Elaine Madison, DukeEngage associate director for programs, has been named the 2013 Civic Engagement Professional of the Year by North Carolina Campus Compact.
Madison is being honored in a ceremony today, Wednesday, Feb. 13, at Elon University, as part of the PACE (Pathways to Achieving Civic Engagement) conference.
For more than 20 years, Madison has played a key role in institutionalizing civic engagement at Duke University. Early efforts included convening faculty to discuss how Duke could help students become engaged citizens and organizing a Dean’s Advisory Committee on Service-Learning. Since 1994, she has served as director of the Duke University Community Service Center where she has led the creation and sustainability of Duke service programs such as Break for Change, America Reads, Habitat for Humanity and the Partnership for Literacy. In 2007, she served on a Provost-appointed task force to envision what would become DukeEngage—now the leading reason students indicate they are applying to Duke.
Her significant work around civic engagement at Duke includes working to establish the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership initiative, guiding a strategic planning process, writing a comprehensive travel policy for students’ domestic and international service experiences, developing an evaluation and assessment plan, facilitating a joint philanthropic program with the Volunteer Center of Durham and the Durham Department of Social Services, coordinating Duke’s 2008 application through which the University received the Community Engagement Classification from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and, in 2009, doing the work that earned Duke University the President’s Award, the top honor given on the President’s Higher Education Community Service Roll.