The Simpson College Civic Action Plan seeks to integrate engaged teaching, engaged scholarship, community partnerships, and institutional action into a coherent framework to advance the public purposes of higher education. The plan includes a broad range of action items designed to promote community partnerships, prepare students for lives of engaged citizenship, strengthen communities, challenge inequalities, and set high expectations for achieving goals. Major aspirations identified in the plan include:

• Successfully roll out a new online service tracking and placement system that will enable students to more easily identify service opportunities and report their hours.
• Secure a stable, ongoing source of funding for student internships that promote service and civic engagement.
• Nurture student relationships with partner organizations that may continue after graduation and lead to a range of volunteer service and professional opportunities for alumni.
• Achieve full annual participation in Simpson’s Wesley Service Scholar (WSS) program through enhanced recruitment and retention initiatives.
• Expand Simpson’s annual Undergraduate Research & Creativity Symposium to include other high-impact learning experiences in volunteer service, study abroad, and internships.
• Work with Simpson’s new honors program to incorporate more civic engagement opportunities and service-learning elements into student experiences.
• Continue to increase the voting participation rate of Simpson students in future election cycles.
• Increase the number of faculty members and academic departments that incorporate service learning into syllabi.
• Expand the number and depth of partnerships with student organizations that already support and engage in community-focused projects.
• Encourage and enable faculty members to expand syllabi to include more critical examination of social and economic inequalities.
• Develop sufficient endowment funds to provide more financial assistance to low-income students.
• Examine and incorporate elements of the Culturally Engaging Campus Environments model.
• Successfully implement an annual service focus area.
• Utilize metrics to better gauge student participation.
• As part of future curriculum revisions, explore the possibility of requiring experiential learning or other high-impact practices which could include service learning, internships, study abroad, leadership positions, or undergraduate research.