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This page provides the overview of your service sites through out this academic year. You will find our site submission form, service tracking, site request, reflections and so much more.

Service Site Expectations

What’s Required:

• Your position should be with a non-profit, government agency, or similar organization that fits the Bonner mission of community engagement.
• Your service site should provide a minimum of 8-10 hours of work each week.
  • Note: you can serve at more than one site during the semester but we expect you to commit to one during your college career.

Who’s Your Partner?

• If you are a First Year you will be placed at 2-3 sites to shadow during your first semester and then we will identify your main site at end of your first semester.
• If you are an Upperclassman (Sophomore, Junior, Senior), we expect you to return to your previous site and communicate with your supervisor regarding start dates.
  • Note: If there needs to be a change in site placement please speak with your Program Director/Coordinator.

Types of Community Engagement Opportunities

As you identify and meet with community partners, you should have a clear idea of the range of community engagement opportunities each may offer. Note that the engagement categories below are often complementary and several kinds of engagement may be integrated into the roles you are filling with partners.

Below is a short-hand set of definitions we have been using.

• Direct service is client service (human, animal, or environmental). Examples include tutoring at an after-school program, serving soup at a homeless shelter, visiting the elderly in a nursing home, or cleaning a park.

• Service Leadership means helping with the volunteer management and other leadership or administrative tasks necessary to manage a program's service delivery.

• Capacity-building A capacity-building project is a project that helps a community-based or a government organization expand and/or significantly improve the quality of its programs, (client) services, and outreach. A Capacity-Building project is led by a student or a team of students, but it originates from a community partner identified need or priority. This ensures that the project deliverable (final product) is something that benefits a community. The final product should be something that a community partner can easily apply or adapt to maximize their capacity to operate or advocate for a program or service. The project deliverable is mutually agreed-upon, keeping in mind students’ skill set, interest, and goals for professional growth.

  Capacity-building projects can be broadly put in the following seven categories, but these categories are not exclusive:

  • Volunteer Management: coordinating/managing service program, volunteer recruitment
  • Training and Program Development: coordinating programs, developing new programs, writing training manuals, organizing training workshops
  • Fundraising: organizing events, identifying grant and funding sources, writing grants
  • Communications: website and social media development, coordinate meetings, online networking support
  • Research: community-based research, policy research
  • Arts-based Projects: Art exhibits, museum exhibits, community murals
  • Social Action: See "Social Action" section below

  There are three kinds of outcomes from capacity-building activities for participating organizations:

  • Efficiency/Efficacy: Improved outcomes with the same level of resources or improved or consistent quality of services with fewer resources;
  • Scale/Reach: Number of new people served, new populations served, and/or new or expanded services;
  • Leverage: Additional resources or assets garnered through capacity-building activities such as funding, volunteers, in-kind support, and partnerships.

  Note: A “capstone-level” capacity-building project builds capacity of an organization on a higher scale. It often meets an academic credit requirement (associated with a course project) and intentionally integrates student’s academic interest with community-defined needs. As such, it involves critical reflection throughout the process and some supervision from a faculty or staff to help student make academic connections.

• Social Action can include community organizing, various forms of advocacy, and working on an electoral campaign. See more on the Teaching Social Action website.

Your Service Site Proposal

• Submit a Service Site proposal for the semester of summer

Service Site Feedback

• Submit your service site feedback here