What's Your Big Idea Category? (please bold which one)

- Student Leadership & Development

- Community Partnerships & Impact

- Campus Culture & Coordination

- Policy & Elections 

PROPOSAL

The 20th anniversary celebration serves to commemorate the Bonner Scholars Program’s 20th year at Oberlin College. The celebration will span the academic school year through different events, guest speakers, and, most importantly, an alumni reunion in April 2013. This celebration will strengthen the Bonner Program by connecting and reconnecting Oberlin’s Bonner Family. It aims to provide a space for Oberlin Bonners from the past 20 years to learn from one another’s education and service experiences at Oberlin and beyond and to reflect on how the Common Commitments have brought us to where we are.

The 20th anniversary celebration will also focus on raising the visibility of the Bonner Scholars Program at Oberlin College.  Overall, we hope to connect more with students who are not Bonners or involved in community service. We envision a public display of the profiles of various Bonner Scholars, both current students and alumni, in a public location on campus like Mudd Library. We will arrange these profiles in a timeline sequence to draw viewers’ attentions to the influence that the Bonner Scholarship has had on the Oberlin community over the years.  These efforts will overlap with the work of the Bonner Center for Service and Learning (BCSL) as it works to create a new graphic element and update its representation on campus.  

The 20th anniversary celebration includes showcasing our community partners and showcasing the non-profits in the Lorain County area. The alumni weekend will be a great way for Bonner alums to find out how their old service sites are doing and for community partners to reconnect with former Bonner volunteers.  We envision this showcase taking the form of a block party on Oberlin’s Main St., where community members, Bonners, other Oberlin College students, can display the work that they are doing in the Oberlin Community and connect with one another over food and music.

The 20th anniversary celebration will help to make the BCSL and its resources more visible by holding different events and inviting the greater public from the town and the college to partake. This will help to bridge the gap between the town and the college by providing fun spaces for dialogue and outreach to different communities of Oberlin.