During the 2009-2010 academic year alone, Niagara students recorded almost 60,000 hours of community service. It's no surprise, then, that Niagara was one of only 30 colleges nationwide named as a U.S. News and World Report "Top College" in the area of Service Learning. 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 focuses on service learning; that is, service activities that are built 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 routinely log thousands of hours of volunteer teaching in local schools.
NUCAPNUCAP (Niagara University Community Action Program) organizes a wide variety of activities to aid the local community. Students invite disadvantaged youths to skating 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 (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 made numerous stateside excursions to places including Philadelphia, Pa., Brooklyn, N.Y., Trenton, N.J., and. recently, New Orleans, La. Students work in local schools, at homeless shelters and nursing homes, and anywhere else there is a need. Students who have participated in these trips have called their experiences "eye-opening" and "life-changing."
Learn about how Niagara lives its mission each and every day.
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.
