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Community Involvement/Volunteerism
While no one here is glad to see Kodak go bankrupt, it's hardly the catastrophe many imagine - in part, surprisingly, because of Kodak. The high-skilled workers it let go over the years created a valuable labor pool for start-up companies. It also helps that Rochester has a strong higher-education sector, which has likewise been supported by Kodak. The University of Rochester became a leading research center through gifts from Kodak's founder, George Eastman, who also gave generously to the Rochester Institute of Technology. These universities have an immense impact on the regional economy.
Like thousands of their students before them, 30 presidents of Lutheran colleges and their spouses are using a day of their annual meeting in New Orleans to do what so many of their students have done in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - help rebuild. On Monday, February 6, the presidents of the colleges and universities who are members of the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America (LECNA) will help rebuild a house and plant trees in the wetlands along a levee.
The Weitz Center for Creativity is something of a bridge between cultures here in Northfield, Minn., an hour outside of the Twin Cities. The local school system and Carleton College came together in an unusual project that saved a much-loved school building, provided a vibrant new space for the community, and allowed the college to fulfill a long-held goal of expanding its arts facilities.
Thomas A. Kazee, president, University of Evansville, writes: We often fail to share what could be one of the most important contributions to the life of the community: the remarkable collective intellectual capital of our faculties. The aggregate intellectual capital represented by a faculty at an American college, even a small one, is vast: Economists, biologists, philosophers, engineers, and historians are teaching and researching the most pressing issues of the day. Yet in my experience, we too seldom take advantage of this resource in an intentional and systematic way.
Jeff Abernathy, president, Alma College, writes: For all of our talk about the college’s carbon footprint, we at Alma have lately been discussing the many ways in which even a small college impacts the local community and environment. Some of the most exciting work I have done 18 months into my work at Alma College has been in collaboration with our local communities. I am still learning about the exciting work of building and nurturing community partnerships which will be key to the college's future as well as that of our town and region.
About 100 students at Whitman College will be going into school classrooms this week to teach about the civil rights movement. The pilot project is a partnership between the college in Walla Walla, Wash. and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. Walla Walla is a small city known for its sweet onions and wine. Blacks make up less than 3 percent of the population there. But the inland Pacific Northwest has long been a center of white supremacist activity, and the growing Latino population in the region also has raised concerns about civil rights.
Small entrepreneurs typically turn to banks to finance their business ideas, but in a handful of college towns, they have a new option: Just ask the students. In the last four years, about a dozen student groups have begun offering loans to local residents who want to start businesses but are unlikely to qualify for traditional bank loans.
American democracy will confront an increasingly bleak future unless colleges make civic learning a central part of students' education, says a report released Tuesday by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. The report coincides with a daylong event on Tuesday at the White House. It calls for colleges to renew their commitment to civic education at a time when higher education is talked about chiefly as a means of job training.
In 2008, St. Louis University started offering certificates in Theology Studies at Missouri's largest state prison. In March, it expanded to an associate of arts, a two-year degree that will take the inmates four years to finish. "We have got to find other ways of dealing with problems in our society besides locking people up," said Kenneth Parker, a SLU theologian who directs the program. "And that means finding more rehabilitative approaches. And that's where I think private nonprofits like SLU have a role to play."
When some local Madonna University students signed up for a video editing class in the school's broadcast and cinema arts department, they never dreamed they would end up learning even more about themselves. The students were assigned a project that put their newfound skills to the test: make a professional six-minute video for local nonprofits to use in their actual marketing programs. For many of them, the project has been life-changing.
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