech-savvy nature of college students to the needs of the community in hopes of finding a way to keep the two connected.
They created volunteer.concord.edu, a website “set up to connect the agencies in the area to the students, faculty and staff that are already looking for new and interesting ways to serve their communities,” Call, of Pocahontas, Va., explained recently. “We wanted to hook them up with the agencies that need them.”
(2) Service-Minded Students Have New Scholarships — from the Associated Press:
But while college admissions offices like to see service work from applicants, they’ve rarely rewarded it with financial aid — or at least not the way they do for star athletes and students with high SAT scores. Of the $29 billion U.S. colleges and universities awarded in institutional grants last year, only a tiny fraction goes to service scholarships.
In the short-term that may not change much, with colleges squeezing their aid budgets to help students in sudden financial need because of the economy.
But longer-term, service-based merit aid looks like an idea with momentum. Colleges are catching up to the interests of an especially civic-minded generation of students, building curricula around service-learning and eager to attract the most ambitious students. And backers are excited about the election of Barack Obama, who made federal financial aid in exchange for community service his centerpiece college affordability campaign proposal.
The federal work-study program now requires schools to use 7 percent of their funds paying students for community service work. But more schools are now putting up some of their own aid dollars.
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