November 18, 2008

Panel Discussion Introduces UCSB Capps Center's New Internship and Public Service Program

The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Religion, Ethics, and Public Life at UC Santa Barbara has joined with Santa Barbara's Nonprofit Support Center to create a new internship and public service program that will allow 10 UCSB juniors and seniors to combine academic study with involvement in one of the 900 or so nonprofit organizations in the area.

To introduce the program, the Capps Center is presenting "The Future of Nonprofits in Santa Barbara," a special panel discussion that will take place on Monday, November 24, at Victoria Hall, 33 W. Victoria St., in Santa Barbara. The event, which begins at 8 p.m., is co-sponsored by the Nonprofit Support Center.

The panel will feature distinguished community leaders who are involved with the nonprofit sector. They will discuss the challenges facing local nonprofit organizations as baby boom executives retire, and how the next generation of nonprofit leaders can be developed. Panelists include Lisa Holden, executive director of the Nonprofit Support Center; Sara Miller McCune, founder and chairwoman of SAGE Publications and president of the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy; Thomas Parker, president of the Hutton Foundation; and Chuck Slosser, executive officer of the Santa Barbara Foundation. John Romo, former president of Santa Barbara City College, will moderate the panel.

"The Capps Center has long wanted an internship with nonprofits in Santa Barbara," said Roof. "We send interns to Washington and to Sacramento, but there is something very exciting and satisfying about the local program because it puts students more directly in contact with people and activities that we know about."

The students selected to participate in the highly competitive, yearlong internship and public service program have enrolled in a fall quarter seminar titled "Internships in Social Ethics" taught by Wade Clark Roof, director of the Capps Center and the J.F. Rowny Professor of Religion and Society at UCSB. During winter and spring quarters the students will serve 10 hours per week as paid interns for local nonprofit agencies.

"We were surprised at the quality of the applicants and the fact that so many students today want to get involved in programs seeking to bring social change or to help people," Roof continued. "There is an untapped idealism and hunger to serve, and it is this that our program is reaching. It is not unlike what the Barack Obama campaign has done in bringing students into a cause."

For more information about the internship program or the panel discussion, call (805) 893-2317.

About UC Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara is a leading research institution that also provides a comprehensive liberal arts learning experience. Our academic community of faculty, students, and staff is characterized by a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the needs of our multicultural and global society. All of this takes place within a living and learning environment like no other, as we draw inspiration from the beauty and resources of our extraordinary location at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.