2009 ANNUAL REPORT OF PROGRAM ACTIVITIES

2009 ANNUAL REPORT OF PROGRAM ACTIVITIES Implementation of Student Development Implementation of Community Partnerships Campus-Wide Culture and Infrastructure  Serve 2.0  Campus Issue Profiles

 

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Implementation of Student Development

Our training program for first year students began with a three-day orientation program August 20-23, 2008.  Senior intern Amanda Hoefner restructured the agenda to give returning Bonners the responsibility of planning and leading nearly all orientation sessions. The Bonner Director, Deano Pape, led only two of the sessions and the Bonner Coordinator, Charles Oberweiser, led two or three of the sessions, but the bulk of the orientation was conducted by Bonner Leaders who provided key information about the program, guided activities, and facilitated reflection discussions.

 

After orientation, training for first years centers on a year-long academic course set (Introduction to Community Engagement and Service-Learning: Theory and Practice) taught by Deano Pape. This year we spent the first semester of the course in an ongoing discussion of poverty as a common thread from which we can build discussions of each of the commitment areas. We used academic articles, class discussion and multimedia presentations to understand and debunk our assumptions about poverty, understand the true roots of inequality, and put a human face to the concept of need. This course was also enhanced by the two AmeriCorps*VISTAs at Ripon College, whose mission is to live in poverty and work toward the end of poverty in the United States. Second semester these new Bonners put their principles to work. Professor Pape centered the course on partner assessment, survey construction and data and presentation. These students picked a social justice issue they were passionate about (from literacy to public transportation) and created, then administrated, a survey to their populations of interest. This data can be used to structure projects and programs address the community need.

 

First years also joined the entire Bonner cohort in three multi-day retreats held off campus. This year these retreats focused on community organizing, project implementation and efficacy, the Bonner Common Commitments, and interpersonal dynamics. Each retreat included a balance of training, fun activities, and a group service project.

 

Some of our most successful and passionate site coordinators came from this first year class. These students worked to build capacity at our nonprofit partners by coordinating placements, conducting volunteer orientations, planning events and recruiting volunteers from across campus. OCE staff was always available to meet to discuss issues as they arose when students worked with partners with issues such as liability protection, resource development, and interpersonal conflicts.

 

The wiki has guided our office through the new leadership structure, and it has shaped the way student leaders report their activities. The RiponOCE wiki serves primarily as an internal wiki, and the reports of Cluster Leaders are of the utmost importance to the staff. Cluster Leaders meet at least once a week with site coordinators and write brief reports on their progress every week. We also organize Bonner events through the Google calendar, and schedule monthly one-on-ones through a spreadsheet on the wiki. Bonner videos have become a community-building tool for the whole Bonner cohort--students shoot, interview for and edit the videos, then share them through YouTube.

 

Our senior leadership positions, including our cluster leaders, outreach coordinator, and senior interns met several times per week with a member of the OCE staff for individualized guidance on their current challenges, as well as for training that met their long-term learning goals.

 

Regardless of their role in the office, all Bonners have one-on-one meetings with our Bonner Director, Deano Pape, three times each semester.  These meetings are an opportunity to set and evaluate goals, recap the semester, discuss challenges with service projects, and ensure a balance between service and academics. All Bonners are also eligible to participate in our service trips. This year Bonners participated in an immersion trip over fall break on the West Side of Chicago, and did a Habitat for Humanity build in Kentucky that involved a visit to Bonners at Berea College.

 

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Implementation of Community Partnerships

Our approach to developing nonprofit partnerships changed dramatically from a coalition of issue-based teams with many leaders in a group to a model with individual student site coordinator positions at each community partner this fall. These students were asked to work as if they were agency volunteer coordinators through recruitment, training and monitoring other volunteers. We believed this approach would immediately build capacity among our nonprofit partners, which are often very small agencies that lack the staff and resources to focus primarily on volunteer management. 

 

We used the first year Bonner class to teach students to build capacity this year as well. Deano Pape taught various assessment strategies to the Bonners and encouraged them to take these skills to their volunteer sites. In constructing, administering and analyzing these surveys, students provided a survey to local nonprofit agencies (such as the Public Library) that they would not have otherwise had. But the service itself does not stop once the surveys are complete; the data gathered can be used by the nonprofit and by student leaders to reshape or redirect service to better address a community need.

 

In addition to establishing the site coordinator positions, we have worked more vigorously as an office to keep the lines of communication open with our nonprofit partners. We held our first ever orientation for nonprofit partners during a breakfast held in August 2008. A half-dozen agency representatives attended the breakfast, as well as faculty members interested in community engagement, a Bonner senior intern, and other OCE staff. Throughout the year staff and students have conducted informal assessment through check-ins via phone and site visits, and we formally assessed our partnerships in January 2009 with a set of surveys that partners filled out. We used the data gathered to reshape our action plan in spring 2009; we stressed the importance of follow-up when communicating with partners to students, set up additional face-to-face meetings for more frank and honest discussions of agency and student needs, and reshaped our standard service-learning contract to make the goals of service-learners (who are often led by Bonner site coordinators) absolutely clear to partners.

 

This year both AmeriCorps*VISTA Members at our site worked to develop and enhance our agency’s partnerships with Ripon College classes. We believe that when our Bonners’ service and community connections are linked to faculty and other students on campus, this makes the projects more sustainable. If a course that is held every year works with the same community partner each time, this project will be a constant presence in the community.

At the end of this academic year the OCE is launching a new asset mapping initiative through the Serve 2.0 Initiative. The asset map is web based and information will be posted and shared on a wiki site. This resource, still under construction, will be used to explore and advertise community assets to students, other campus members, and the broader community. This philosophy of using social media to strengthen, connect, catalog, and promote local resources will guide the Ripon College Bonner Leader program in the 2009-2010 school year.

 

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Campus-Wide Culture and Infrastructure 

 

The OCE hosted two AmeriCorps*VISTA Members this year, and these full-time volunteers were required to report quarterly to an advisory board. The board this year was composed of about an even mix of faculty members and directors at community agencies, and also included one Bonner student. Not only did the VISTAs report the progress of their projects and the achievements of our Bonner Leaders, they gave this board tasks concerning faculty community engagement. For the first time, Ripon College faculty were surveyed about the history of service-learning at Ripon College and desire for service-learning and other community engagement in the classroom. The board also helped the OCE restructure service-learning contracts to be a more complete facilitated service-learning agreement between partners, students, professors and OCE representatives. The Bonner student on this board was part of discussions between faculty and community partners that she would not otherwise by privy to, and was encouraged to bring lessons and ideas about social justice and service to other students, especially fellow Bonners.

 

This was a milestone year for inter-departmental cooperation with the goal of community engagement, largely due to the Outreach Team. This team strengthened our partnership with the Student Activities Office and Multicultural Affairs Office through joint programming and well as targeted outreach to each student group suggesting relevant service projects for them. The Outreach Team also worked closely with Residence Life by creating floor activities with RAs that got students out into the community and thinking about the world outside campus.

 

The RIPEN local foods project, funded by the Serve 2.0 grant, has brought us even greater opportunities for campus outreach this spring. A main goal of this project is to see local foods served to students in dining halls, so our Serve 2.0 intern has forged a partnership with Sodexo Food Services on campus. She meets weekly with the director of food service and helps local and organic growers through the contracts, liability, and paperwork necessary to get their produce on campus. The creation of a community garden on campus has also brought the RIPEN project into partnerships with the Sodexo Physical Plant Department and the Biology Department.

 

This year the financial aid office doubled its institutional scholarship for students participating in the Bonner program, and the admission office informs all visiting students, with a strong emphasis on those with financial aid packages that indicate a need for financial support (and an interest in service), that the Bonner Program is a great way to learn about their new community, develop leadership skills, and make an impact on social issues.

 

The 2009-2010 academic year will be our first in partnership with the Ethical Leadership Program. We plan to utilize each organization’s strengths and experience for community engagement and student development. We will collaborate to live out our similar values and share our resources for the betterment of our students, our campus, our community, and our world.

 

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Serve 2.0 

In the spring of 2009 our office received the Serve 2.0 grant to help students understand the roots of their service by identifying community assets and needs. We decided to launch a local food researching project through this initiative. The source, production, and use of food are especially important issues in Ripon, a rural community immersed in agricultural culture. It was recognized that local farmers were struggling and that, despite being surrounded by farmland, many students and community members knew little about where their food came from and why. We focused the grant into a project centered on researching the costs and benefits of eating “locally” in terms of health, the environment, and the economy to our community. Using the grant to launch a new initiative at Ripon College has allowed us to employ web-based tools in every step of the process.

 

Design

The student intern hired under the Serve 2.0 grant spent time gathering preliminary research on food issues through search engines, YouTube, and the Bonner Network Wiki. She also established connections between local producers, the Office of Community Engagement, and the Ripon College campus food services over the internet. We added a page entitled “Local Food Project 2009” to http://riponoce.pbworks.com, our office wiki. This page holds a compiled list of statistics and links to other sites regarding local food issues, as well as our outlined goals for the project. The wiki page is centered on design and organization of the project and is used mainly to keep the office staff up to date.

 

Outreach

Once preliminary research had been done and a network of community members and college staff and faculty was set up, we began to focus on the outreach aspect of the initiative. We branded the project “R.I.P.E.N.”, the Ripon Initiative for local Produce Education and Nutrition, and proceeded to create pages for it on all of the social networking sites commonly used by students, as well as the college’s website. The page on Ripon College’s website is intended to be an introduction to the Serve 2.0 Grant and R.I.P.E.N. to those learning about the college. The YouTube channel has all of our videos and a link to the homepage for people outside of Ripon or those who don’t participate in the other social networking sites. The Facebook group is used primarily to periodically update students (and some staff) on campus that have a cursory to vested interest in the project. Our Twitter feed provides updates on events related to R.I.P.E.N. to some students and staff participating in the project, as well as local agriculture groups and reporters. Our Ning site is the “homepage” for R.I.P.E.N., and is used both by those seeking more information about the project and those most involved in the initiative, and is most frequently updated.

 

Management

Future plans for the project include growing the network of students, faculty, staff, farmers, and community members through the differing levels of involvement that these sites provide, as well as email lists and meetings. The web-based tools employed by this initiative have already prompted the involvement of students and faculty on the campus this summer in organizing a community garden. Those not yet on campus provide their input online and are kept updated about upcoming events in the fall.

 

Office wiki page “Local Food Project 2009”

R.I.P.E.N.’s Ning homepage

YouTube channel

Facebook group

Twitter feed

Ripon College’s R.I.P.E.N. page

 

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Campus Issue Profiles

• Education
• Sustainability and Local Food