ASMSU community service resolution passes

Climate change and a global pandemic have brought environmental issues and human health to the forefront of public discussion — but students will soon have opportunities to turn discussion into action. A resolution recently passed in the ASMSU Senate aims to help students participate in community service opportunities to address these issues.

“This is something we know college students are really passionate about, the only problem is that there are some barriers to them actually getting involved in this type of work,” Calvin Servheen, an ASMSU senator for the College of Engineering and sponsor of the resolution, said.

The resolution passed unanimously on Thursday, Sept.13.

Servheen first envisioned the idea about a year ago when he was speaking with the Office of Sustainability about the service programs that it was working on at the time.

“You know, they're doing so much cool stuff over there. But they have really low participation in the number of students that actually take part in the efforts that they’re doing,” Servheen said.

Servheen wanted to create a way for students to become more easily involved in sustainability efforts. “I started brainstorming ways that we could increase the ways that we could get everyday sort of ordinary students who don't want to dedicate themselves to a pretty intensive position involved in things that make a difference with sustainability,” he said. “And one of the ideas that we came up with was this community service initiative.”

Entitled “Support Community Service to Further Environmental and Human Health at MSU”, the resolution aims to connect students to community service opportunities in Bozeman “with a particular focus on environmental sustainability and human health.”

Now that the resolution has passed, ASMSU can move forward in its plans to integrate community service opportunities within various organizations into a portal so that these opportunities can become more accessible for students.

CatsConnect, the platform MSU uses to advertise various clubs, presentations, and activities for students, will be the place in which this portal will be located. The resolution states that the portal must be a tab that organizes service opportunities for students to easily view.

Additionally, the resolution states this project intends to create two paid student positions under the Office of Student Engagement that will be responsible for marketing and facilitating the service marketplace, as well as nonprofit/organizational outreach.

Servheen said the timeline for this proposal is uncertain. He wants to have both recurring service events in place to connect with local nonprofits and also to fill the two student positions within the next six months.

“And then within one year, I want to have all that sort of event-based stuff moved over on to CatsConnect… so it's really easy for students to go on and find these opportunities. Our goal is to build this CatsConnect [platform], but it's fairly expensive,” Servheen said. “So we're going to build that into the budget and then you need a period of time to beta test it and get everybody trained and all that sort of stuff. So takes a bit of time.”

Servheen stressed the importance of sustainability and connecting students to opportunities to help the world around them. “Sustainability is a topic that a majority of MSU students are super passionate about,” he said. “On the national level, there's data that says somewhere around 90% of college students say that they're extremely interested in working on environmental and human health issues during their careers.”

Our world faces many challenges — such as reducing environmental footprints, empowering future careers, enabling research and the development of technology to solve environmental problems, said Servheen during the first reading of the resolution.

More accessible community service opportunities will allow MSU students to take part in addressing environmental and human health. “We're making a commitment to focus,” Servheen said.

Offering one-time service projects on this CatsConnect platform could make a big difference for students because it allows them to become involved in their community without committing huge amounts of time and energy, Servheen said.

“Taking the service opportunities and putting them online is what's really going to drive involvement,” he said.

This is only the beginning of Servheen’s plans for service efforts. “You know, we started by looking around at sort of ways that we could get students involved in sort of, like, easy sort of bite-sized ways with directed sustainability efforts,” he said. “We've also been looking into doing some class projects that align with the goals that are laid out in the sustainability framework.”

“We're working with some curriculum planners to potentially get that built into things like engineering, capstones, and architecture, senior design projects, design thinking classes and diesel projects,” Servheen said. “There's a lot more work to be done in all these other areas. This is only one piece of my sustainability initiative.”

Adding a community service platform to CatsConnect means that soon community service opportunities will be more easily accessible for MSU students. “They’re going to be even easier for people to access, and [this will] increase the number of people that get to do that sort of stuff,” Servheen said.