Several SF State faculty members and students received awards of recognition for their outstanding community service learning work.

The Office of Community Service Learning (OCSL) held its third annual Student, Faculty and Community Partners Award ceremony and luncheon on Wednesday.

OCSL places students into community service positions that correlate to their field of study. This enables students to get hands-on experience in the field they are pursuing as a career while community members receive the benefits of interacting with people knowledgeable about their societal situation.

It offers project in 289 courses throughout the university with approximately 4,000 students and faculty participating annually.

Among OCSL 2004 student award recipients were BECA senior Thanh Cao, health education senior Jennifer Christy, Asian American studies junior Cassandra Fung, psychology senior Alisha Garr and Stephen Williams, a senior double major in Classics Egyptian literature and creative writing.

All of these students have gone above and beyond in helping OCSL provide volunteer work to nonprofit organizations, said Roza Terrazas, OCSL associate director and organizer of the event.

“Knowing that members of the community need help and knowing that I can help makes me feel good,” said Cao who has participated in a community service-learning course at SF State since spring 2003. The course gave her the opportunity to manage a production team and work together with a nonprofit organization that supports a culturally diverse community of theater artists in the Bay Area.

“I feel really honored to receive this award,” said Christy, who has been doing community services for eight years. “It’s really amazing that nonprofit organizations show a lot of support for the community, and I wanted to be part of that. I started doing community services on my own, but through the community service class I involved myself more.”

Christy was enrolled in a service-learning course last fall. The course, entitled "Community Organizing," is designed to promote students learning through active participation in service experiences, and it led Christy to serve as a volunteer worker at Quan Yin health Clinic, located in the Mission District.

Steven Cochrane, director of the Community Involvement Center- Office of Community Service Learning, nominated Stephen Williams, who is currently enrolled in a course entitled “Volunteer Internship for Professional and Personal Development.” Through the course Williams works to educate inmates in California State Prisons.

Williams is going into a culture that is invisible to society and bringing them care and education and improving the quality of life for many of these inmates, said Cochrane during the ceremony.

“Regardless of how we carry ourselves as individuals, we want to be identified as groups. If I want to feel like a full citizen, I have to be concerned with cultural problems that may not affect me,” Williams said.

Three SF State faculty members also won recognition awards: Jennifer McNaughton from the College of Humanities, Dr. Erik Rosegard from the College of Health and Human Services and Dr. Julia Marshall from the College of Creative Arts.

McNaughton won a faculty award for her work as coordinator of the Reading Assistance Program (RAP) in which SF State students tutor at-risk children at Lakeview Alternative Elementary School. Since she became coordinator in 1999 both the number of interns trained to tutor and the number of children served doubled.

McNaughton described the most rewarding aspect of her service, “ I love to see the kids reading improve, to see them grow more confident in themselves. But I also love to see the tutors as they become successful and more confident in themselves as tutors and experience the joy in teaching.”

OCSL also awarded a Community Partnership Award this year. That was given to the Charles Tindley Academy of Music Inc. for their contribution in providing Bay Area urban youth with artistic, academic and personal development activities designed to encourage discipline, commitment, excellence and accomplishment.

The Office of Community Service Learning and the Charles Tindley Academy of Music have worked as partners for six years on projects such as the Citywide Tutorial AmeriCorps Program and America Counts. Both programs utilize SF State students as tutors to local youth.

"Giving something back is very pleasing to us,” said a member of the academy’s Board of Directors, Carol O’Gilvie, who said she was the single African American student in the SF State’s Business Department in 1954.