DOWAGIAC — For incoming students at Southwestern Michigan College this fall, getting acquainted with campus will also mean getting acquainted with the Dowagiac community.

New SMC students will participate in a community service day from 10 a.m. to noon on Aug. 31 as part of their welcome week activities. For the community service day groups of new students will work together to complete community service projects around the city. Projects include park beautification, and city cleanup and painting projects, in addition to a group that will be staying on SMC’s campus making blankets for those in need.

“Any opportunity we have to go into Dowagiac and be good members of the community is really going to help out students,” said Katie Hannah, first year experience manager for SMC.

The community service day is fitting in with a larger push from SMC to get students involved in downtown life, said Joe Odenwald, vice president of student services at SMC. Other initiatives launched include a Downtown at Dusk event, which will also take place during welcome week, a shuttle to downtown once a week and a partnership between the college and the chamber of commerce to provide students discounts at local businesses.

“I we want to get kids involved and right out of the gate doing service, and send the message that the community supports the college and we support the community,” he said. “Our students will be serving together and getting to know the campus, each other and the community at the same time.

“Part of our first-year experience is engaging students in new activities, so we do fun activities, and we have our academic activities, but we really wanted to find a way to encourage students to be good members of the community,” Hannah added. “This is the best way to do it, by getting them out into the community and introduce them to Dowagiac — some students may have never been downtown — and show them all it has to offer. We want to give them an introduction to all the resources [students] will have right in their neighborhood.”

Both Hannah and Odenwald added that the community service day also fits in the college’s plan to promote community service more, something that has already been a long-time priority for the honors program at SMC.

“We want to have that service element and get as many students involved as we can,” Odenwald said. “We want to make that a pillar of our clubs and organizations on campus. We want to show that we are a campus that serves our community.”

Should the community service day prove successful, Odenwald said he would like to see the community service day grow and expand to other areas in Cass County.

“I’d like to see this become a tradition,” he said. “And we are looking at other ways we can do community services, like on [Martin Luther] King Day and around the holidays. … I want our students — no matter where life takes them — to have a sense of ‘how can I be a part of maintaining and improving where I am living.’ To me, it is character and citizenship education.”