Walking the Talk

At Warren Wilson, we share your fierce obligation to serve your community. So we walk the talk. Community engagement isn’t optional at Warren Wilson. It’s required.

Here, all students participate in community engagement as a graduation requirement. As you interact with our Community Engagement Commitment, you will think deeply about issues that you are passionate about and collaborate with others to take action.

And as a member of the Warren Wilson community, you will be surrounded by faculty, staff and peers who are dedicated to deconstructing our most pressing social and environmental justice issues and exploring creative solutions right alongside you.

Explore Our Issue Areas

At Warren Wilson College, our engagement in the community is focused on addressing social and environmental justice issues. We find that the issues that we care about in the world are often connected and there are many points of intersection. Students engage with a wide variety of issues, but we commit the most time and develop the deepest partnerships in our designated Issue Areas.

• The Environment
• Food Security
• Housing & Houselessness
• Race & Immigration
• Youth & Education

How You’ll Do It

The Center for Community Engagement supports your involvement by providing a variety of opportunities, including:

• Service-Learning courses
• Alternative Break Trips
• Community Engaged Research
• Internships
• Ongoing commitments with local organizations
• Community engaged work crews

Serious Accolades

We know that many colleges and universities provide service opportunities to their students.

But by integrating community engagement into every aspect of your learning experience and requiring it of all students, our program does a superior job of cultivating engaged citizens.

And we’re not the only ones who think so. We’ve received some serious accolades for our commitment.

• US News and World Report “Top 25 Service-Learning Programs to Look For”.
• Warren Wilson College is 1 of 361 colleges to receive the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification.
• We’re in the Princeton Review Top 10 of students “Most engaged in community service”.
• School of distinction on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
• We’re a “Campus in Action”.

What It Means

Annually, Warren Wilson students complete over 50,000 hours with local, national and global communities.

But we’re interested in more than how many hours our students contribute. We want to know that we’re sending young people into the world with the confidence and experience they need to engage in their future communities. Our alumni tell us it works.

• 86% of Warren Wilson alums indicated that their experience here prepared them well for social and civic involvement (national comparison: 59%).
• 75% of 2015 Warren Wilson graduates said that they felt their community service contributed quite a bit or very much to their learning and personal development (national comparison: 45%)