The Corporation for National and Community Service announced a $570,000 grant to CIRCLE at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Public Service at Tufts University. The grant will support CIRCLE in building an online community that college students throughout the greater Boston area will use to pool information, deliberate, and coordinate their service and activism. The software is built on a platform called YouthMap, produced by Community Knowledge Base of Wisconsin, which is a sophisticated tool for analyzing networks online and in the real world. For the use of college students, YouthMap will plug into popular social networks. CIRCLE will collaborate with Community Knowledge Base, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Massachusetts Campus Compact, and the Boston Foundation to build, refine, and promote the online community.

According to the Corporation’s press release, “Today’s college students have a strong altruistic bent, and are working in extraordinary ways to tackle some of our most pressing problems,” said Corporation CEO David Eisner. “We want to further ignite this idealism by investing in strong organizations that will use the power of social networking to bring lasting change.” Eisner announced the grants before hundreds of civic, government, and education leaders gathered at the National Conference on Citizenship annual meeting at the National Archives.

The Corporation also made a grant to CIRCLE in partnership with the National Conference on Citizenship to conduct research on volunteering and civic engagement and disseminate research findings. CIRCLE was one of five leading university centers chosen in this competition, according to the Corporation.