Community Hornets support service

Looking to connect with community service opportunities in the Emporia area?

Community Hornets is a new service that helps students make contact with service organizations and keep track of their community service hours. Community Hornets’ web site provides an up to date calendar of events for each of organizations with which it is involved.

“There really is a need for people to learn more about Emporia, and the needs of Emporians and how we can give,” said Blythe Eddy, associate director of Memorial Union and one of the creators of Community Hornets.

The web site was built in January 2008 to assist students in their involvement with community service. Two months later Eddy applied for and was awarded an Academic Enhancement Grant, which provided the funding to hire two student employees and pay travel costs for those students to attend a community service conference.

“I love doing community service, so if I could help enhance that for Emporia in any way than obviously… I’d want to do everything I could,” said Natalie Skaggs, junior elementary education major.

Skaggs has been involved in various community service activities since her high school days and is now employed by Community Hornets. Applications are currently being reviewed for a second student employee.

In one semester, Community Hornets logged over 6000 hours for registered student organizations and individuals. According to the organization’s web site, every registered student organization on campus is in the Community Hornets database and each of these groups need to log at least 20 hours of community service each year. The organization also works together with the Associated Student Government to approve the hours needed by each of the registered student organizations.

The Community Hornets are also an Official Certifying Organization for Presidential Service Awards, which are awards given out under The President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation as a way to recognize those who engage in community service.

Eddy and Skaggs plan to be involved in as many of the community service programs as they can. In this way, they hope to gain as many facts as possible in order to promote Community Hornets to individuals and registered student organizations. They want to find out exactly what is required and what each organization needs to accomplish their goals.

“There are over 50… service organizations that we can help [in Emporia],” Eddy said. “College students wouldn’t have the time to learn about all of those.”

All recognized student organizations are registered with the Community Hornets service and individuals who wish to register can do so on their web site. Last year, any student who registered with the Community Hornets and participated in community service received a free t-shirt, which will also be available this year.

With the funding they have available, Eddy and Skaggs hope to sponsor or co-sponsor their own community project in the future.