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SALT LAKE CITY — College is a place that is always changing to keep up with the times. But one program at the University of Utah has remained constant for three decades. The call to serve has become a tradition for students at the Lowell Bennion Community Service Center.
"People were inspired, especially in those early days when it was all new," says Irene Fisher. She's talking about a passion for service to Utah's communities that took off 30 years ago.
In 1987, Fisher, a community activist at the time, was hired to be the first director of the Bennion Center. "I saw how I had learned by being in the community and I knew that would be a life-changing experience for people, especially students," she says.
A service center on a college campus was a novel idea when the Bennion Center opened. It was only the second of its kind — the first at a public university. "Two of the big things we emphasized were student leadership and a bias toward action or really doing it," Fisher says.
A handful of students helped Fisher with the center's first service project. They cleaned up a home for the mentally ill in Sugar House, tearing out and carrying an old clawfoot tub down several sets of stairs. Fisher described the project as "lots of cleaning and lots of work side by side with the chronically mentally ill people that lived in the residence."
Within a year of opening, more than 1,200 students were volunteering at the center. Today, over a fourth of the U.'s student body or about 8,500 students dedicate a quarter of a million hours to community service each year.
Dean McGovern, the current director of the Bennion Center, gives Fisher credit for the growth in interest over the years across the campus. "The rest of us who followed stand on her shoulders."
"It really challenged me to want to make a real difference, to change the status quo," says Gina Cornea, who volunteered at the Bennion Center in the early 1980s.
Today, she leads the effort to find public policy solutions to hunger in Utah as the director of Utahns Against Hunger. "When we have a neighbor who is hungry, when we have a neighbor who goes without, that makes our whole community poorer," she says.
McGovern says today's students recognize the need for their involvement. "When we see these issues, we believe deeply that service is a solution."
Junior Nick Knight is part of a new generation of Bennion volunteers. He runs the Feed U Pantry on campus. "It's especially hard to function or study, go to class, everything when you have nothing to eat," says Knight.
Knight's service experience will not stop at college graduation. "It will definitely be a part of what I do going forward," he says.
Senior volunteer Julie Chasse runs a book club at Palmer Court, a housing complex for the chronically homeless. She says helping homeless kids learn to read is a passion. "There's nothing more rewarding than helping someone out," says Chasse.
Today, there are thousands more U. students volunteering in Utah communities, but what drives them to service has not changed. "I can see the same enthusiasm for service and involvement in the community that I saw earlier on," says Fisher.
The student volunteer center was originally named for Lowell Bennion, a man with a reputation for compassion and service. When he was the associate dean of students and head of the LDS Institute of Religion, Bennion inspired generations of college students.
