Service Learning Opportunities

The Graphic Communications Department regularly collaborates with CCSF's Office of Mentoring and Service Learning (OMSL) to provide unique Service Learning projects that enable students to apply their skills and talents to help local communities in need. Not only do students practice their skills through social action, they also get paid from a CCSF Service Learning grant.

For example, we served the 2004 and 2005 Bioneers Conference Youth Initiative with graphic recording. Service Learning students were involved in the demanding task of mapping information on-the-fly and in front of a live audience. Graphic recording tasks include deep listening, synthesizing and diagramming information, conceptualizing stories and visualizing in culturally appropriate representations—all in real time.

We also collaborate across disciplines. One such collaboration is with the Health Sciences Department, on a project called Designing Community Health. Service Learning students partner with a variety of local communities to address health issues in this regularly recurring project.

One Designing Community Health project was a collaboration with Mission High School on gang violence issues. CCSF students mentored high school students, first to identify this issue of pressing concern to them. Later, Service Learning students designed and facilitated an entire college-level Design Week that dealt with gang violence on a deep level. Content for appropriate communication pieces was derived from two days of health education and discussions, then posters were collaboratively conceptualized, designed, produced, and printed. Service Learning students from CCSF led Mission High students in a variety of brainstorming techniques, including Agosto Bao’s Theater of the Oppressed.

This achievement was followed by a similar project in which students collaborated with the Community Leadership Training group in CCSF's HIV/STI Education Office. Together they conceptualized, designed, and produced posters for Black History Month in February of 2005. These posters are now being considered for public display at bus stations citywide.

Most recently, Designing Community Health collaborated on an HIV Prevention Campaign. Students on this project created a campus-wide installation of provocative posters to accompany an information campaign by the Community Leadership Training group.

For more information about mentoring and service learning
please visit www.ccsf.edu/Services/Mentoring_and_Service_Learning