Madison House is incredibly thankful to the UVA Parents Fund for their generous support during this academic year. UVA Today featured Madison House in a story about how the Parents Fund enhances the experience of University students through grants. Click the link below to read all about the technological upgrades we are able to make thanks to their grant of nearly $28,000.

Here is an excerpt from the UVA Today article:

“… There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature & fortune have measured to him.”

-- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Rutledge, Dec. 27, 1796

Jefferson’s notion of service to community is woven throughout the University of Virginia. Madison House, UVA’s largest volunteer clearinghouse, enables approximately one in five undergraduates to serve the community each each year.

Among other things, that means more sports coaches for young teams in the Charlottesville-Albemarle community, more volunteers for Habitat for Humanity and more UVA students working with refugee youth arriving to Charlottesville from countries like Burma, Congo, Iraq and Liberia.

“We have about 3,100 students who volunteer on a weekly basis throughout the year at 168 local sites,” Tim Freilich, Madison House’s executive director, said. That service was worth $2.5 million last year. But logging all of those volunteer hours had become a chore because Madison House was using an antiquated system.

For help, Freilich turned to the UVA’s Parents Fund, which makes annual grants to enhance the undergraduate student experience. A grant of nearly $28,000 enabled the volunteer hub to upgrade to a sophisticated system that enables students to log their hours using a smart phone. The funding was also used to upgrade Madison House’s computer lab.

Would Madison House have been able to make the upgrades without the grant? “No,” Freilich said. “The grant is letting us upgrade our systems in a way that we would not have been able to do otherwise.”

Read the complete story HERE.