Community Impacts
We help generate tens of thousands of hours of community engagement and service annually, while helping prepare future community leaders of Southern Nevada. With the ongoing partnership of more than 30 community organizations and spanning both academic and co-curricular settings, we serve as one of the primary points of intersection and partnership between UNLV and the broader community. We are the hub of service-learning teaching practice on campus, and we support individual faculty members and whole colleges in integrating critical service-learning pedagogy in courses and academic programs.
Staff
Have any questions? Feel free to reach out to any one of us. We’ll help you get to where you’re going.
Locations
We operate out of two locations on the third floor of the Student Union. Room 316 is where you will find our leadership & service programming, and Room 309 is where you will find our scholar programs and student basic needs initiatives. Feel free to stop by either location, there are front desks at both locations to help ensure you get to where you need to go.
Service Learning & Leadership Core Threads
Woven throughout all of our learning experiences are four core threads: Community, Criticality, Identity Development, and Systems Literacy. While this language is somewhat specific to SLL programming, they directly support institutional undergraduate and graduate learning outcomes and the UNLV Top Tier Initiative.
Collaboration
We partner with students, faculty, staff, administrators, community members, and community organizations to advance learning and development. In each relationship we strive for trust, mutuality, and reciprocity, recognizing that each person and organization carries expertise and a powerful story. We bring our own expertise and stories with us at all times, and offer them for shared benefit.
Criticality
Criticality surfaces hidden assumptions and structures as we seek not only to understand how things are, but to envision and actively work towards how they should be. Employing a critical lens must be balanced and informed by critical hope, which is the ability to continually face the challenges of our present while maintaining optimism about our future. Criticality balances the processes of deconstruction (the process of identifying and thinking critically about taken-for-granted and hidden assumptions) and reconstruction (the process of making incremental gains through adaptation and alteration of previous assumptions, models, and structures), and centers the concept of justice - racial, social, environmental - in all that we do.
Identity Development
Identity development is the process of becoming more complex in how we understand and express personal and social identities. The process is socially constructed, meaning that it is shaped through our formal and informal interactions with others. This is a life-long journey, but can be advanced through interactions between and across differences, as well as developing skills and habits in reflection and critical analysis.
Systems Literacy
A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. This applies to everything around us, including biology, ecology, economics, organizations, education, community, government, etc. While systems are everywhere, we are conditioned to see and attribute responsibility to the parts - the individuals - and often struggle to see the whole. Systems literacy, particularly in relation to social systems, is the ability to recognize these systems at play to such an extent as to be able to challenge, interrupt, or reshape them in order to achieve more just outcomes.