Dekira Wilkerson, reporter
Berry and the Center for Good Neighbor Culture & Community Engagement partnered with an application called GivePulse to offer community service opportunities through Berry Portals. Director of Community Engagement Devon Smyth announced the new app through a campus-wide email on Sept. 28. GivePulse offers service opportunities on campus and extends throughout the Northwest Georgia community.
This is a new project for Berry, as the school has never had an app that facilitates community service between students and organizations while measuring the amount of service done by Berry students.
“It’s a client records management system at its base,” Smyth said. “We are using [GivePulse] to track volunteerism and engagement across our campus.”
To access GivePulse, students must visit the single sign-in link sent to their email by Student Affairs to access the app and log-in using their Berry credentials. Through the app Berry students have access to plenty of community service opportunities that they can explore. GivePulse lists opportunities from tutoring off campus to assisting Trunk or Treating with Campus Organizations. The app allows students to seek opportunities to serve the surrounding community.
“It’s a way for us to share the Rome Floyd Community’s needs,” Smyth said. “A student can go volunteer and it is tracked, helping organizations that otherwise wouldn’t have the capacity to serve.”
To get credit for their service, students would have to describe how they volunteered at the service event when logging their hours.
“You go in and add your impact [in the app],” Smyth said. “It lets you add the date, how many hours and a short description of what you did.”
The stories curated from the GivePulse app will be used to communicate with donors. It will be used to show that Berry students interact with the local communities and the effect that students have. Furthermore, communicating this to donors will open doors for Berry students.
“It’s a very concise way for us to talk to donors, some donors really love numbers and want to really quantify our students’ impact, while others want to know the stories of what our students did,” Smyth said. “This gives us the opportunity to apply for grants and tell donors why it matters to support our students.”
The college’s current administration has a Strategic Plan with five strategic priority areas, one of them being community impact.
“Point two on the Strategic Plan is very heavily invested in our community engagement efforts,” Smyth said. “This is one way we can quantify and tell a story both with numbers and reflections.”
Smyth said the volunteer hours had never been tracked in a meaningful way before. This became apparent for her during this past graduation ceremony; a number was presented to acknowledge the amount of community service hours earned by Berry seniors for their entire college career. However, immediately looking at the number, she knew that it was off because it did not correctly reflect the amount of service hours put in by the Bonner Scholars.
“I knew the numbers were off by at least 30,000 hours, because Bonner scholars contributed 30,000 hours alone,” Smyth said.
Students have a positive reaction to the new app. Miriana Hernandez, scholar and student leader of Gate of Opportunity, is excited about the opportunity that GivePulse has given students to interact with the community in a guided and encouraging way.
“The fact that they have created something that could guide students to community service and encourage them is honestly really great,” Hernandez said.