The University of Louisiana at Lafayette has earned a place on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for the third consecutive year.
Membership in the Honor Roll recognizes the part colleges and universities play in volunteering and service. It’s the highest federal recognition a university can receive for its commitment to community, service-learning, and civic engagement.
Dr. David Yarbrough, dean of Community Service at UL Lafayette, said faculty, staff and students performed an estimated 172,451 hours of service during the Honor Roll time frame.
“Over 7,000 volunteers worked to impact the lives of about 70,000 members of our community,” he said.
Volunteers partnered with a variety of agencies and organizations to build and repair housing, landscape public green spaces, clean up litter and debris from streets and waterways, and plant vegetation to combat coastal erosion. They also provided in-school and after-school tutoring, health screening and wellness checks.
Yarbrough estimated that their efforts had an economic impact of more than $3 million.
The Honor Roll was announced Monday by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The CNCS is a federal agency that engages more than 5 million Americans in service through its core programs: Senior Corps, AmeriCorps and the Social Innovation Fund. It also leads United We Serve, President Barack Obama’s national call to service initiative.