The Meelia Center for Community Engagement opened its doors in 1989 with the goal of mobilizing the talent and energy of Saint Anselm students to respond to the service needs of greater Manchester.
Meelia Center Highlights
- More than 150 student volunteers and nearly 200 service learners engage in community service each week, serving between two to four hours per week.
- The Meelia Center manages service learning for the college. Service learning is an educational strategy in which students apply important course concepts through significant service to the community. Each semester nearly 10 percent of the student body chooses to participate in service learning.
- The center hosts four to six major service events on campus each year. More than 800 students participate in these one day service events each year.
- The center utilizes a student leadership team of more than 40 students to coordinate its community partnerships, organize service events, and manage the office. For example, the staff support managers, administrative assistants, and the service events managers are all students.
- The Meelia Center maintains more than 50 community partnerships with agencies ranging from a nursing home and public schools to adult and juvenile correctional facilities. In addition, volunteers and service learners are sent to help out at any of 30 additional nonprofits each year.
- The work of the center has been significantly enhanced through a generous gift from Richard Meelia in 2000. His faith, compassion, and kindness guides the center as it helps the college build the skills, knowledge, and passion to make the world a better place to live and grow.
"Working with the Meelia Center is amazing and I could not be happier that I ended up here. My preschool sites are the perfect fit for me and they're exactly what I need after a long week of studying."
~ Jenny Farrar, Class of 2016
If you are interested in volunteering or are a service learner, please complete the Online Volunteer and Service Learning Application to select a community site that can use your help!
Learn More
-
Community Agencies
Partnerships
The Meelia Center is engaged in more than 16 partnerships in the greater Manchester community.
Each partnership agency is assigned one or more on site student coordinators. The on site coordinator works closely with the agency to develop opportunities, respond to requests, support present volunteers, and recruit new volunteers. On site coordinators also help to ensure that service learners are engaged in work consistent with course learning goals.
Affiliates
The Meelia Center also refers volunteers and service learners to more than 30 affiliates in the greater Manchester community.
Managed Affiliates: The center's three affiliate coordinators facilitate placement and support of volunteers and service learners at 18 affiliate agencies where there is no on site coordination present. While they visit each site each semester, and stay in regular contact with the volunteers and service learners, they are not on site on a weekly basis.
Other Affiliates: In any given semester five to ten additional affiliates agencies may be served with one or more volunteers/service learners. New affiliates are frequently added to respond to community need, student interest, and faculty learning goals. Because of their limited use, these affiliates may not have specific student leaders assigned to manage placement and support. The Meelia Center asks students placed at these sites to keep in close contact with the center so we can assist as needed.
-
History
In 1989, Saint Anselm College committed resources to establish the Center for Volunteers. It did so with an understanding of the considerable need that existed in the greater Manchester area, and faith that an institutional response could make a difference.
Over the past 15 years community service has grown to become a central component of the student life experience at Saint Anselm as well as a defining characteristic of the college's identity.
From 1989-1991 the center operated with its half-time director, Professor Dan Forbes, running as fast as he could to keep up to student interest and community demand. Dan had an inkling of what the future was to bring when on the second day of operation a student marched into his office and pleaded for some way for students to help the victims of Hurricane Hugo. Within a month the center had conducted a park clean up in the city that generated $4,000 in contributions for Red Cross relief. Students have been bringing the urgent requests and their service dreams and aspirations to the center ever since.
Dan discovered the world of federal work study employment in the fall of 2001 when he hired a young woman to help him with the referral and placement process. Her five hours of work quickly became countless hours of dedicated service and genuine ownership of the center and its future.
As more students were added, the dream of what we could become grew exponentially. Resources were located to contribute to leadership training, and models for managing students developed and evolved. While the employment of students may have initially been driven by financial need, it soon evolved in to a tremendous learning opportunity for college students and an amazing new resource for the community.
The humble beginnings and subsequent growth of student leadership mirrors the humble beginnings and subsequent growth of service learning at Saint Anselm. In 1987 Dan Forbes began integrating service in to his social work courses as a way of teaching important course concepts, and a model for integrating service and learning was crafted with the help of Fr. Peter Guerin, O.S.B., dean of the college. Soon faculty in the criminal justice and psychology departments added service learning, and the Center for Volunteers and its student leadership corps administered student placement and support.
Today service learning is a learning option in more than 16 academic departments. Beginning in the 2004-2005 the center assumed a more formal role in service learning administration, and has begun training all of its on site student coordinators in service learning administration.
In 2000, Richard Meelia ('71) and the Meelia family provided the Center for Volunteers with a generous endowment as an expression of their commitment to the college and their appreciation for the hard work and dedication of the Center for Volunteers.
In the fall of 2003, the staff of the Center for Volunteers decided to change the name to the Meelia Center for Community Service in recognition of the Meelias' generosity, faith, and confidence in the center's work.
Every step that the Meelia Center takes to more fully engage Saint Anselm with the community is an attempt to be good stewards of the blessing that the Meelias have bestowed.