News from your Key Center
We're advancing civic engagement and service learning. How?
Students! To inquire about a service-learning
or civic engagement placement, link here
What's new at the Key Center?
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New leadership. The big news is that, beginning in fall, 2009,
Dr. Joseph Berryhill of UNC Asheville's Psychology Department becomes the Key Center Professor, replacing Merritt Moseley, who has held the position for the past four years.
Important events and activities for the 2008-09 academic year.
Fall 2008 ACT in Asheville Day. On September 9, our 600 freshmen fanned out for service in the city of Asheville, working with partners including Quality Forward, Riverlink, Asheville City School, and the Asheville Housing Authority. Some photos are here.
2008 was an election year, and the Key Center partnerred with Student Government in a variety of voter registration, voter education and voter transportation efforts.
UNCA is a member of North Carolina Campus Compact (link to website here; national Campus Compact here). This is a crucial step toward our goal of becoming a fully engaged campus. Our membership also makes available some student placements in NC-ACTS!, a program under which students commit to 300 hours of public and community service during an academic year and receive a $1000 educational award. Are you interested? More information on that program here. The 2008-09 NC-ACTS! interns are Julie Clifford, Anna Spears, and Ashleigh Redmond.
Outreach beyond Asheville and Buncombe County: In January, 2009, the Key Center sponsored an alternate winter break trip to Jefferson County, Alabama, where a UNC Asheville team worked with the local Habitat affilicate building badly needed housing. In March, a larger team undertook our third annual Alternate Spring Break, this time to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to work on a Habitat house. Student Frank Jones blogged, and can be followed here. Some photographs of the event are here. There was an alternate alternate spring break in Asheville, also supported by the Key Center.
The Key Center co-sponsored the annual A Day On, Not a Day Off event in January, 2009.
We once again are sponsoring the Munch Money project that collects unspent meal money from UNC Asheville student and uses it to provide nutritious food for hungry people through MANNA FoodBank. In December we delivered 600 pounds of peanut butter, along with some backpacks we'd collected for MANNA's program that provides food to schoolchildren for the weekend.
We have enjoyed a beneficial relationship with the members of our Key Partners Advisory Board, who represent MANNA FoodBank, Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity, the Asheville Housing Authority, Children First of Buncombe County, the Dogwood Alliance, Asheville GreenWorks, and Our Voice.
