The GW Student Association

On November 6, 2009, SA President Julie Bindelglass and SA Executive Vice President Jason Lifton sent a letter to First Lady Michelle Obama with an update on GW’s progress towards the challenge she issued to GW in September.

In the past two months, the entire GW community- students, faculty, staff, and members of the Board of Trustees- have been inspired to commit to service.  Through the Office of Community Service, 19,000 service hours have been logged, which includes the thousands of hours put in by the Class of 2013 during the Freshman Day of Service and Community Building Community, a pre-semester program.

To make sure that we are capturing all the service hours, GW has partnered with VolunteerMatch, an application that will allow students, faculty and staff to easily track and report their hours.  VolunteerMatch is a non-profit organization that boasts a network of over 70,000 non-profits located all over the world who list their volunteer opportunities and recruit volunteers via the specialized VolunteerMatch sites. The GW site will not only list these general volunteer opportunities but also allow departments, professors, student organizations and other members of the GW community to advertise and recruit volunteers for their own specific service projects.  Every student, staff, and faculty member will have an account set up when the program launches on November 16th, and we expect our numbers to increase greatly as the community inputs the many hours they have been manually counting since the start of the semester.

What are you doing to be part of the challenge? Has your student org signed up to serve breakfast early one morning at Miriam’s Kitchen?  Are you serving as a mentor or tutor at a DC Public School?  Are you raising money for a great cause with your fraternity or sorority?  We’d love to hear about how you are making a difference in our community; share your story here.

Don’t forget to visit serve.gwu.edu for more information on GW’s Office of Community Service, the Service Challenge guidelines, and the VolunteerMatch How-To.  Please contact serve@gwu.edu with any questions.

Full text of the letter:  October Service Challenge Update.