National organizational partners

These are groups who we can reach out to to connect to our students and campuses.

• Alliance of Students Against Poverty is a campaign to abolish extreme poverty worldwide by the year 2025.  As a non-profit organization, it seeks to inspire today's Generation Y to assist in this effort.  It calls upon the youth of this world to take the lead in raising awareness of the issue of those living on less than $1 a day
• New Organizing Institute is a unique, nonpartisan, grassroots program that trains young, technology-enabled organizers to work for progressive campaigns and organizations. Through interactive and informative workshops, the New Organizing Institute highlights the best examples of online networking and organizing, connects trainees with the most successful organizing techniques and lessons from across the country, and ensures that the lessons learned from the world of Web 2.0 organizing are shared with a wide variety of people, organizations, and institutions.
• CIRCLE — The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) promotes research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25. Although CIRCLE conducts and funds research, not practice, the projects that we support have practical implications for those who work to increase young people’s engagement in politics and civic life. CIRCLE is also a clearinghouse for relevant information and scholarship. 
• IMPACT Conference
  • The IMPACT Conference builds on the legacy set forth by the COOL Conference and the Idealist Campus Conference to bring college students together once a year across issues, perspectives, geography, and approaches to social change.  Mobilizing an extensive network of campuses and nonprofit organizations, this event is a remarkable opportunity for hundreds of campus community members to exchange resources, meet peers, brainstorm new solutions to community problems, and network with a wide variety of change-oriented individuals.
  • Held once a year in the spring (on different campuses, traveling around the country), the conference is a staple of campus calendars and is often combined with campus alternative break experiences.
  • The conference (as more than a three-day event) can be helpful in integrating the results of this project's training and evaluation into the event agenda, as well as the pre- and post-event experience.  The vision for the conference is to support a richer and deeper national network of active/engaged college students, before, during, and after the three-day conference.  This will entail the use of social media, as well as alternate forms of the conference experience, such as live-blogging, Second Life gatherings, etc.
  • The 2008 conference was held at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.  Just over 900 people attended -- including students, year of service members, campus staff, and nonprofit professionals from 37 states and DC.  Of those 900 attendees, just over one-third were from Bonner and/or Campus Compact member campuses (some campuses are members of both networks).

Other Resources

• National Service-Learning Clearinghouse: Web 2.0 resources
• Center for Social Media: The Center for Social Media showcases and analyzes strategies to use media as creative tools for public knowledge and action. It focuses on social documentaries for civil society and democracy, and on the public media environment that supports them. The Center is part of the School of Communication at American University. 
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