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 In the fall 2006 semester alone, Niagara students recorded 55,000 hours of community service. It's no surprise, then, that Niagara was one of only 10 colleges nationwide named as a finalist for General Excellence in Community Service inthe 2006 President's Higher Education Community Service Awards. It's proof of how important service is to the mission of the university. In fact, you'll find a service component in almost everything you do at Niagara.
There are three main avenues for connecting with service opportunities at Niagara.
Learn & Serve
 Niagara's Catholic and Vincentian heritage inspires students and faculty to serve all members of society. What better place to start than in our own backyard? Niagara students and professors are active members of the Niagara Falls community, from the accounting students who provide tax-preparation services for elderly and low-income residents to the biology students who are conducting a study through the university's Academic Center for Integrated Sciences in partnership with the Heart Center of Niagara, researching genes that are involved in regulating heart disease.
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Learn & Serve Niagara focuses on service learning; that is, service activities that arebuilt into course curricula to help students experience how concepts they are learning in the classroom can be applied to the actual needs of a community. More than 100 Niagara classes have a service requirement, and education majors routinelylog thousands of hours of volunteerteaching in local schools.
NUCAP
NUCAP (Niagara University Community Action Program) organizes a wide variety of activities to aid the localcommunity. Students invite disadvantaged youths toskating and swimming  parties; others volunteer in local nursing homes and soup kitchens. NUCAP is a great resource for student clubs,especially since each one is responsible for conducting a certain number of service hours per semester to maintain university funding.
BASIC
BASIC (Brothers and Sisters in Christ) sends busloads of students and campus ministers every semester break to spend a week immersed in fulfilling the university’s Vincentian mission by serving disadvantaged people in poor neighborhoods They have traveled as far as Panama and stateside to Philadelphia; Brooklyn, NY; Trenton, NJ; and. recently, New Orleans, working in local schools, at homeless shelters and nursing homes, and anywhere else there is a need. Students who have participated in these trips call their experience both "eye-opening" and "life-changing."
 
"Expert-in-Residence" Niagara University is corralling its intellectual and physical resources to help revitalize and advance the region's economy and build the tourism industry. In fact, the John R. Oishei Foundation recently awarded the university a $600,000 grant to implement this initiative. To kick-start the program, the university invited Eddie Friel — a distinguished international specialist in destination marketing who is credited for the amazing revitalization of Glasgow, Scotland, as a major tourist destination — to serve as "expert-in-residence" in the College of Hospitality and Tourism Management. His work will involve Niagara University students and faculty members in a major research study and industry training in cultural tourism.
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