Ginsberg Center E-Newsletter

October 2009

Project Community Alumni Survey Finds Evidence of a Lasting Impact

by Kemba Mazloomian

Project Community Peer Facilitators participate in a team-building activity during a beginning-of-term retreat in fall 2008.
—Project Community

A survey of 234 U-M alumni indicates that Project Community, one of U-M's oldest service learning programs, has a powerful impact on students' commitment to social justice, even after graduation. "I became a Soc[iology] major because of Project Community. I pursued social justice jobs in my time off from school. I developed better leadership skills. Many, many pluses," one survey respondent said. Project Community (PC), is a course offered in partnership by the Ginsberg Center and the University's Department of Sociology. Students who enroll volunteer for four to six hours each week with a local criminal justice, community organizing, education, gender and sexuality or public health organization, and meet weekly to discuss their experiences with classmates and a peer facilitator, and relate them to assigned readings. Each year, 350 to 450 U-M students take PC courses.

Students often give positive feedback on the program during or right after the semester, but PC Faculty Advisor Ian Robinson wanted to know how service learning classes affected the lives of students after graduation. "There was a big gap in our understanding of Project Community and service learning in terms of its longitudinal effects," Robinson said. The email survey, conducted in winter 2008 by Robinson and graduate student Johanna Masse, included an equal number of PC participants and randomly selected non-participants who matriculated at U-M at the same time.

PC participants were more likely than non-participants to report that their U-M education had increased their interest in community service and social justice issues, and that these had remained important to them since graduation--even though 90 percent of non-participants reported that they had been involved in community service and/or taken a different service learning class while at U-M. PC participants were also nearly three times more likely to be employed in the non-profit rather than the business sector, and while PC participants' salaries were on average lower than their counterparts', they were no less likely to say they were "satisfied" with their lives.

Alumni who had taken PC courses said it had been highly relevant. When asked which of their classes at U-M had most helped them learn skills to work with community partners or offered meaningful interactions with people of other races and ethnicities, in each category, three-quarters of respondents who had participated in PC said it ranked among the top three.

PC participants also indicated that the program enhanced their academic experience. Half said it was among the three courses that had most increased their understanding of racial, ethnic and social class inequality in the US, and an equal portion said that taking PC courses had encouraged them to take related courses they might not otherwise have enrolled in at U-M. While Robinson cautioned that his sample may not represent all students who have taken Project Community courses and his analysis does not control for factors such as the interests or background that might attract certain students to the program, he said it raises noteworthy possibilities that are worth investigating further.

Project Community may appeal to students already interested in social justice, but participating in it may reinforce and deepen students' outlook, skills, values and goals in ways that help shape their choices after graduation, he said.

"Quite often, this 'reinforcement' is not just a matter of incremental additions to prior positions; rather, it helps students across a threshold, at which point the effect is transformative," he wrote in his report on the survey. Robinson hopes to publish the results online and in academic journals. "Our hope is that this will draw greater publicity, and more student interest, to the field of service-learning," he said.

Ginsberg Center E-Newsletter

Project Community Alumni Survey Finds Evidence of a Lasting Impact

October 2009 Table of Contents