After the Hurricane Katrina levee failures devastated New Orleans in 2005, TulaneUniversity President Scott Cowen knew that the university's role in the community would never be the same. President Cowen traveled from city to city telling the diaspora of displaced Tulane students, "If service isn't in your DNA, don't come back to Tulane". In 2006, the Tulane Center for Public Service was created, along with the Tulane AmeriCorps VISTA program. Members of the VISTA program were placed in nonprofits around the city, helping them build capacity, coordinate a massive influx of volunteers, and start to rebuild their organizations with an eye towards sustainability. In the last 6 years, the Tulane VISTA program has grown significantly; in 2006, the program mobilized just over 100 service-learning students at a dozen sites, while this past year in 2011, the program engaged over 700 service-learning students at more than 18 different sites, providing over 20,000 hours of service to this community.

But this story is about more than just growth in terms of numbers; the program has also grown in terms of innovation and impact. The Tulane VISTA program places its members at a wide range of non-profits, but it has always had a special focus on education: both supporting education service providers in the community, and connecting those organizations with service learning students and public service interns from Tulane.

Six years later, the Tulane VISTA program continues to impact the New Orleans community through innovative models in member training and support, community engagement, and campus-community collaborations.

In 2011, Tulane collaborated with the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the U.S. Department of Education in conjunction with AmeriCorps, to launch the new Together for Tomorrow program in which 4 school-based VISTA members would work to build parental involvement, community engagement and faith-based partnerships. The premise of the initiative is that the best schools have communities that rally around them, and in order to turn under-performing schools into long-term success stories, it requires collaboration with neighborhood organizations, faith-based groups, local businesses, corporations and individuals from the community who can provide resources to the schools. In addition to conducting outreach and fundraising efforts, the Tulane "Education VISTAs" also mobilize service-learning students and interns from Tulane to help support their projects.

The TulaneAmeriCorps*VISTA program has modeled innovation, resource leveraging, and partnerships to further the impact of service and engaged citizenship during the past six years.