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New S-L Website Developed By Marketing and Logistics Dept.
Fresno, CA - The Marketing and Logistics Dept. of the Craig School of Business has announced the creation of the first School-based website dedicated to Service-Learning at California State University, Fresno.
As part of the University’s commitment to civic engagement in the Central Valley and as a means of strengthening the bonds between the University and the community, the Marketing and Logistics Dept. established a service-learning requirement that required every student in the Craig School of Business to fulfill in order to earn his or her undergraduate degree. The concept, while quite simple, offers extraordinary opportunities not only for business students to enhance their education, but contribute to the community in a practical and effective manner.
Initiated six years ago by Dr. Skip Sherwood, professor emeritus and former Chairman of the Marketing and Logistics Department, with a contribution of more than $12,000 from the Civic Engagement and Service-Learning program (http://www.csufresno.edu/cesl/) to seed the program, The Craig School of Business was the first school at Fresno State, to engage in service learning and has been the leader and role model for the other schools on campus as they met the challenge of becoming a truly “engaged” institution of higher learning.
The results, to this point, include Fresno State, recently being classified as an “Engaged University” by the Carnegie Foundation and recognized as one of the top 10 engaged universities in the country.
During the past six years more than 3,500 Marketing 100S students from the Craig School have contributed more than 52,000 hours of service-learning time working on marketing-related programs for community-based organizations (CBOs) in the Fresno area valued at nearly $1 million. Additionally, many of these same students continue to work for those organizations on a volunteer basis long after they complete their service-learning project.
The impact of this strong and growing partnership has been seen in the results that the students have achieved: Raising more than $100,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night campaign and collecting over 100,000 books for kindergartners through 3rd-graders for ReadFresno’s program to improve literacy in the Valley.
And while the results students have achieved working with other, and often smaller, organizations have been more subtle, they have been no less important to the organizations with which they worked; creating databases of potential donors, developing newsletters, creating and executing fund-raising events, or designing, implementing, and analyzing market research.
Now, with the creation of the new Service-Learning website, the Marketing and Logistics Dept. expects to make the entire Service-Learning program an even more positive and productive experience for both its students and its community partners. According to Prof. Alan Canton, program coordinator, “The objective is to make this website interesting, informative, increasingly productive, and user-friendly to better serve our community partners and students.”
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