Considerations for Volunteer Resource Managers In Engaging Service-Learners

Do organizations track and use service-learning(Intern)hours as part of their volunteer hour counts?

At my previous organization, we treated service learning students as we would treat any other volunteer or unpaid intern in terms of how we counted the hours. Now, working on the University end and assisting students and faculty with service learning opportunities, I can attest as challenging as it was from the nfp side to often find a fit for these students, it's just as challenging from the academic side to find organizations willing to take on service learning students/faculty for projects or on-going service. Speaking from experience and what we did at my previous position, we were inundated with requests for service learning projects which were embedded within courses. We eventually developed a series of on-going projects which could be done in a semester and had the students focus solely on one or two of those projects. We'd also encourage them to join us for our other volunteer projects. So for instance, we'd have students organize a student membership campaign at their campus, or organized a fundraising event on campus with funds going to our organization. Students would develop a volunteer day of service for their campus, organize a donation drive for our various programs. We were there to work collaboratively with them, but they were responsible for the entire project. As for students at the organization individually, we treated those like interns. We had them apply as interns and established them within a program or department.That worked best for us when we had individuals looking for a service learning opportunity. The most important thing is to have the support of the program managers and directors - you can't have a successful service learning program without their buy-in.