President Obama’s Community Service Initiatives

As we traverse to the fourteenth day in our campaign to get President Obama in an IMU tee, it’s time to move focus from our Obama 4 IMU movement to talk about something near and dear to IMU’s hearts: service. If you remember a couple posts back, one of the reasons why Obama=IMU is due to us both having emphasis on serving our communities. As a result, we feel it is important to discuss some of the Obama administration’s service-inspired initiatives.

1. The revamping and improvement of established community service entities

As his new administration entered the Oval Office, a new and improved Corporation for National and Community Service entered as well. This year, Patrick Covington was elected as the new CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and he has wasted no time in blogging for Obama’s Service site and documenting community service initiatives around the nation.

2. United We Serve

“United We Serve” is not just a tagline for Obama’s call for able citizens to give back to their communities. United We Serve is actually a part of a nationwide tour—led by Bon Jovi—to encourage concert goers to sign up to volunteer in their local communities.

3. Earth Day’s 40th Anniversary

This year marks the 40th Anniversary for Earth Day, and Obama is trying to make Earth Day 2010 one of the biggest volunteer efforts ever. Again, on Serve.gov, you can input your location, and the site will give you the nearest volunteer areas from their database. If you are interested in volunteering for Earth Day, there is hardly any excuse not to go out and improve the environment.

4. Encouragement for colleges to award community service based grants and scholarships.

Obama has encouraged both colleges and universities to award additional financial aid to those committed to community service, in order to both encourage the youth to volunteer and alleviate rising college costs. Check this article out about a girl who was offered a full-tuition scholarship last year for her service work here.

5. It’s all in the family

Barack is not the only Obama committed to community service. Michelle Obama has recently launched the Let’s Move initiative, which combats childhood obesity and helps get children physically active in their neighborhoods.

Building better communities begins with building better and healthier people, and Michelle Obama’s program aims to do just that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Blog, Campaign, Uncategorized and tagged with A letter to the President, Ann Arbor, David Merritt, Earth Day 2010, I Miss You, IMU, News Story, Obama 4 IMU, Obama administration, President Obama, United We Serve, University of Michigan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.