Landis Center
The Landis Center is a place where students can go to develop leadership skills through service in 3 programs. Pre-Orientation Service Program, Alternative School Break and MOSAIC. It was during 1960 that the Church of Lafayette College became very active within the city by using Dock St. Mission. Eventually there would be vehicles bought to transport volunteers to different programs within the community.
During 1970, the option for community service was quite limited and eventually there was a handful of students that began volunteering as tutors and that lead to the creation of Black Children Can. Then in 1983, Father Thomas Hagan had formed the Prison Tutoring Program, Adopt a Grandparent Program, and Soup Kitchen and this lead to asking for volunteers from the community to help in 1984. It was during 1985 that Lafayette College had become the first college to join Project for Community & Public Service and the Haiti Program was created which would take students to Haiti during school breaks. This created an additional 10 volunteer opportunities that would become available and over 150 students volunteering.
Then during 1986, the very first student was hired to be a coordinator for volunteers and they worked out of the Chaplain’s office. This lead to the creation of the Children’s Home of Easton volunteer program. After that the Girls & Boys Club was created for Easton and a workshop was held for philanthropy for Greek organizations, which lead to there being over 200 volunteers.
It was during 1988 that the Haiti Program had became Hands Together and it had opened a shelter for the homeless community which was originally within different parts of the college and eventually moved to a church. Then 5 students were hired using the Work Study Program which had started to schedule activities for volunteers and an additional vehicle was bought to be used to transport volunteers to outreach programs. This lead to the formation of community groups to start Safe Harbor Easton, which was a homeless shelter. At the same time Hands Together was running a roving shelter during winter until the shelter was finished.
1990 brought the Spring Garden School campus program and a newsletter that talked about volunteer efforts was published and it was called Campus Community Connection. It was then that Lafayette was awarded a grant to hire a coordinator to run multiple community programs, and it was around this time that there were over 300 students volunteering.
During 1992, Lafayette College was awarded a $20,000 grant from the ACTION program in order to grow their programs within the outreach center. This caused the creation of many other programs such as LIFT which is a mentoring program for 4th graders who attend March School as well as Pillars for Single Parents which was a program that supported single parents with tutoring, child care, and much more.
By the end of the 1990s, Lafayette College had many community programs going on which even allowed there to be more Alternative School Break trips, as well as the training tutors for after school tutoring programs, and local preschools and elementary schools.