What is Direct Service?

Direct service is defined as actual face to face service with your community and could take the form of mentoring, counseling, tutoring, coaching for Special Olympics, planting trees, building houses, feeding the homeless, and countless other ways of assisting your community. Our program is especially interested in encouraging our members to serve with disadvantaged youth as mentors/educators and to encourage friends and family to get involved in their community through events such as Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the National Day of Service, and many other volunteer events at your university or in your community.

At least 51% of your service must be direct service and less than 49% must be doing the administrative work that is usually needed to coordinate or support your direct service. Administrative functions can include marketing an event, staff meeting time, doing follow-up calls, filing paperwork, writing reports, etc.

What is Not Direct Service?

Any service that is purely administrative like a research position, clerical work, student assistant positions on campus not working with the community, any position on campus that does not serve the local community outside of the campus, any internship with a for-profit organization, or any position that involves activities on our prohibited list. List of prohibited activities

What is Member Development/Training Hours?

Up to 20% of your service hours can be spent on striving to achieve service-related or professional goals you have for yourself. Member development goals must be related to their service or future service/professional goals. SIS encourages members to strive for goals that would help a member in developing their ability to better help their community now and/or in the future. Some examples of member development goals include:

• any training, readings, reflections, classes, symposiums, presentations, etc. that will help you in better serving your community
• learning a new language such as Spanish to better serve the Hispanic community
• to take a class in website design so as to help non-profits with their website
• taking a First Aid/ CPR class
• reflecting on your service and providing a great story
• working out/exercising so member can pass the disaster relief worker strength test or firefighter exam
• take an extra coaching class so as to be better prepared to be a coach for Special Olympics
• take an intercultural cultural class so as to work more effectively with immigration services
• time spent in workshops at a Service Learning Conference

What is not Member Development?

Any activity that is not related to your service or future service/professional goals such as running or going to the gym for personal health, doing yoga, dancing, eating right, walking your dog, general reading not related to service goals, or other activity that purely benefits the member personally.