Annual Report – Programmatic Section

Please complete this template below to share programmatic highlights.  The entire report can be three pages or less.  Please share information and highlights, in a letter-like or reporting format, that addresses the following three categories and provides a synopsis of your Bonner Program this year.

Implementation of Student Development: 

This was Hamilton's first year for having Bonners begin in the freshman year.  We had a stellar and robust group of applications and began 7 students for 2008-09, with the intention at the beginning of the year to recruit 10 Bonners the next year, bringing Hamilton's number of Bonners to 20 by 2009-10.  One student transferred from Hamilton after her first semester, leaving us with 6 first year Bonners and 5 Bonners completing their second year either as juniors or seniors.  The six first years usually met separately as their needs seemed to be different than the older Bonners, who had their own group meetings, and all met together at least once each month for an all-Bonner meeting/training.  First year Bonners made a trip to Puerto Rico, having arranged to volunteer at a school, a Veteran's hospital, and the Red Cross there.  Once again we were planning for a second year exchange with Siena College and Johnson State College, but we were never able to find a time that worked.  The first year Bonners were all in after-school programs for youth, and that gave a consistency to the issues they were addressing in their sites, though with age groups that varied from elementary through high school.  All Bonner trainings included a "Bridges out of Poverty" training given by two community partners, which they all found valuable.

Bonners were also trained in thinking through the policy issues behind public school education and after school programs in particular.  We began this approach, which will be deepened next year, to encourage an emphasis on policy education and to have the Bonners be better informed as to how policy influences practice at their sites.  They gathered data for the "local" impact portion of the policy options wiki and participated in discussions about funding and planning for the future and began thinking about the needs of their agencies and why they function as they do.  From beginning with an awareness and often criticisms of the way their agencies function, they began to do more critical analysis of the missing pieces, needs, and what could truly improve services where they work.

Implementation of Community Partnerships: 

Meetings with community sites were done solely on an individual basis this year, as it became too sporadic trying to gather them together.   

We did institute a program this year that included community partners in our training schedule for the Bonner Leaders.  Several of our community partners were brand new to us and we to them, as we determined to place the Bonners in sites relevant to a new AmeriCorps VISTA project for us -- The West Side Project.  Kernan Elementary School was a new site, working with the West Side Coaltion to create "Family and School Connections."  This included our Bonner in the after-school program, service-learning courses that brought student volunteers to the school throughout the spring semester, a working group that met at the end of the year on campus (school librarian, three faculty involved, one student, the AmeriCorps VISTA, and the Bonner Leader Director), and the VISTA's participation in the monthly Coalition meetings.  Their Family and School Connections initiative will include Donovan Middle School, where we have three Bonners.  It expands to include more generally the YWCA Y-Girls program, the Underground Cafe, and Thea Bowman, also Bonner sites for after-school care.    These are sites where we've had Bonners now for the past 3 years. 

     A new Bonner is hired for fall to continue from her summer internship under the Policy Options initiative with the Bonner Foundation.  Isabelle Van Hook generated an idea from her involvement with Refugee Resettlement issues to bring peer involvement to the younger adults learning English.  We've now written a grant proposal to the NY/PA Campus Compact Consortium based on Isabelle's idea.  She will be placed in a site with the Utica City School District, following our conversations with the community partners serving this population, especially with 18-20 year-olds for whom little funding is available to provide services when they come as immigrants or refugees.  Isabelle will participate in generating a group independent study which will study this issue, create social events with their non-English speaking peers, and meet regularly with Judith Owens-Manley, who will oversee the independent study and arrange for guest speakers.  A second new Bonner placement will be filled by a returning Bonner who is changing sites.  She will work with the International Red Cross on refugee and immigrant issues, locating family members, dealing with notifying families of mass grave sites when they are identified, and facilitating communication with family members abroad.

Campus-wide Culture and Infrastructure: 

 The campus structure changed significantly this year with the creation of a new office for the campus, Community Outreach and Opportunity Program (COOP) under the Dean of Students Office.  The Office then decided not to participate in the Bonner Program, which had been co-led with the Levitt Center.  This has altered all of our plans, which had been firmly in place to recruit Bonner Leaders through Admissions each year.  The future of our Bonner Leader program is now in question, as a new proposal needs to be drawn up through the Levitt Center, which will require a stronger academic connection.  We had hoped that the partnership between the academic and student development sides of campus would be strengthened through the Bonner program and communication improved.  The COOP has now instead developed their own community internship program with Admissions and Financial Aid instead of participating with the Bonner Foundation.  That will begin in the fall of 2009.  The Levitt Center could choose to keep developing a smaller Bonner Leaders Program focusing more on the policy connections and the implementation of policy in local agencies.  That will be the proposal to be funded as we go forward.