Dartmouth Community Services

Encouraging idealism in action

Overview

Dartmouth Community Services (DCS) is idealism in action.  The program facilitates local student community service outreach projects in the Upper Valley region neighboring Dartmouth College.

DCS strives to make real the ideal that learning through serving others, and by helping to build stronger, compassionate and more just communities, is at the heart of a premier liberal arts experience.  The program typically hosts between forty and fifty ongoing, weekly or bi-weekly service projects and referral relationships with local schools and social agencies, and also guides student leaders to offer a variety of large service events and campus celebrations.

The program provides approximately 40,000 hours of service annually, through the passion and work of 1,200 students.  Child and youth mentoring, food and shelter, educational enrichment and community healthcare and fitness are focal emphases in the program.  Every week, students are building affordable houses, cooking community dinners, mentoring area youth, tutoring reading to adults and children, leading outdoor challenges, assisting in free health clinics or visiting "adopted" grandparents.

Projects are student-led and managed, with assistance from Tucker foundation staff advisors.  As a forum for questioning and reflecting, as well as a springboard for action, Dartmouth Community Services is a dynamic evolving organization.

Community service is not selfless.  It’s something that you do with the initial intent of trying to help somebody, but you as a community service provider, end up getting a lot more out of those trips and sometimes even more I would say than the people that you actually go to “help.” I think that one of the most important aspects of community service is to come back to your respective community, to your respective school campus and let them know what you learned, what you experienced.

—Elizabeth Mendoza ’08