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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE |
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CONTACT: Casey
Kockler |
State Rep. Thomas
Petrone |
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Joint Urban Affairs and Local Government Committee meeting addresses university-community partnerships
HARRISBURG, June 20 – State Rep. Thomas Petrone, D-Allegheny, co-chaired a joint meeting of the House Urban Affairs and Local Government committees today to address the economic and social impact of university-community partnerships in Pennsylvania.
“Today’s meeting was truly exciting and enlightening as I saw the potential benefits we could reap by taking the partnership plan statewide,” Petrone said. “The college communities that are currently involved in a partnership are experiencing economic, cultural and civic impacts that are improving those areas, and I believe our Commonwealth needs to look further into this idea.”
Representatives from the Joint Urban Studies Center, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pennsylvania and Slippery Rock University testified on the merits of implementing a university-community partnership program.
Pennsylvania has 453 colleges and universities, the third highest number in the United States.
According to the Institute for Community, Service-Learning and Non-profit Leadership, if each Pennsylvania college student completed 10 hours of service each year, they would generate a total of 5.9 million service hours to benefit the state. Furthermore, if each college student assisted 20 people per year in a service fashion, the entire Commonwealth would benefit from college student service.
“Pennsylvania’s multitude of post-secondary learning facilities provides a great untapped resource in our state. If we could harness the power of these institutions, even through something as simple as requiring service hours of each student, we could see a vast improvement in the quality of life in a short amount of time, at no cost to taxpayers,” Petrone said.
Petrone, majority chairman of the House Urban Affairs Committee, said he plans to study the idea of university-community partnerships in upcoming hearings. He hopes to focus on ways that the state can facilitate more academic-community partnerships as well as identify and remove any impediments that might stand in the way of those ventures.
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