About UMass CALLS
Leadership, Service, and Community
UMass CALLS (UMass Community Action through Leadership, Learning, and Service) is a central portal into the array of volunteer, community service, leadership, and community building programs and opportunities at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. UMass CALLS offers its own suite of programs, serves as a resource for both students and communities interested in student engagement, and collaborates with both on-campus groups and community organizations in their own engaged efforts. Through these activities, UMass CALLS facilitates and strengthens relationships between UMass Amherst and surrounding communities.
Vision and Mission
Leadership and Service are avenues for individual growth, supporting personal interests and augmenting career goals. Leadership and Service build the “soft skills” that are necessary for success in any organization or business–communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving and so on. They are also opportunities for students to transform themselves and the communities they live in and care about. Building caring communities and developing effective leaders are integral to the university’s social mission: To provide an affordable education of high quality and conduct programs of research and public service that advance our knowledge and improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth.
Following the 2015 Diversity Strategic Plan, UMass CALLS embraces UMass Amherst’s “profound legacy of and commitment to social justice, extending across generations and spanning disciplines.” Improving the lives of the people of the commonwealth requires that we understand and embrace differences in identity, and understand and address the production of inequalities, privileges, and oppression between and among social groups. Thus, UMass CALLS’ central mission is:
To create and support leadership, service and community engagement programs, relationships, and experiences that can help to “instill in our UMass Amherst students the ongoing commitment to create a better, more just world.”
Integrating Leadership and Service
UMass CALLS combines its two predecessors 1) Volunteer UMass and 2) Lead UMass, programs that made a distinction between community service and leadership development. UMass CALLS endeavors to bridge this separation by actively integrating leadership and service both in theory and practice.
UMass CALLS embraces a social change model of Leadership Development. In this model, service and engagement are necessary components of leadership development. Individual competencies, values, and commitments are developed and shaped through collaborative efforts aimed at social change.
Developing Leaders, Deepening Engagement
UMass CALLS’ leadership opportunities nurture educational excellence, cultivate critical awareness of self, foster active citizenship, and advance professional and personal growth.
UMass CALL’s programs and projects are designed to meet students where they are. UMass CALLS helps students locate existing service, leadership, and engagement opportunities that meet their interests and needs.
UMass CALLS also provides pathways that can deepen and transform students’ understandings of themselves as leaders and community members. One way to think about this trajectory is in terms of Westheimer and Kahne’s helpful ideas around levels of citizenship– a movement from individual responsibility, to group participation, to an orientation around social justice.
Building Community through Community Economies
Meeting today’s social, economic and ecological challenges requires effective, active leadership and service; it also requires new ways of thinking about community development, new ways of relating to one another, and new ways of doing business.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst supports and is host to numerous programs and initiatives that build community through economic exchange, consumption, and development. Campus initiatives include student cooperatives, community supported agriculture, permaculture, local purchasing, bike-sharing, and an overwhelming number of volunteer efforts and philanthropic giving—encourage community engagement and service, provide opportunities for leadership development, create social connections, and can enable cooperative, ethical, sustainable, and socially-just practices. UMass CALLS endeavors to support and connect the diverse economic activities on-campus and in our surrounding communities through leadership and engagement programs.