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Community

At SMU, community means building supportive relationships and doing your part to shape and improve your campus, your city and beyond.

Impact on campus

Giving Day
Figure: SMU Giving Day supports a myriad of student clubs and organizations every year.

Having community impact begins wherever one stands. At SMU, Mustangs have opportunities every day to make a difference in large and small ways on campus.  Some ways to be engaged with community on campus include:

Service in Dallas

Giving back to the city

We love to give back! SMU was awarded the 2026 Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement, meaning we engage with our community in deep, mutually beneficial ways. SMU’s Social Change and Intercultural Engagement (SCIE) team connects you with service opportunities on campus and throughout Dallas. Top SCIE service programs:

  • Engage Dallas – Student groups from SMU Residential Commons select sites to serve throughout South and West Dallas.
  • The Big Event – In this largest one-day student-run national service project, students across the United States dedicate a day to giving back to their local communities.
  • Mustang Heroes – Students serve through ongoing projects in Dallas.
  • Alternative Breaks – Students perform community service projects during their spring and fall breaks.

Dallas has many initiatives that allow citizens to incorporate giving back in day-to-day life:

  • Take high-energy dogs for a run as part of Dallas Animal Services D90 Dog Runners program.
  • Volunteer at organizations such as Austin Street Shelter or the North Texas Food Bank.
The Big Event
Figure: The Big Event is an annual service opportunity that sends SMU students out into the greater Dallas community.

Societal contributions

Mason Morland
Figure: Mason Morland ’24 makes his pitch during Big iDeas.

The work SMU students are doing here in Dallas have real-world impact. The entrepreneurial spirit of SMU has led to many projects and initiatives that continue to serve humanity at large.

  • Raleigh Dewan ’23 and Mason Morland ’24 are co-founders of SteadiSpoon (a Big iDea Pitch competitor), a self-stabilizing eating utensil that allows people suffering from disorders that cause shaking to regain their ability to feed themselves with ease and dignity.
  • Joshua Baier ’24 founded TIMIO, a news aggregator which identifies bias reporting.
  • SMU Impact Lab provides students, faculty and alumni the opportunity to invest in solutions to complex community problems. The SMU Impact Lab was established through a grant from the Phillips Foundation (executive director, Elizabeth Carlock Phillips ’09).

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