Since its founding in 1988, the MIT Public Service Center (PSC) has gone far beyond the typical student volunteer clearinghouse. The PSC treats service activities as learning experiences that will be as useful for students as classroom work. The Center encourages students to apply their inventive and entrepreneurial talents to public service. The PSC also teaches MIT students how to meet challenges and manage projects with innovation and creativity. The PSC itself operates in that same entrepreneurial spirit, solving problems in new ways.

That philosophy explains a lot about the PSC, including the breadth of the challenges students take on under its auspices — from mentoring pupils in Cambridge schools to inventing technologies for use around the world. MIT students generate the ideas for their PSC projects and create opportunities for themselves. They plan initiatives, raise money, and run programs. These projects challenge students to recognize their skills and what those skills equip them to do in the world. And, not to be forgotten, these students are helping others every step of the way. Each program is an opportunity for students to think imaginatively and to learn, while accomplishing great things.

“Our aim is to help people understand their capacity for changing the world,” says Sally Susnowitz, director of the PSC.

The students’ contributions to local schools and families reflect the creativity that is one of the Center’s hallmarks. For example:

• iMath engages area pupils with an interactive Web site so they can see math and geometry at work, and also learn directly from an MIT student mentor;
• SciPro matches MIT students with economically disadvantaged middle and high school pupils, each of whom designs and develops a science project over a 10-week period; and
• Keys to Empowering Youth (KEYs) enables 11- to 13-year-old girls to meet MIT women students and work on projects with these thoughtful and creative mentors.

Through these and other vehicles, MIT’s mission of service to society has taken on vital new dimensions and emerged as an integral part of the Institute experience for thousands of students. Often, those enterprises involve developing or adapting technology to meet communities’ needs. One team of MIT students designed a system that speeds regeneration of coral reefs in the Philippines by using wind, tidal, and solar power to stimulate the process; another team is harnessing solar power through parabolic collectors to provide electricity for villages in Lesotho.

“These are examples of the ingenuity of MIT students who are using the knowledge gained from MIT, applying it to a project, figuring out what it takes to be effective, and involving as many other students as possible,” Susnowitz says.

The Public Service Center provides students with a launch pad: It aids in the design process, often gives fellowship or grant support, and, where appropriate, assists in integrating the projects into students’ course work. And then MIT students put their entrepreneurial skills and energy to work.

Exciting ideas become reality

The IDEAS Competition is a collaboration between the Public Service Center and the Edgerton Center. (Named for the late Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the Edgerton Center provides hands-on educational experiences for MIT students and others.) “IDEAS” stands for Innovation, Development, Enterprise, Action, and Service. The Competition challenges students to invent things that will solve real problems. Competition winners receive modest funding to help them develop and deploy their designs. They then go on to raise additional money to turn their designs into projects that change people’s lives. Recent inventions include:

• a tele-robotic device for doing lung biopsies that improves the previous trial-and-error way of inserting a needle into a patient’s lung by hand, and that was created at the request of doctors who came to students seeking a better method;
• a pedal-powered washing machine designed for use in a rural area of Guatemala, made from bicycle parts, which enabled MIT students to engineer a new product and also help turn a local individual’s bicycle workshop into a more viable business; and
• a backpack refrigerator powered by a Sterling engine that stores vaccines for transportation by foot to remote regions where roads do not exist for vehicular travel.

The PSC also catalyzes and helps develop in-course projects intended to help the disadvantaged. This “service learning” enterprise, in which students play a core role, has already led to dozens of projects for academic credit and community benefit.

Why your gift matters

The Public Service Center depends mostly on private sources — a few companies, selected foundations, but especially individuals — to support the remarkable work of MIT’s students.

Gifts to the Center have a superb multiplier effect. They provide backing for a group of committed and extremely talented young people — the MIT students who are using their knowledge, inventiveness, and entrepreneurial instincts to help individuals in need. But your gift also aids individuals in Cambridge schools, in a Sri Lankan crisis center for girls and women, in a Native American wool cooperative in Arizona, or in any of a host of other settings.

The Center makes sure there are few limits on students’ imaginations or energies when solving problems. Your naming gift will give future leaders the chance to test their skills in settings where they have dramatic effect.