Space is still available in the Fall 2012 Civic Life Project.

The Civic Life Project, to be piloted in the 2012-2013 academic year, is an academic program designed to stimulate public dialogue in the Fox Cities community through short, student-made documentary films about local issues. It is open to all students sophomore year and above. No previous filmmaking experience is necessary.

The program has three segments.

1. Fall 2012: University Course 315: Topics in Civic Engagement and Service Learning: Civic Engagement and the Fox Cities. An exploration of citizen involvement in local politics and community organization. Readings will include perspectives from history, sociology, political theory and the fine arts, to be combined with speakers from the local community and class discussion. Students will be required to participate in several field trips to observe local government and meet community leaders as well as a Bjorklunden retreat. In addition to short papers and class discussions, students must develop a treatment for a brief documentary film focusing on a local issue of interest.
2. Winter 2013: 6 unit tutorial in Film Studies, focused on documentary filmmaking
3. Spring 2013: Screening of films for the general public and community discussion

Congratulations to the students who will be pursuing volunteer work, internships with non-profit organizations, and other community service this summer. Funded jointly by the Office for Engaged Learning, the Volunteer and Community Service Center, and Career Services, Summer Experiential Learning grants cover basic expenses in order to make these experiences affordable to students who would otherwise not be able to pursue these opportunities.

Jamie Cartwright ’14 and Kaleigh Post ’13, Sexual Health and Reproductive Education (SHARE) program, Kigali, Rwanda

SHARE is sponsored by the Health Development Initiative, partner to GlobeMed. The program seeks to educate Rwandan youth about safe sex and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, specifically HIV/AIDS. Jamie and Kaleigh will educate Rwandan youth about sexual health through classroom lessons and youth programs. They will also seek to enhance local communication about healthy lifestyles.

Cayla Rosche ’13, Boys & Girls Club of the Fox Cities, Appleton, WI

Boys & Girls Club Music classes, taught by Cayla Rosche, will focus on building a consistent curriculum that will engage underprivileged children in the world of music. Cayla seeks to provide children with the knowledge and the enthusiasm required to learn about music. She will also advise club staff on how to better use their arts program funding.

Lauren Nokes ’14, Open Books, Open Books, Chicago, IL

Open Books is a non-profit organization that seeks to raise literacy in Chicago. Their programs are funded through the sale of used books. Lauren will be working to increase literacy in children by leading creative writing workshops, coordinating volunteers and students, researching trends in literacy, and performing community outreach.

Kerstin Brolsma ’15, Emergency Shelter of the Fox Valley, Appleton, WI

The Emergency Shelter of the Fox Valley provides women, men, and families with temporary shelter and a safe environment that promotes independence. Kerstin will write grants to obtain funding for the shelter and will work to coordinate volunteers.

Polly Dalton ’14, COTS Inc.-Riverview Gardens, Appleton, WI

Riverview Gardens is a community-based project that will provide jobs for those living at COTS, education about sustainable gardening to the community, and serve as a park space and community center for Appleton. Polly will keep the website up to date, work on several promotional projects and advertising campaigns, assist in writing Riverview’s newsletter, and promote local foods. She will work with the COTS Riverview Gardens staff to address the larger community issue of homelessness.

Ashley Heun ’14, Sustainable Lawrence University Gardens, Appleton, WI

Ashley will educate high school students about sustainably growing food. She will work with them in the garden planting, weeding, harvesting, and performing general upkeep. She will use this experience to enhance high school students’ knowledge about farming and sustainable growth.

Emily Herranen ’13, Esaana Ink, Milwaukee, WI

Esaana Ink is a small, new publishing house that focuses on publishing African-American literature and enhancing literacy and fostering creativity in urban Indianapolis. Emily will edit children’s books and other new projects, and also work closely with one of the founders of the publishing house.

Tammy Tran ’14 Let’s Get Ready Queens, New York, NY

Let’s Get Ready is a not for profit organization that aims to provide inner city high school students with the resources and support needed to reach higher education. As a coach with Let’s Get Ready, Tammy will be providing role modeling on a one on one level with students, teaching critical reading courses for SAT prep, and organizing and implementing workshops to prepare students for the college admissions process.

While students make plans for senior experience, honors, and independent study projects, consider their potential interest in community based projects or research. The amount of community involvement students do on campus is staggering and many would love to culminate their years at Lawrence with a significant research project that unites their academic and community interests. Three organizations already identified fitting projects, see below. Contact Prof. Monica Rico at monica.rico@lawrence.edu or Chuck Demler, Lawrence’s Service Learning Coordinator at demlerc@lawrence.edu if interested.

Riverview Gardens Project at COTS Inc.

Will transform an exclusive country club into a sustainable agriculture hub and welcoming community center, coordinating with Oren Jakobson ’11, students could:

• Document the story of this visionary project in a variety of media: film, print, drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and others
• Study insurance coverage of community supported agriculture, resulting in proposals to insurance companies
• Study passive heating systems for use at Riverview Gardens (expertise in chemistry or physics required)
• Monitor the compost operation at Riverview Gardens, research best practices, and suggest and implement methods of optimization
• Research new revenue streams to supplement their agriculture operation including, but not limited to, seed-saving, composting, and a plant sales.

Housing Partnership of the Fox Cities

A highly innovative, local nonprofit that uniquely combines affordable housing with assistance of caseworkers to empower residents to lift themselves out of poverty. Interested students could:

• Document the organization in short videos to explore the mission of Housing Partnership and what it does for its clients.
• Evaluate how its houses could be more environmentally sustainable, researching and suggesting cost-effective methods to decrease environmental impact

Sexual Assault Crisis Center

Helps survivors (and their families and friends) of all forms of sexual assault or abuse. Interested students could:

• Brainstorm new survey methods, and analyze survey data to help provide a stronger sense of the population served and program results

Connected Knowing: 2012 International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement Annual Conference***

September 23-25 at University of Maryland, College Park

The 12th Annual IARSLCE Conference will include tentatively 12 tracks including “International Impact and Development” and “Student Development and Learning”. The conference’s theme will focus broadly on transformative learning partnerships in research and scholarship on community engagement, with community partners, and on the connections those learning partnerships leverage and facilitate. More information is available at www.researchslce.org.

Intercultural Strategies in Civic Engagement: 2^nd Annual Intercultural Horizons Conference***

October 4-5 at SUNY Global Center, New York, NY

This conference is intended to explore “Intercultural Strategies in Civic Engagement” with educators and experts from a variety of perspectives examining the challenges and achievements of civic engagement in a global context and the evolving definitions of civic engagement in service learning and general education, with an emphasis on turning theory into practice. The conference will include presentations and workshops from experts in service learning, language instruction, intercultural and cross-cultural communication, and international education. It is hosted by the State University of New York at Geneseo, Siena Italian Studies, and the Associazione Culturale Ulisse at the International Center for Intercultural Exchange.

***If you are interested in attending these or any other service learning development opportunities, funding is available from the Office of Engaged Learning Faculty Mini-grant Program. Call or email Monica Rico for more information.

Workshop for Campus and Community

April 26, 2012, 7-9 PM Hurvis Room WCC

Faculty, students, staff, and community partners are encouraged to attend this interactive workshop introducing social media strategies for nonprofits and priming participants to help local nonprofits on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.This is valuable experience that can be used in a variety of nonprofit settings including education, advocacy, fundraising, and others. Attendees of the workshop will be strongly encouraged to put their new found knowledge into practice volunteering at local nonprofits.

Three Panelists will discuss their experience with and strategies for social media:

• Rachel Crowl, Lawrence’s New Media and Website Coordinator
• Greg Linnemanstons ’80, President of the Weidert Group
• Lee Snodgrass, Director of Marketing and Brand at the Girls Scouts of the Northwestern Great Lakes

Space is limited (just 13 spots remain!) and advance registration is required. Please email demlerc@lawrence.edu to reserve your place.

The Fox Cities Sexual Assault and Crisis Center seeks two or more students to work on the projects described below. These projects could possibly be completed as credited or non-credited internships, as independent study projects, or simply as long-term, high-value volunteering experiences. If you are interested, please email Chuck Demler ’11 at the Volunteer Center.

Strength of Survivors Visual Art Project

At the Sexual Assault Crisis Center-Fox Cities, support groups provide survivors of sexual assault with the opportunity to share a common experience in a safe environment that promotes healing, support, understanding, and hope. By the end of a ten-week session of groups, these individuals have acquired strength that helps them begin the process of healing. We want to offer participants in one of our winter groups the opportunity to express what it means to be a survivor of sexual assault by creating an image or word that would become a panel on a wall hanging with the work of each group member, thereby symbolizing both the personal healing process and the community impact of the group structure. We would like to work with Lawrence volunteers to help us develop a structure for this project (what materials would work? how would we piece together the project?) and to put the survivors’ work together into its final structure, which would be on display at the Sexual Assault Crisis Center. Our staff envisions this project in a way that is both student driven and survivor centered. We want to empower survivors by providing them with the tools they need to express the process of healing as we simultaneously draw on the creativity and skills of interested student volunteers from Lawrence. The winter session of support groups will end in April. Our staff would want to work with the volunteers in March and April.

Survey redesign and distribution for the Sexual Assault Crisis Center-Fox Cities

For non-profit agencies, collecting meaningful demographic information about clients plays a crucial role in fundraising and project design.  At the same time, acquiring such data from clients in crisis proves an enduring challenge for therapists at agencies like the Sexual Assault Crisis Center-Fox Cities, where confidentiality serves as a foundation of the client-therapist relationship.  We are interested in working with a creative yet empirically astute student to brainstorm about offering new options for survey dissemination (e.g., online forms), creating questions that provide us with data in ways that do not feel invasive to participants, and developing strategies for analyzing data to help us provide funders with a stronger sense of the population we serve and the results of our programs.  This is an ongoing need for our agency and could be a small project (one or two students piloting a single component of a survey redesign for a specific project) or larger scale (a class or group of students helping us over the course of several months with all phases of the process).

You might know that many Lawrence students perform outstanding community-based research that deserves a wider audience. You may not have known that there’s a journal specifically dedicated to undergraduate in community-based research in all disciplines.

The editorial team for the new Undergraduate Journal of Service Learning and Community-Based Research seeks submissions. This is
a refereed, multi-disciplinary, online undergraduate journal open to all undergraduate students in the U.S. and across the globe. The journal is
dedicated to publishing intellectual and reflective work by undergraduates on service learning, community-based research, and all related curriculum-and/or research-based public community engagement activities. These go by many additional names, such as community-based learning, public scholarship,publicly-engaged learning/teaching, etc. The editorial team of UndergraduateJournal of Service Learning and Community-Based Research encourages undergraduates to pursue their own intellectual projects and to join the academic conversation.

Submissions will be accepted from now through June 30, 2012.

More information is available!

February 15th – Strategic Partnerships in Service-Learning, hosted by Iowa Campus Compact, 11:00 am to 1:00 pm, Loras College Academic Resource Center, Dubuque, IA
Campus Compact members: Free
Non-members: $25.00
Registration/Information link: http://www.iacampuscompact.org/workshop-building-strategic-partnerships.html

March 1st – Building Access through Service-Learning in P-16 Teacher Education, hosted by Illinois Campus Compact, 8:30am to 3:30pm, Columbia College, Chicago, IL
Pre-Teacher Students: Free
Campus Compact members: $25.00
Registration/Information link: http://www.illinoiscampuscompact.org/member-events/

If you are a faculty or staff member interested in developing your understanding of service learning, there are a number of upcoming conferences that might be of interest to you.

Indiana Campus Compact Service Engagement Summit, March 29-30, Indianapolis, Indiana

Greenleaf Center Leadership Institute for Educators, April 5-6, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Upper Midwest Civic Engagement Summit, June 5-6, St. Paul, Minnesota

If you would like to attend one of these events, funding is available for faculty and staff via the minigrants program. Please email monica.rico@lawrence.edu for further information.

If you have students and advisees who are seeking funding to support a summertime volunteer experience or internship with a nonprofit organization, please note that this year, there is a single application form for all of the following grants:

Summer Volunteer Opportunity Grant (SVOG), sponsored by the Volunteer and Community Service Center, provides financial assistance for students participating in service projects as learning experiences during the summer months.

Betty Heistad Barrett Fund for Excellence in Civil Service, sponsored by Career Services, provides Lawrence students internship funding to participate in unique and valuable opportunities to learn, explore, and grow as individuals while serving the non-profit community.

Pieper Family Foundation, supports the Office of Engaged Learning which provides funding for student projects that are academically rich, faculty supported and have the potential to build capacity of the community served.

To obtain an application, students should go to one of these sites and submit an application to Career Services by Friday, March 16 at 4:00p.m

Career Services
LUworks (announcements)
Volunteer and Community Service Center