The Service Integration Project, Office of Student Leadership & Civic Engagement, annually presents the Exceptional Achievement in Service Learning Instruction Award to an outstanding Colorado State University faculty. The award recipient is honored for developing service learning curriculum that encourages the acquisition of academic knowledge while addressing community needs. The recipient is also recognized for leadership in disseminating service learning ideas to other colleagues.

Margarita Maria Lenk, Ph.D., CMA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Information Systems and the Department of Accounting in the College of Business at Colorado State University (CSU), in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is a member of the National Campus Compact Service Learning Scholar Consulting Corps. She recently finished her contract as an Engaged Scholar for the Campus Compact Indicators of Engagement Project – Minority Serving Institutions. In both 2004 and 2005, Margarita was honored as one of the top ten finalists for the Thomas Ehrlich Award, the top Service-Learning award for faculty in the USA. Over the past ten years, Margarita has been facilitating service-learning adoption and institutionalization on dozens of campuses and communities in the US, in Argentina (her native country) and in Japan.

In addition, Margarita has published many service learning articles, cases and chapters in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Issues in Accounting Education, Journal of Information Systems Education, Review of Accounting Information Systems, Business Communication Quarterly, and a chapter in Learning by Doing: Service Learning in Accounting. She also started the Active Learning Committee within the Teaching and Curriculum Section of the American Accounting Association and serves on the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Diversity Initiatives Committee.

Margarita is also a CSU Service-Learning Faculty Fellow, is a member of the CSU Service-Learning Faculty Advisory Committee, and has been honored with the Community Bank College of Business Service-Learning Fellowship Award in 2004. Margarita has also received many other service-learning related teaching awards, including the 2006 Excellence in Service-Learning Instruction at CSU, the 1997 Outstanding Accounting Educator in the State of Colorado Award from the Colorado Society of CPA’s, the 1996-97 Colorado State University Instructional Innovation in Service Learning Award, the 2002 Outstanding Professor in the College of Business, and the 2001 Excellence in Service Award for the College of Business.

Over the past 15 years, Margarita has developed and taught ten different service-learning courses at Colorado State University at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her students have helped nonprofit boards of directors understand their fiduciary responsibilities for organizational governance and asset security, built spreadsheets, databases, and websites for local nonprofit agencies, evaluated the cash receipts and cash disbursement cycles, documented business processes within local government agencies and with the CSU internal auditors, and have tutored many different ages of students in the local school district.

Through her work on the CSU Service-learning Advisory Committee, she has helped to change the CSU Faculty Senate Code to include civic engagement criteria for faculty tenure and promotion decisions and to have civic engagement in the strategic plans of the university and the College of Business. She has helped to develop CSU’s high standards and thorough faculty training programs for service learning courses, as well as both formative and summative assessment measures of the academic learning outcomes and campus culture benefits of service-learning and civic engagement work. Currently, there are about 80 service-learning courses involving over 2,000 students each semester at Colorado State University.