Joint Educational Project

In 1972, Barbara Seaver Gardner envisioned a program that would contribute to the well-being of the community while offering USC students an opportunity to learn about the issues of poverty, immigration, education and inequality firsthand. Today, the program that Gardner created — the Joint Educational Project housed in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences — is recognized as one of the oldest and best organized service-learning programs in the country.

At the core of service learning is the idea that community service and classroom learning can be linked together for the mutual benefit of community members and students — and that the learning that takes place is defined more by the realities of the world than by the abstract theories and concepts of the classroom. The Joint Educational Project (JEP) acts as a broker between academic courses from USC schools and service agencies in the university's communities, offering students the unique opportunity to combine academic coursework with community experiences. Each year, nearly 2,000 students receive academic credit for their participation in JEP as mentors, mini-course instructors, translators, tutors, teacher's assistants and other helping professionals. To date, more than 45,000 USC students have contributed more than one million hours of service to the community through JEP.

Visit the Joint Educational Project Web site.