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Campus Wide Centers:
Organizational and Staffing Structure
Overview | Guides | Campus Examples | Documents to Download
Guides below include: Staffing Models, Job Descriptions, and Benchmarking Your Center
Staffing Models
The Bonner Foundation requires one full-time staff member for every 40 students in the program. It is common for staff to manage other campus-wide programs and engagement efforts. For more on staffing requirements and recommendations, see: [ADD LINK]
According to reports from centers across the Bonner network in the summer of 2015, centers generally have a core professional and student leadership staff that ranges from 1.5 (for a small start-up program of 10 students) to 13 (the University of Richmond’s Bonner Center). The average center in the network has 5 staff, with 2 dedicated to the Bonner Program.
The slides below explain some approaches to staffing your Bonner Program and Center.
Typical Job Functions
- Center Director (usually the Bonner Director)
- Bonner Coordinator
- Faculty Coordinator (a person focused on training and developing faculty engagement)
- VISTA staff
- Work Study student staff
- Bonner Senior Interns (or other student leaders)
Benchmarking Your Center
Benchmarking your campus’s center and operations against others may also be a valuable effort. Some campuses do this in conjunction with broader strategic planning efforts. You may want to consider creating a group to benchmark with using the following considerations:
- Institutional Type
- Mission/vision (i.e, other schools that are doing a similar QEP)
- Size/demographics of student body
- Rankings or ratings (peer and aspirant groups): besides U.S. News and World Report, you may want to look at these listings:
- Colleges That Change Lives
- Colleges That Care
- Fiske Guide to Colleges
- U.S. News also has some other rankings like Most Innovative Colleges or Best Colleges for Service-Learning that may interest you
- Sense of place (i.e., setting, urban, rural, town and opportunities for engagement)
- Other institutional characteristics (i.e., religious affiliation
One good resource for looking at the development and growth of civic engagement as a whole is the annual survey of the national Campus Compact. You can find that in the Documents to Download.
For campuses and centers interested in growing larger campus-wide offices, nationally, there are some centers for community engagement that have larger staff. Some of the largest (and oldest) centers nationally are:
- The University of Utah’s Lowell Bennion Community Service Center (founded 1987): with over 24K undergraduate students and nearly 8K graduate students, this center has a dedicated staff of 11, as well as formalized student and community boards.
- Stanford University’s Haas Center for Public Service (founded 1988): with an undergraduate population of nearly 7,000, the Haas Center engages about 1,000 students annually. It has a staff/faculty of 38. See https://haas.stanford.edu/
Student-Led Campus-Wide Engagement
Guide to ignite community a community service initiative using student leadership while addressing community needs.
A workbook that was designed to accompany a one-day workshop on strengthening campus-based community service programs. The workbook provides opportunities to examine the Coalition of Project Model, Recruitment, Gaining Support, and Developing Action Plans.
