Lees-McRae College 2009 Annual Report 2009 ANNUAL REPORT OF PROGRAM ACTIVITIES

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

Implementation of Student Development

Development Structure

During the 2008-2009 academic year we continued with our combined first/second year student meetings and our third/fourth year student meetings.  Because of the change in the college's weekly calendar that took away our scheduled campus-wide free hour we had to move to evening sessions.  While not as convenient as day-time meetings for students or staff, it proved very challenging to find a time when everyone could meet during regular class hours. We kept our bi-weekly meeting schedule with all-Bonner meetings scheduled at the beginning, middle and end of each semester. This year we moved through issues of time management and presence, citizenship and calling, and spent a semester focused on  the environment. Also new for us this year, we created leadership teams for several community events. At the beginning of the fall semester, all students were required to sign up for at least one leadership committee and could chose between organizing blood drives with the American Red Cross, Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, Human Rights Awareness Week, or Relay for Life. We asked students to rank their interest and then tried to make sure that there were first and second year students as well as upper-class students in each group so that they could do peer training within each unit. This format worked exceptionally well and allowed our office to expand our "usual suspects" of students who are involved in the leadership of every event and expanded the leadership opportunities and responsibilities to our entire Bonner family.

Cornerstone Activities

During the fall we hosted a very successful orientation for our first year students. With the leadership from our senior intern, we put together an off-campus retreat at the North Carolina Outward Bound School and also utilized a half of a day in our on-campus computer lab to get the students started early on bwbrs and their AmeriCorps paperwork. The NCOB school was a wonderful location, based at the foot of Table Rock this site provided us with ample outdoor and indoor space to get to know one another and share the history and the student's role in the Bonner Program. We spent time doing ice-breakers, informative Bonner history performances and of course joined together to also complete a service project where we created a trail on the property out of small boulders.

During the spring of this year we also attended a service exchange with Mars Hill College. We hosted Mars Hill during the spring of 2008 and this year they returned the hospitality. We participated in the Crop Walk with their campus and learned about local and global hunger issues and were fortunate enough to attend a Bailey Mountain Clogging Team performance. Students spent the evening playing board games, sharing service stories and comparing notes between Bonner Leader and Bonner Scholar programs.

While we did not host an end of the year service project we did identify several specific students who are interested in organizing a project for the next academic year and plan on making the event part of the sophomore class responsibilities. One of the ways that we bring students together across both academic ranking and Bonner and non-Bonner status here at Lees-McRae is to offer several alternative fall and spring break options. We highly encourage our first year students to participate in either a fall or spring alternative break and have student leadership teams for all programs. Our senior intern and congress representatives serve as the primary student leaders for these events and work together to provide meaningful off-campus service opportunities. This year students participated in three alternative breaks including trips to Jubilee Partners in Comer, Georgia, New York City and the southwest, which included visits to Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon.

Here at Lees-McRae graduating seniors are required to complete an Omega course, which includes research in their field as well as service. This year, each graduating Bonner Leader also incorporated their years in the program into their service, research and their final Omega presentations. Each presentation was given to an audience of peers, faculty, staff and fellow Bonners.

Serve 2.0 Initiatives

If it were not for our senior intern and congress representatives, we would not have been able to participate in the integration of the new Serve 2.0 Initiatives. From the beginning, our intern and one of our congress representatives were assigned the task of creating our wiki page. They took the wiki page and also created a blog for students to use to host conversations around specific service or training events. They created a solid foundation that we hope to continue grow in the coming years. Our congress representatives also took on the video project and while mostly unsuccessful during this past year, we have very high hopes for next year's representatives.

Implementation of Community Partnerships

Management of Partnerships

Because of our limited time as a staff during the academic year we try to conduct site visits during the summer months. For our sites that have been hosting Bonner Leaders and other college-related volunteers for several years we only do a brief visit or phone check-in. For new sites we do an in-person visit that orients the community member on the Bonner Leaders Program, the student's availability and other programmatic details. We remain in contact with all of our members throughout the year and try to also schedule special event site visits throughout the year. Our main growing edge during this next year will be assisting some of our older community partners with creating more independent an involved placements for students who wish to remain with their organization during their junior and senior years. While we have considered creating a restricted list of organizations for students to chose from, we continue to value student's creative choices and allow students to serve at any qualifying agency in the area.

Partners as Co-Educators

One of the most clear linkages between in and out of the classroom education has been with our Director of the Blue Ridge Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Nina Fischesser, is both the Director of this local non-profit and also a faculty member in the Wildlife Rehabilitation major for the college. This direct connection allows our students to fully integrate their academic and service pursuits, all the while serving the injured and abandoned animals in our region as well as educating the general public about what we can do take care of our environments. The Wildlife Rehabilitation course of study includes several courses with specific lab and service requirements and proves to be one of our strongest service and service-learning programs here at Lees-McRae.

Another example is with a local therapeutic riding center and our Director of our Burton Center for Student Success, Dr. Fiona Chrystall. She serves as the executive director of Blazing Saddles and opens up the organization to student volunteers who are completing both direct and indirect service hours. Just this year she hosted one of our senior Bonner Leaders and her Omega research project. 

Site & Issue-Based Organizing

Because we have students who serve across a very wide variety of sites and issues we have found it difficult to organize based on site or theme. However, after returning from the 2009 Summer Leadership Institute our congress representatives and senior intern decided that we have at least one area where we could begin to focus. While our students do serve at varying sites, we feel as though we have the crucial mass required around issues of the environment and would like to focus on how to create more in depth linkages between those students serving the natural environment with sustainability and green initiatives and those students working specifically with wildlife rehabilitation. As an office we would also like to focus on the existing applicable biology courses that may already have service components in place or that would be suitable for this type of expansion in order to increase site and issues based service and research. We would also like to create an "environment" committee that would be one of the required group service project choices at the beginning of the year. This would allow students who are interested and already working in related local agencies to brainstorm and create cross-programming and events.

Capacity Building

 One of the benefits organized by the Office of Community Outreach this year were state-wide professional development sessions offered by our state's Campus Compact. Our office organized a group of faculty, staff and community partners from our campus and community to attend a professional development workshop on resource development and classroom engagement. We have also focused on passing appropriate funding opportunities and resources on to our community partners on a very regular basis by setting up several topic based list serves that help us forward resource opportunities directly to groups of applicable community partners. Throughout the year we also do mailings including a program description and brochure to agencies where we are not currently placing volunteers and ask them to complete an information form about what types of services could be completed by volunteers at their agencies.

Campus-Wide Culture and Infrastructure 

Academic Connections

As mentioned above, the Wildlife Rehabilitation course of study includes several courses with specific lab and service requirements and proves to be one of our strongest service and service-learning programs here at Lees-McRae. As such, it continues to be one of our strongest academic connections for our students. Bonners who chose these courses or this course of study at Lees-McRae can easily create connections not only between their courses and direct service that they complete at the clinic but also between the in-class research and the application of new findings at their service site.

Another new connection that we created this year was between the student organizational team for the first annual Human Rights Awareness Week, that was mostly made up of Bonner Leaders, and one of our performing arts faculty, Dr. Tessa Carr. After hearing that we were planning a week focused on human rights issues, she volunteered to have her Forum Theater class debut their first piece focused on campus issues of racism during our week of events. The performance and following conversation were engaging and enlightening and we have planned to continue to work together on several more projects in the future.

Campus Relationship Building

During our alternative spring break to the southwest the Office of Community Outreach partnered with both the Global Community Center and Outdoor Programs.  This event allowed our group of Bonners to reach out across campus and invite other students and departments to join us in service to Grand Canyon National Park as well as to the Navajo Reservation in Canyon de Chelly. As a result we have expanded our joint programming throughout the rest of the academic year and expanded the types of organizations where students can serve.

During the 2008-2009 academic year our office also worked very closely with the Office of Financial-Aid and Work-Study to alter the work-study reporting program. We are in conversation about how to better monitor the students total number of work-study hours and are working closely together to monitor the number of allowable work hours for our entire student body as compared to our Bonner Leader's requirement of one hundred and fifty hours as the state's minimum wage increases.  

As always, we have worked closely with our admissions staff so that they can help us recruit our new class of Bonner Leaders for the coming years. We look forward to our new class of Bonners and have already scheduled an August informational session with the new admissions staff members so that they have all of our program details and our most up to date recruiting materials.

Unique Initiatives

Thanks to strong institutional support, our office continues to host two major campus service events each year. We organize the Orientation Day of Service as a part of our new student orientation in the fall before our first year students begin classes and our Mountain Day of Service in the spring which involves the entire campus community. Both of these events speak to the importance not only of taking care of our local community and learning about the place in which we live, but also speaks to our tremendous intentionality of providing an integrated educational experience for our students. Both events include projects on our campus and in the community and give our office a chance to share with the larger student body our mission and year-round opportunities for engagement.

Serve 2.0 

Community Outreach Homepage

http://www.lmc.edu/sites/studentdevelopment/StudentLife/CommunityService/BonnerLeaders/ 

Bonner Wiki Page

www.lmcbonner.pbwiki.com 

Instead of flooding our student's inboxes with hundreds of announcements and reminders we have funneled all of our communication through our wiki page. Our students can find links to bwbrs, our blog, the calendar, announcements, summer service opportunities, our facebook group and much more. While still a work in progress, we hope that this page will increase the effectiveness of both our communication and service coordination. The tool is used primarily by our Bonner Leaders and we encourage them to check the site on a daily basis for the latest updates.

Bonner Facebook Page

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5414193002

Campus Issue Profile Page

http://bonnernetwork.pbworks.com/Environment+-+Lees-McRae+College

Other Social Media Tools 

Our Facebook group account was also a new addition this year and we began using it as an avenue to publicize our events. While we did not see a tremendous benefit in using this particular tool, we would like to continue using the wiki page and blog as a way to more effectively communicate new events, details and as a way to create more avenues for dialogue.  While we do plan on participating in the Bonner video project, our first attempts were works in progress from which we learned a lot! The official role to create and publish videos has formally been assigned to our illustrious congress representatives and we know that they will improve our participation during the next year.

Campus Issue Profiles

•   http://bonnernetwork.pbworks.com/Environment+-+Lees-McRae+College