Service, Spirituality and Social Responsibility
As an integral part of Wheaton’s commitment to transformational education, the Office of Service, Spirituality and Social Responsibility (SSSR), located in the basement of Cole Memorial Chapel, coordinates three areas of personal and academic development. Through SSSR, the college supports both curricular and co-curricular programming that encourages students to reflect upon their actions, values and beliefs and on the ways these affect their own intellectual development, the people around them and the communities of which they are a part.
Service at Wheaton is all about partnership—recognizing that involvement with our closest neighbors in southeastern Massachusetts, as well as those in our extended global neighborhood, transforms students’ lives, as well as the lives of their community partners. A commitment to service has long been a hallmark of a Wheaton education. Wheaton students are involved in a broad range of local volunteer opportunities and participate in student-run service clubs and activities, including the Community Service Council, the HERO Tutoring Program, AIDS Prevention and Education Team (APET), and Habitat for Humanity.
At Wheaton, spiritual exploration is valued and encouraged at a secular but vividly multi-faith academic community. Wheaton’s support for spiritual inquiry and practice is based on the belief that such activities enhance intellectual development by promoting religious literacy—an essential prerequisite to global citizenship—and encouraging students to examine and re-examine their values and to live those values to the best of their ability. The college provides opportunities for interfaith dialogue and seasonal interfaith worship services, in collaboration with the student-run Interfaith Alliance, and for tradition-specific study and practice through such organizations as Hillel, Christian Fellowship and the Zen Meditation Group.
Social responsibility describes Wheaton’s approach to civic engagement, global citizenship and constructive political action. Wheaton promotes student-initiated social activism on campus through leadership development, training in community organizing and ample opportunities to explore critical political and social issues from a broad range of ideological perspectives. In this richly diverse learning community, nurturing the ability to build coalitions and to engage in rigorous and respectful political dialogue with people whose experience and opinions differ from one’s own are among our most important functions. Few skills will be more important to our students as they prepare to embrace the complex world they are soon to inherit.
Contact information: x3370 or sssr@wheatoncollege.edu.