Two Thousand Volunteers Help Close Centennial year with Acts of Pubic Service

All across the country Americans young and old are making a difference by volunteering. According to Washington D.C.-based Independent Sector, in a given year, 93 million people volunteer some 20.3 billion hours collectively. Although the dollar amount of their efforts is put at $201.5 billion, the real value can be measured by the rewards public service brings to communities and individuals.

Volunteerism has become so important that part of the new Clinton Library in Arkansas will be dedicated to public service; Gen. Colin Powell has teamed with superstars like Janet Jackson to promote it, and educational institutions around the nation are incorporating service learning into their curriculums.

In keeping with the national public service model and its own mission of service, 2,000 volunteers from DePaul University will open their hearts, roll up their sleeves and give of themselves to help improve Chicago communities beginning at 8:30 a.m. on May 15. Centennial Service Day will mark the close of DePaul’s centennial celebration, which featured a year filled with activities, reflection and accomplishment.

DePaul staff, faculty, alumni and friends will perform hundreds of acts of public service at inner-city Catholic schools and senior citizen housing complexes in Chicago. Volunteers will be involved in such activities as painting senior citizen apartments, planting gardens, cleaning playgrounds and creating public murals.

Students at one school will have the earth at their fingertips after DePaul volunteers paint a map of the world on their playground. At another site volunteers will clean school grounds and plant flowers. Volunteers armed with brushes and paint also will move out across the city to paint apartments for senior citizens living in Chicago Housing Authority homes. The fresh paint will be the first some of the apartments have seen in many years.

DePaul has much to be proud of this centennial year. It is currently the largest Catholic university in the country with an enrollment of 18,565 students located on five campuses. For the first time in its 100-year history DePaul can boast of having a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, M. Cherif Bassiouni, among its law faculty. The university’s part-time business program was ranked fifth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in 1999, and for the past five years its Kellstadt Graduate School of Business has been ranked number two among the top 25 business school programs for entrepreneurs in the country by SUCCESS magazine.

But perhaps DePaul’s greatest accomplishment is its history of setting a standard for public service by incorporating it into its mission, which began long before public service became a national cause. That mission seeks to foster respect for individual dignity, strives to build a coalition of students, staff and faulty of diverse cultural backgrounds and, through higher education, instill in them a dedication to community service. DePaul consistently promotes and encourages service to the community and many of its graduates seek careers in public service.

"Centennial Service Day is a statement DePaul is making to ourselves, the city of Chicago and to the nation," said Richard J. Meister, executive vice president of academic affairs. "This day symbolizes what DePaul is about today and what we will be about for the next 100 years."