Community Engagement and Public Service Activities

Students volunteer their time each year from January to April to assist low-incomes families with tax returns through Chicago-based organization Ladder Up and its Tax Assistance Program (TAP). Students of any major or program can volunteer and earn experiential learning credit. All training is fully provided.

Ladder Up is a nonprofit organization providing free financial resources to families and individuals needing help in moving up the economic ladder. It relies on the time and generosity of volunteers to meet its goal of file accurate tax returns and securing unclaimed tax credits for people and communities that are underserved.

The Cities Project is a non-profit collaboration between Chicago universities and Chicago Public Schools. We do research to understand how stressful life experiences affect young people and how young people can learn and grow from stress. We use the results of that research to create programs that support healing while also fighting root causes of stress and trauma. We evaluate those programs to determine how they can become more effective and continuously work to increase our impact.

MUS-208 Community Audio Art students contributed 5 recordings of original live music performances at DePaul Art Museum.  Students also created a "pop-up" sound-installation using the entire Holtschneider Performance Center (including the elevator and multiple multi-media classrooms).  The class worked closely with Jim Duignan, College of Education (Visual Art). A group of students also worked with film maker Mark Siska (Siska Films, LLC) on a documentary about blues piano legend Erwin Helfer (who has a street dedicated to him just west of campus on Magnolia).

On April 29, 2022, a group of DePaul's Strobel Honors Accounting students attended a volunteer event at the Chicago Food Depository.  The event was designed to give back to the community and to allow students to network with accounting firm professionals.  We had about 30 honors students attending the event along with 10 professionals from BDO, Grant Thornton, Plante Moran, PwC, KPMG, and RSM.  The participants helped to package 6,000 pounds of potatoes, leading to us preparing 207 meals per each volunteer. The Chicago Food Depository helps individuals and families throughout Cook County. In addition to giving back to our community, the students were able to network with professionals to learn more about the firms and accounting careers.

DePaul University’s first ever 24-hour gaming marathon raises $1500 for Extra Life, Lurie’s Children’s Hospital

We are a collective of poets & our manual typewriters whose mission is to appear around the city in public places — street festivals, museums, libraries, theaters, & events — to provide our patrons with a magical, unexpected, unpretentious, & decontextualized encounter with poetry. No requested topic is too big or too small, too funny or too sad, too silly or too serious.