Monday, November 16, 2009

New Website to Tally Community Service Hours for Obama Challenge

On September 11 Michelle Obama promised to speak at the 2010 commencement if the GW community completed 100,000 hours of community service, raising questions of how the university would keep track of the hours. Today, a launch party was held in the Marvin Center Great Hall by the Office of Community Service for a new website called Volunteer Match.

The university has joined forces with Volunteer Match, the popular community service network, to help create a website specifically for GW that allows hours to be reported and tracked.

Every member of the GW community has been assigned a profile and will be able to enter their hours using the website.

“Our partnership with Volunteer Match will not only help the GW community find volunteering opportunities they can be passionate about, it will help us ensure that service hours are tracked accurately for this challenge,” Robert Chernak, GW’s Senior Vice President for Student and Academic Support Services, said in a press release.

“Tracking and reporting hours will be much easier now that GW’s VolunteerMatch system is up and running,” said GW President Steven Knapp in the release. “I am confident that this new system will help us meet the First Lady’s challenge.”

Only activities that directly serve a group or organization will count towards the goal. Volunteer Match offers students with service options from over 2,600 organizations in the DC area.

GW will be hosting a 30-minute Volunteer Match training webinar everyday at 12 pm from Tuesday, November 17th until Friday, November 20th. For more information visit serve.gwu.edu.

No comments:

Post a Comment