Overview

Successful workplace volunteer programs help meet the college’s core strategic goals and address issues that affect the college’s ability to operate. MWCC’s commitment to civic engagement initiatives deepens relationships with employees, students, stakeholders, and community leaders and businesses.

Volunteering can strengthen work teams and build employee skills as well as contribute to professional development. According to a research report by the Points of Light Foundation, there is an upward trend in workplace volunteering. The report found that:

  • 81.7% of responding corporations focus their employee volunteer programs on core business functions.
  • 52% of responding companies stress a commitment to community service in their corporate mission statement to help build a cooperative corporate culture.

In addition, this research shows those companies surveyed indicate they are tying their workplace volunteering programs to:

  • Address public relations goals (83%)
  • Meet marketing and communications objectives (64%)
  • Develop employee skills (60%)
  • Recruit and retain employees (58%)
  • Workplace volunteering is an investment in the future of the college, your employees and the communities in which you live and work.

MWCC “Walks The Talk”

MWCC is a leader of innovative strategies directed at building social capital and student engagement externally. The Senator Stephen M. Brewer Center of Civic Learning and Community Engagement has flourished over the past eleven years.  Programs include:

  •  Service Learning and Internships: Community/Student/Faculty Focus
  • United Way Youth Venture: Student/Community Focus
  • Student Leaders in Civic Engagement: Student Focus
  • S.O.S. Peer Mentoring and Food for Thought: Campus Pantry: Student/Community Focus
  • Days of Service: Student/Community Focus
  • AmeriCorps *VISTA: Community Focus

In an effort to accomplish the college’s strategic priorities of community outreach and involvement, student success and institutional culture and climate, MWCC, in its entirety, can demonstrate the value of volunteerism with the implementation of an internal workplace volunteer program. All MWCC employees can become teachers by modeling the behaviors we encourage the students emulate. In essence MWCC will begin to “Walk the Talk”, creating a learning environment through volunteer activities that benefit students by providing modeled behaviors, employees by providing new personal learning experiences and the communities MWCC serves by providing volunteers with exceptional abilities to create positive social impacts to the issues they are most passionate about.

Everybody’s a Winner

What’s in it for the employee?

  • Employee work/life balance
  • Provides a social component
  • Enhances leadership building and professional development opportunities
  • Allows people to give back to a cause they are personally committed to
  • Some people volunteer to fulfill a lifelong dream
  • Strengthens community/employee relationships
  • Awareness of serious social issues
  • Knowledge of local agencies

What’s in it for the MWCC campus community?

  • Builds connections to community resources
  • Develops team building skills in a non-competitive environment
  • Provides positive publicity that enhances public image
  • Improves employee morale
  • Attracts civic minded employees
  • Increases employee retention
  • Illustrates MWCC’s values through action
  • Provides human resources to local nonprofit agencies

What’s in it for students?

  • Illustrates MWCC’s values through action
  • Creates trusting relationships
  • Provides encouragement and validates their ability to create change
  • Demonstrates the importance of work/life balance
  • Personalizes MWCC, Peels away the larger institutional level
  • Employee volunteering provides access to opportunities for students

What’s in it for the Community?

  • Human resources to local nonprofit agencies
  • Larger net of professional skill sets for nonprofit agencies to learn from
  • Ability to enhance current programs that address serious issues affecting the heath and well being of people and the environment