Campus Outreach Opportunity League - The COOL National Conference

The COOL National Conference

The only COOL program that continued throughout its twenty year history was its National Conference on Student Community Service, more commonly known as "the COOL Conference." Its first few years, it attracted a couple hundred students and administrators and it grew large when hosted by Fordham University, with more than 1,200 students and administrators attending. In similar years at UCLA, in New Orleans and then Orlando, multiple campuses hosted this large and dynamic event. The largest COOL Conference may have been in 2000 at Saint Anselm College when over 2,000 students attended the event.

This program also continued as part of the Idealist on Campus program within Action Without Borders. After AWB/Idealist.org decided to discontinue the program, a group of volunteers stepped forward to continue the conference as an all-volunteer organized event. Heather Cronk, who had served on the staff of Idealist On Campus and planned a number of conference in that capacity, and Abby Kiesa, from CIRCLE led the volunteer organizing effort. John Sarvey, who had served as the National Conference Director for COOL from 1991 to 1994 joined the volunteer effort and arranged to have Northeastern University hosted the next conference. The planning committee re-branded it "IMPACT: National Student Conference on Community Service, Advocacy, and Social Action." In 2009 the conference was hosted by the University of Maryland, College Park and in 2010, the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. The next conference, in 2011, will be hosted by Stetson University.

PAST AND UPCOMING HOST CAMPUSES

1985: Harvard University—Cambridge, Massachusetts

1986: Brown University—Providence, Rhode Island

1987: Georgetown University—Washington, DC

1988: Stanford University—Palo Alto, California

1989: Fordham University—Bronx, New York

1990: University of California, Los Angeles—Los Angeles, California

1991: Dillard University, Tulane University, Xavier University, SUNO, others—New Orleans, Louisiana

1992: Rollins College, University of Central Florida, Valencia Community College—Orlando, Florida

1993: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign—Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

1994: University of Massachusetts Boston – Boston, Massachusetts

1995: Arizona State University—Tempe, Arizona

1996: George Washington University—Washington, DC

1997: Case Western Reserve University—Cleveland, Ohio

1998: University of South Carolina—Columbia, South Carolina

1999: University of Utah—Salt Lake City, Utah

2000: Saint Anselm College—Goffstown, New Hampshire

2001: Harvard University—Cambridge, Massachusetts

2002: Morehouse College—Atlanta, Georgia

2003: Cleveland State University—Cleveland, Ohio

2004: University of Pennsylvania—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2005: University of California-Berkeley—Berkeley, California

2006: Vanderbilt University—Nashville, Tennessee

2007: DePaul University—Chicago, Illinois

2008: Northeastern University – Boston, Massachusetts

2009: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland

2010: University of Arkansas, Little Rock – Little Rock, Arkansas

2011: Stetson University - Deland, Florida