Project Public Service

Project Public Service commenced in September 2003 with a Congressionally-authorized grant administered through the US Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Project Public Service is designed to advance the mission of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, which is to inspire and prepare students to be public service-minded leaders who impact public policy for the common good. The Project includes several individual research projects by USF faculty members.

Required Federal Disclosures: Project Public Service is funded with $993,500 in federal funds. There is also an administrative overhead ("F&A") contribution of $348,430 from the University of San Francisco. Thus federal funds account for 74% and nongovernmental sources account for 26% of the overall project funding.

Goals:

1. Inspire and equip students to enter public service and impact public policy, with fundamental concern for and understanding of underserved and disenfranchised persons and communities.

2. Conduct projects that will have impact, that will be innovative and that can be replicated elsewhere, towards the advancement of the civic education, both academic and practical, of university students.

3. Capitalize on USF's unique strengths, including a 400-year Jesuit tradition of service and training "men and women for others;" an engaged faculty; an extraordinarily diverse student body; a complex and sophisticated urban setting; a Service Learning requirement for all postsecondary students; a Law School and Business School with strong clinical and service emphases; and a partnership with the California Dispute Resolution Institute.

Project Public Service consists of the following individual research projects:

1. Public Service Leadership Recruitment Program
2. Citizenship Development Research Project
3. Political Ethics Course Development
4. Public Service Resource Bank
5. Globalization Ethics Project
6. Medley of Events on Public Service
7. Conflict Resolution Compendium
8. Service Learning Conference Attendance, Syllabus and Site Development
9. McCarthy Public Service Research Fellowships
10. Homelessness Community Partnership
11. Community Connections: Bridging the Digital Divide
12. Asian American Civic Engagement Project
13. PICO Project

1. Public Service Leadership Recruitment Program: Focused recruitment program targeting outstanding students who exhibit an interest in public service to encourage application to and enrollment at USF and subsequent participation in McCarthy Center programs.

   Project Leader: McCarthy Center Staff

2. Citizenship Development Research Project: This Project will conduct formal academic research, in collaboration with a research team in the New York City area, to study and understand how university students develop knowledge about, interest in, and become involved in active citizenship. The extraordinarily diverse student population at USF, as well as that of the San Francisco Bay Area, will serve as an excellent sample base for this important research project. It will provide a foundation for the Center's objectives of inspiring and equipping students for public service.

   Project Leader: Professor David Marcotte, SJ, Department of Psychology

3. Political Ethics Course Development: The purpose of this project is to prepare an undergraduate course in political ethics, based upon cases that represent standard ethical problems that can be encountered in public life. A team of four faculty members representing the Departments of Politics and Philosophy is designing the course and collecting case studies and secondary materials. The course planning and content is scheduled to be complete by December of 2004 with the course debuting during Academic Year 2005-06.

   Project Leaders: Professors Al Jonsen, Fromm Institute, Brian Weiner, Department of Politics; Ron Sundstrom, Department of Philosophy

4. Public Service Resource Bank: The purpose of this project is to catalogue and disseminate important public policy resources for postsecondary students. We have developed a Public Policy Research Guide in collaboration with the USF Gleeson Library which is an online source of journal and newspaper articles, statistical data, reference sources, books and dissertations and selected web sites of think tanks, university-based centers, local, state and federal government agencies pertaining to the study of public policy.

   Project Leader: McCarthy Center Staff

5. Globalization Ethics Project: This project will produce a paper presenting a framework of the ethical principles evident in the mission statements of major international financing institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO. It then will examine those principles relative to the actions of these organizations in a select number of case studies.

   Project Leader: Professor Les Myers, School of Business and Management

6. Medley of Events on Public Service: Throughout the year, the McCarthy Center sponsors events for the USF community and the public at large on important, topical issues relating to public policy and public service. For more information on McCarthy Center events, please visit our Events Page

   Project Leader: McCarthy Center Staff

7. Conflict Resolution Compendium: This Project will compile a comprehensive compendium of the theories, methodologies and practices, and the experienced efficacies thereof, of major approaches to inter-group conflict resolution. The resulting document will serve as a baseline primer for inquirers and practitioners alike, a significant contribution to the field of conflict resolution, as nothing such as this currently exists.

   Project Leader: Fairuz Abdullah, California Dispute Resolution Institute (CDRI)

8. Service Learning Conference Attendance, Syllabus and Site Development: The University's Office of Service Learning is a core component of the Center. This project module consists of facilitating the development of syllabi that incorporate service learning elements and development of actual service learning sites; attendance by faculty members at important service learning conferences also will be enabled.

   Project Leader: Julie Reed, Director of Office of Service Learning

9. McCarthy Public Service Research Fellowships: The Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good (the Center) has awarded $109,582 in fellowships to USF faculty for research that inspires and equips USF students to engage in public service and impact public policy with fundamental concern for poor and marginalized communities.

10. Partnership on the Homeless in San Francisco: The McCarthy Center, with the St. Anthony Foundation and Homebase, have formed the Partnership for Promoting Real Solutions to Homelessness. The goal of the Partnership is to build support for implementing practical policy responses to the problem of homelessness in San Francisco. The Partnership hosts briefings and presentations in an effort to form coalitions of support. It plans to monitor the implementation of policies in an effort to measure the impact of these programs.

11. Community Connections: Bridging the Digital Divide: We have established a project known as Community Connections in the USF Computer Science (CS) department, with the goal of fostering a service learning culture within the USF CS department. There have been three major results to date from this project:
    
    • We have established a Service Learning course (CS 480), offered every Spring semester, in which CS students work with local nonprofits to assist them with technology and IT support.
    • We have had a group of approximately 20 students provide ongoing technical support and assistance to several Bay Area nonprofits, including Network Ministries, Breakthrough Collaborative, and Hire-ability.org.
    • In March, we took nine USF students to Tacna, Peru, where we installed and networked approximately 100 donated computers in two local schools. This is part of an ongoing effort to provide computers to poor schools in Latin America. We currently have two students following up by spending 3 weeks in Tacna, working with the teachers to help them incorporate computing technology into their classes.
      Photo Gallery: March 2004

    Project Leaders: Professors Chris Brooks and David Wolber, Computer Science Department

12. Asian American Civic Engagement Project (AACEP): Although there is a large Asian American population in the San Francisco Bay Area and at the University, Asian Americans are under-represented in the formal processes of governance. This project will strive through a variety of approaches and mechanisms to encourage and stimulate increased participation and involvement of Asian Americans in public life and service, including public forums, visiting scholars, and funding for student internships.

    Bridge Scholars: For the spring semester of 2005, AACEP welcomes Community Bridge Scholar Jay Mendoza, Executive Director of FOCUS to USF who will perform presentations and lectures, interact with students and faculty, create joint activities between USF and the community, and develop educational materials related to civic commitment and campus-community relations.

    Student Internships: AACEP provides funding to students to support summer internships at San Francisco Bay Area Asian-American public or nonprofit organizations.
    Description (PDF, 82KB)
    Application (PDF, 108KB)

    Roundtable Discussions & Events:
    April 29, 2004: Roundtable discussion on Asian American public policy issues. Speakers: Steve Nakajo (Kimochi, Inc.), Dang Pham (San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission), Edwin Jocson (West Bay Multi Service Agency and the South of Market Teen Center) , and Sandy Chau (Vision New America).

    November 15, 2004 Viewed documentary: The Gift of Barong: A Surfing and Cultural Odyssey on two generations of Filipino-American surfers based in the San Francisco Bay Area who travel to the Philippines for the first time to experience first-hand how it is to be a Filipino. It is about their transnational experience, citizenship (as both American and Filipino), immigration and social issues, cultural integration, reconnection, identity crisis, and personal healing.

    February 25, 2005: Transgendered (LGBT) Immigration Policy
    This event was covered by NBC and the local Asian American and Filipino American print and TV media. It was attended by more than 100 students, faculty, staff, and community members.

    Project Leader: Professors Jay Gonzalez, Politics Department and David Kim, Philosophy Department

13. PICO Project: The Pacific Institute for Community Organizing ("PICO") is the leading organization in empowering marginalized communities to engage in formal processes of public policy and program change. It has over 350 affiliates in California and scores of others elsewhere. The PICO Project will produce a vernacular description of the PICO model of organizing and empowerment for widespread use, complete with a series of oral histories of some of its principals.

    Project Leader: Robert Blair Kaiser, McCarthy Center Visiting Scholar, 2003-04.

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