History

The Center for Community Engagement at USU coordinates the One Utah Service Fellowship Program on behalf of the Utah Commission on Service and Volunteerism. In 2024, legislation passed to support the One Utah Service Fellowship, which gives post-high school young adults and matriculated college students real world experience working in various areas of public service. Additionally, the bill allocates funds to provide the participants with stipends. These stipends allow the young adults to explore careers in public service, as opportunities in these sectors are typically unfunded.

In the early 1990s, institutions of higher education in Utah were loosely organized in the Serving Utah Network (SUN) that sought to strengthen community service and learning at each of the state’s colleges and universities. Most institutions had some level of involvement in community service, but many staff and faculty desired to deepen this commitment and hoped to better integrate service into the curriculum.

On November 21, 1996, a coalition of all of Utah’s college and university presidents formally created the Utah Campus Compact with a mission to foster in students the values and skills of citizenship through active involvement in academically‐based and co curricular public and community service. The Board of Directors, consisting of all member campus presidents, approved the mission statement, and Utah became the 18th state to join the national Campus Compact network.
In 2004 an annual Utah State Legislative appropriation was approved, and in 2005 Utah became the first state compact to include all of its non‐profit higher education institutions. In 2008, guided by a new strategic plan, UCC focused on two main goals: 1) to continue to advance community engagement in higher education across the state as it had done for the past ten years; and 2) undertake a statewide higher education initiative. They worked to embed engagement more deeply across each campus and bridge the opportunity gap by improving educational access and success.

In 2011, Utah Campus Compact added the Segal Education Award Program funded by AmeriCorps as it’s keystone service opportunity. Since then the program grew to fund the educations of more than 5,000 college and university students to the tune of 12.1 million dollars.

In 2018, as many of the presidents of the public universities in Utah were moving on to new career opportunities, they, as the board of directors for Utah decided to disband the compact, but insisted on maintaining the AmeriCorps Program. Out of that decision, program was transferred to the Center for Community Engagement at USU and continued to operate as the Utah Higher Education AmeriCorps Network.