Community service is an activity that involves giving your free time to voluntarily help another group or local area or business.

These activities can range from cleaning highways, beaches, and local parks to helping businesses and others in a variety of ways.

Community service activities are meant to better and strengthen a community and improve the overall development of an area. What better place for community service than our own city of Wilkes Barre?

The 2012-13 year has been a large stride for Wilkes University’s involvement with community service. First, there was student government’s requirement that all clubs on campus must contribute community service hours and have those hours recorded on Givegab.com.

Givegab.com is a website that tracks an organizations community service hours and allows us to see the total number of community services hours accumulated over the year. It also tracks each club individually, and allows you to “compete” for who has the most community service hours between clubs.

Just looking at the website now, one can see that Wilkes University has contributed over 13,000 hours of community service. That number will continue to grow as the years go by.

Then there was also The Big Event, which occurred on April 7. The Big Event was another successful attempt by the university to have as many of its various clubs come out and have one day dedicated to community service and helping out around the city of Wilkes-Barre.

Of course, this is all part of a bigger picture. Wilkes University is working towards winning the Carnegie award for community service. We have already made it on the president’s national honor roll for community service.

Some of you may look at this and think a little cynically, “Were only doing this community service so we can win some award!,” but you really need to look at the bigger picture.

Wilkes has always been a big part of the community in Wilkes-Barre in various ways. We affect this city through not only community service but through economy as well. We help give the city life. But having a goal to achieve makes people want to work harder because it gives them something to achieve. We are already on the president’s honor roll, so what is stopping us from winning the final prize and bringing home something we as students at this school could all be proud of?

Even if the award never existed, it wouldn’t stop Wilkes from contributing countless hours of service to its city. And it is rather impressive to think that our little university could contribute so much when you think of the other, larger universities out there.

It should make you proud to be a student here at Wilkes and make you want to get involved more. Winning the award might even motivate others to want to contribute to the standard of community service that award shows. The award isn’t just a goal, or something designed to make the university look better, it’s a symbol. A symbol that adds to the meaning of what it means to “Be Colonel.”

This semester is already winding down, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start planning your next big community service event for your club. Plan to get involved next year and make a difference. Be a part of the group of students that pushes Wilkes to finally win the Carnegie award and give our school national recognition in a positive way.