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ReimaginingService.org is a community and a platform to foster ideas that make an impact. It is a place for anyone who believes that volunteering is more than just "a nice thing to do," and that it holds the key to addressing some of our communities' toughest challenges. This website features the Reimagining Service report, written by a community of leaders from the government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors.

In the recession, the nation's poverty rate climbed to 13.2 percent last year, up from 12.5 percent in 2007, according to an annual report released Thursday by the Census Bureau. The report also documented a decline in employer-provided health insurance and in coverage for adults. The rise in the poverty rate, to the highest level since 1997, portends even larger increases this year, which has registered far higher unemployment than in 2008, economists said.

Barack Obama began his presidential campaign by promising to make public service "cool" again. He is now working to honor that pledge by strengthening three types of service: a day of volunteering now and again, a year or two with organizations such as AmeriCorps or Teach for America, and lifelong careers working in government or nonprofit agencies. Obama could easily create or save a million public-service jobs by the end of his first term.

Colleges are failing to produce competent public citizens, and accreditors should pay more attention to their performance in that area, says former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida. Mr. Graham says that too many Americans have no idea how to organize their neighbors to affect public policy. Even the students he encountered a few years ago during a visiting position at Harvard University, he says, lacked basic knowledge about how to leverage public power.

Every semester, "service learning" programs send students out to local community organizations to get their hands dirty, putting to use the concepts they learn in the classroom. The intended outcome is a symbiotic relationship between the college and the community. Review of "The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning" (Temple University Press).

For Andrew Seligsohn, the traditional academic path—graduate school, doctorate, tenured professorship—eventually led him away from the ivory tower and into a hands-on involvement with social change as director of civic engagement learning for Princeton University’s Pace Center.

Several studies presented Monday at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference—and one scheduled to be discussed later this week—suggest that the souls of America's youth will not be saved on its college campuses anytime soon. Although many colleges have committed themselves to promoting the moral and ethical development of their students, they generally have not proven very good at the task, their efforts being undermined by their own cultures ...

A new national survey of faculty members shows that the proportion of professors who believe it is very important to teach undergraduates to become "agents of social change" is substantially larger than the proportion who believe it is important to teach students the classic works of Western civilization.

Academic departments at Wagner collaborate with community agencies to deepen students' volunteerism. Stuffing envelopes instills many qualities: humility, patience, tough fingers, and a pasty tongue. It is not, however, known for expanding the intellect. That's what college is supposed to do. And there's the rub. It has been a persistent tension since the 1990s, when service learning became de rigueur on college campuses.