ICC Archeology

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 Liza Newman, Program Director for Marketing and Member Relations

I’ve unearthed some treasures while preparing for our 20^th anniversary year. The treasures weren’t buried in the earth, but instead in some very deep filing cabinets. Among the items that I dug up were the 1995-1996 Indiana Campus Compact Annual Report and a stack of old hard copy newsletters.  In the one of the newsletters, I found a 2001 acceptance speech from Nicole Hallet, that year’s recipient of the Richard J. Wood Community Commitment Award.  

As I kept reading, I found a 2002 article from IUPUI Dean, William Plater on the institutionalization of service learning. In the same issue, Jerry Israel, then president of the University of Indianapolis talks about the bricks and mortar institutionalization of community engagement. And wrapping up the campus culture issue was an article about Purdue North Central‘s inclusion of reciprocal service learning in its mission statement.  I found a 2003 newsletter that featured articles from Community Service Directors tackling the daunting task of describing their work. I found a 2005 interview with Butler University’s Dr. Margaret Brabant, in which she discusses the Indiana Campus Compact Faculty Fellows 10^th anniversary with our own J.R. Jamison.

The last newsletter I found was written in the spring of 2003 – Indiana Campus Compact’s 10^th anniversary year and 4 months before I became part of the ICC staff.  This particular newsletter is chock full of insight, retrospection, and forward thinking from three of Indiana Campus Compact’s brightest stars and best advocates; Bob Bringle, founder of the IUPUI Center on Service and Learning, Rev. Edward Malloy, who was then president of the University of Notre Dame, and one of the founders of ICC, and Ben Hunter, Chief of Staff for the president of Butler University, and one of the student founders of ICC.

This nostalgia has been both heartwarming and fortifying.  In the rush of deadlines and planning, and days ending before you’re finished with work, and months ending before you’ve finished a project, it’s easy to forget the reason that we all do what we do.  We don’t all do the same things, we’re not all students, we’re not all academics, we’re not all administrators, but we are all involved with service engagement because we believe in the power of people working together to improve people’s lives.

Don’t worry; I won’t keep all of these treasures to myself.  Look forward to one of these articles the second and fourth Thursday of each month in the ICC eBrief from now until our Service Engagement Summit and 20^th Anniversary Celebration.   If you have some ICC nostalgia you’d like to share, you can upload a blog here (if it’s 140 characters or less, use the hashtag #ICC20).