2009 ANNUAL REPORT OF PROGRAM ACTIVITIES

Please add narrative text that responds to the questions in the four categories below.

Implementation of Student Development Implementation of Community Partnerships Campus-Wide Culture and Infrastructure  Serve 2.0  Campus Issue Profiles

 

---

Implementation of Student Development

Training, Courses, and Meetings

First semester, we hosted a successful Orientation for our first-years which led to our LA101 (Liberal Arts 101) class entitled “A Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World” where Bonner Ideals (Common Commitments, Student Development Model, etc.) were introduced along with structured reflection around each student’s service placements.  After this class, students are then required to take the following sequence of classes: ID/PSY 212 (Bonner Service I/Social Entrepreneurship Seminar) in their Sophomore Year and ID/PSY 312 (Bonner Service II/Social Entrepreneurship Practicum) in the Junior year which helps students develop their respective capstone projects, further explore how to integrate academic interests into service work, grow in leadership with Community Partners, and look at how non-profits function effectively or ineffectively.  We began the transition from Monthly Meetings and individual service placements to issue/site-based teams and weekly meetings alternating between site-based and class-based teams.

Second Semester, we implemented the new weekly meeting structure with slow success, but ended the semester strong.  We used faculty to facilitate two issue teams (Poverty&Housing and Healthcare).  Members of our BLT (Bonner Leadership Team) facilitated and helped program the Class-Based meetings which consisted of event and cornerstone activity planning and skills training under the guidance of our Center Staff.

Cornerstone Activities

Our First year trip was, again, held in Charleston, SC where we partnered with the United Methodist Relief Center to perform construction and learn about housing issues in the South Carolina Low Country.  Sophomore Exchange this year centered on issues of nuclear proliferation in East Tennessee.  We met-up with Tusculum College Bonners and went to a demonstration in Oak Ridge Tennessee where Nuclear Peace activists (sponsored by OREPA: The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliange) gathered to stage a peaceful protest at the gates of the Y-12 Nuclear Facility.  This event marked the end of “Who Would Jesus Bomb? Week” at Carson-Newman where several Bonners and faculty hosted discussions and film screenings around the issue of Nuclear Proliferation (one discussion involved both Amnesty International and the ROTC students on campus). Our Juniors and Seniors went to Philadelphia for our annual Jr/Sr Trip this year.  The trip mainly focused on urban non-profit work and how different organizations do this work in Philadelphia (Walking Fish Theater, The Simple Way, BuildABridge) and Camden, NJ (The Romero Center).  We also paid a visit to The TCNJ Bonner House and then  spent some time with Wayne at the Bonner Foundation in Princeton.

For Senior Capstones, every senior was paired with one or two fellow students and presented the story of their journey as Bonners (all students were required to attend at least one capstone night during the Spring Semester and write a reflection).  Regarding leadership roles, we have continued with great success to utilize our BLT (Bonner Leadership Team) to help make decisions for the program and drive student involvement in the program.  We also had a fantastic team of core student leaders with our President, Senior Intern, and Congress Reps who all kept office hours and some of which served on our Student Advisory Council, which meets with students on program probation to discuss a recovery plan for the student’s status with the Program.  

Serve 2.0

     We owe a great debt to Jennifer Tramel, our senior intern and Bonner Video Star Award Winner, for implementing the Bobo Show and Bobo Info to help build the capacity of our program and build community among our students.  We started a campus wiki, and students had a small part to play in its development, but we are forming a student committee on web-based tools for the Fall to help us implement the wiki and other resources (blog, videos, etc.) more effectively.  We successfully made a few videos covering events for the program (Wayne’s Visit and our Bonner Visitation Day), but we are looking to use videos more in our work with community partners.  Facebook has continued to be a good resource for us, especially with event planning and tracking down students.

 

---

Implementation of Community Partnerships

 

Arrangement & Management of Partnerships

Our shift from the “shotgun approach” to service sites (with as many as 20 different placements in a given semester) to more thoughtful Community Partnerships has been slow-moving this year, but we have made some great progress.  We decided early in the year to focus our main efforts to a few well-known sites then build on that progress.  As of right now, we have 2 very STRONG community partnerships with Appalachian Outreach and the Hillview Housing Authority that have worked well this year.  In an attempt to help our Freshmen get started in good fashion, we placed all of them at Appalachian Outreach (doing different things from working in the Homeless shelter to rural construction) and we had very consistent and helpful feedback from AO for the most part.  With Hillview, we had a fantastic core group of older students working there who conducted a CBR project identifying community needs and assets, which in turn led to a successful grant proposal for computers for their community center facility.  In terms of strategic planning, these are the two main sites we worked with to develop a more holistic relationship where we communicate well and share resources.  This summer, we are taking steps to improve our relationships with our Community Partners by meeting with organizations we are not as familiar with, such as The African American Heritage Alliance (AAHA), Habitat for Humanity of Jefferson County, Good Earth Community Farms, Jefferson County Housing Authority, and Hope for Healing (an abuse recovery center).  We also had a graduate intern develop a Community Partner Handbook for use by Partners beginning this Fall.  Like TCNJ’s placement process, we will have a Community Partner Placement & Discussion meeting at the beginning of the school year where partners present their organizations and students begin scheduling their work hours.  

Partners as Co-Educators & Site/Issue-Based Model

We have tapped a number of community partners as resources for co-education in the past year.  Marie Cirillo at the Clearfork Center in Eagen, TN and the staff at the Highlander Center were both very helpful with our New Bonner Orientation last fall.  Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center and OREPA (The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance) helped us during the year with Earth Week programming and the “Would Would Jesus Bomb? Week” which coincided with our Sophomore Exchange.  The staff with the United Methodist Relief Center in Charleston, SC were also very interactive in helping our students understand the history of that area and the significance of their work in the context of diversity, social justice, spiritual exploration, and civic engagement.  In the Fall, we hope to involve community partners more in our bi-weekly Issue-Team meetings and work towards a concentrated Site-based model where we have six or seven teams meeting regularly with community partners to build capacity and work as teams at the sites.

Capacity Building

This past year, several of our students helped their sites by establishing Issue groups on Facebook to raise awareness, and also helped with PR and volunteer recruitment using Facebook to spread the word (a resource agencies hadn’t utilized in the past).  We had one student (Kristy Snider, Freshman) successfully research and write a grant for Appalachian Outreach to raise money for their new Homeless Shelter (we currently have no shelters for Homeless males in our entire county!).  We also have a group of Bonners at the Boys & Girls Club using Local Summer money to take their students on College visits as part of a new college readiness initiative we have started called SEFE: Student Encouraging Further Education.

 

Campus-Wide Culture and Infrastructure 

  

Faculty engagement and academic connections. 

 

We have established a group of 20 faculty designated as Bonner Fellows who are doing engaged scholarship in their teaching and research and who are highly supportive Bonner Scholars programs on campus.  We kept them informed of Bonner Center happenings and developments, solicited their feedback on new ideas, and involved them in Bonner events and projects.  For example, two Bonner Fellows facilitated issue-based teams that met on alternate weeks in the Spring Semester.  Several helped with the interview sessions on Bonner Visitation Day  About 25 Fellows and other interested faculty attended a fall workshop for faculty on service learning sponsored by the Bonner Center.  About 30 Fellows and other interested faculty attended the dialog opportunity with Wayne Meisel in April.  One Fellow served as faculty advisor for a new campus group started by a Bonner Scholar called Students for Campus Diversity and also facilitated the Martin Luther King Day Teach-In that involved several Bonner Scholars as session leaders; one served as faculty advisor for the campus-wide Carson-Newman Recycles initiative that is entirely led by Bonner Scholars; one served as a panelist for discussion of U.S. nuclear weapons policy that was part of our Sophomore Exchange week-long program called “Who Would Jesus Bomb? Christians and Nuclear Disarmament;” one located a speaker for another new initiative started by a Bonner Scholar called “Dialogs4Diversity.”  At least three Fellows have attended our digital story telling planning sessions we have held with our newest community partner, the African American Heritage Alliance. 

      Course-wise, we have a three-course sequence for Bonner Scholars (described elsewhere) that helps integrate the Bonner journey with the student’s academic experience.  Many of our Bonner Fellows teach classes across the curriculum that involve service learning, community-based research, or public policy, and that comprise our array of minors related to civic engagement (Nonprofit Leadership & Social Entrepreneurship, Women’s Studies, Appalachian Studies, Conflict & Justice Studies, and Environmental & Community Studies).  All new students at Carson-Newman are now required to enroll in a course called “Liberal Arts Seminar” that includes a service learning component.      

Relationships and activities involving other departments or divisions.  

We worked closely with Admissions and Financial Aid to recruit a strong class of in-coming Bonner freshmen.  In the fall semester, an ad hoc committee of Bonner, Admissions, and Financial Aid staff met regularly with several interested Bonner Scholars to plan our first Bonner Visitation Day in February that drew over 40 prospective students and their parents from as far away as Michigan and Iowa.  A second major set of collaborations was with Campus Ministries and Student Development (Student Activities, Career Office) for a series of events including an all-campus service day (“Operation InAsMuch”), community service opportunity fairs in the fall and spring, a nonprofit career information booklet and table coinciding with the chapel service entitled “Send Me” featuring Wayne Meisel as speaker, and Earth Week that included an environmental service event, a hybrid car show, an environmental organizational fair, and an Earth Day chapel co-sponsored by one of our community partners, Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center.     

Unique initiatives to institutionalize service and civic engagement on campus.   

 

One central component of the college’s mission statement is to inculcate in all our students a lifelong commitment to service.  By declaring service in our mission statement, our accrediting agency holds us accountable for articulating and measuring that aspect of our institutional mission.  Social responsibility is one of five categories of coursework and learning outcomes that comprise the official general education core required of all students.  Again, service has been integrated into how we define institutional effectiveness here.  Service learning is a component of the universally required course for all new students, Liberal Arts Seminar.  Carson-Newman gives two faculty awards annually at our Honors Convocation, the Distinguished Faculty Award and the Community Service Award, whose names largely reflect our list of Bonner Fellows.  Community service and engaged scholarship are officially recognized criteria for promotion and tenure as stated in our Faculty Handbook.  This year Bonner Center proposed establishing a new standing committee called the Engaged Scholarship Committee, to promote and recognize service learning, community-based research, policy research, and other forms of action pedagogy.  We also began a review process in insure inclusion of service in general and the Bonner Center in particular in each new publication of the college catalog.  

 

---

Serve 2.0 

 

Our Bonner Program Wiki: cnbonner.pbworks.com

           

Our Program wiki still needs considerable work, in that our students have mainly used it to access our program calendar and plan events.  It is also a good place to find links to Bonner Foundation resources (wiki, website, Webbers, etc.), so students can access those conveniently.  This summer, we are working on including the following to our wiki:

·      Our entire revised Bonner Student Handbook for student use,

·      Lists and explanations of all moneys available from the Foundation (i.e. Community fund, Jr/Sr Leadership, etc.) in one place.

·      Site Planning wikis for each Community Partner

·      Project planning wikis for each of our projects this year (i.e. Fall Retreat, Community Service Day)

·      Summer Internship possibilities

One Bonner staffer is signed-up for the Bonner Network Forum on Ning, but the students have not latched on to the opportunity yet.  In the Fall, we are starting a Web team that will try to push these different things and manage all our online accounts.  We took a shot at using Twitter with the students….we have a page, but very few of my students are on Twitter, so it was not very successful this year.  Since Twitter is gaining more popularity, we will have an easier time with this in the Fall.  We have used our FlipCam at practically every event and meeting since we received it.  We have used YouTube to broadcast our famed Bobo Shows to everyone, and we have found that to be very successful for both community outreach and inreach.  With the Bonner Video Project, we are beginning to implement the assignments listed, by using our camera to catalog Wayne’s visit to campus and our Bonner Visitation Day.

 

 

---

Campus Issue Profiles

Add links to your completed or draft campus issue profiles here:

• Education 
• Environment