Leading Decatur’s Promise

Providing caring adults, safe places, structured activities and marketable skills to more than 600 youth through the College Americorps Program and the America Reads Initiative

Completing basic health screenings for more than 300 Head Start students by College nursing and allied health students

Volunteering by college leadership organizations with at least half of their active members involved in volunteer service project, primarily serving younger youth

web: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~sarkin/elderrehab.html

In a healthy partnership, each participant brings a distinctive contribution to the service, so that the two working together are able to do more than either could do alone; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The partnership that has formed between Gateway Community College and local air conditioning businesses in Phoenix, Arizona, serves as a good example.

In Phoenix, heat can cause health problems, especially for homebound elderly residents. Evaporative coolers do the job of cooling things down in most low-cost houses. However, when these coolers break, the fifty dollar repair bill is beyond the means of many low-income residents.

Enter: the partnership.

Gateway Community College offers HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) certification among its associate degrees. Students training to get certification usually don t get experience working with evaporative cooling systems. They could get hands-on experience with these systems by providing repair services to residents whose air conditioning systems, and health, could be saved in the process. The college, however, has neither the material resources nor the transportation systems to provide these services. Local air conditioning businesses are inclined to develop strong relations with their customers, and help those in need. They have the materials and transportation needed to repair systems for paying customers. However, providing this service free of charge would be too time-consuming and costly, without the organizational services and support of the college students.

Six years ago, Professor Clyde Perry at Gateway put this set of needs and resources together: the need of elderly metro-Phoenix residents for functional air conditioners; the need of HVAC students at Gateway for hands-on experience working with evaporative cooling systems; and the resources of the college and the local businesses. Together, they formed the Evaporative Cooler Services Project, a day of service in March when air-conditioning technicians and students match up to provide services for residents throughout the area.

The project is now a staple in metro-Phoenix. Thirty-two HVAC students at Gateway participate in the specialized training that precedes the day of intense service. These 32 students are paired off with professional technicians. Using trucks and equipment donated by local businesses, each pair services up to four evaporative coolers in a single day, in homes of elderly residents who have requested the service.

Companies are able to build their customer relations through the program, and students receive essential practice in a skill they would not otherwise learn. Both have the opportunity to do so in an effort to better the community.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

The above is one of several intergenerational programs featured in the Constitutional Rights Foundation Network magazine, Winter 2001. Written by Wendy Schaetzel Lesko

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Contact person: Rose Washington, Special Project Director, External Relations, ccr {at} usc(.)edu

USC Neighborhood Outreach web page: http://www.usc.edu/dept/CCR/nbrhd0.htm

From

Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Website: http://www.sandiego.edu/csl/

The clinic is a student-run, street based effort to provide basic medical and social support services to the men and women who rely on the food coalition and who have very limited access to health care and social services.

Website: www.studentgroups.ucla.edu/mobileclinic

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Contact: Department Chair Charles Dagnillo at Charles.Dagnillo {at} pcc.cccoes(.)edu

Contact: Teresa Taylor at (478) 445-5772 or ttaylor {at} gcsu(.)edu

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Northwestern Community Development Corps web site: http://www.studorg.nwu.edu/ncdc/

Dr. Fitch s second idea was to make the course more exciting and relevant to students lives. She would do this by giving students hands-on experience with science, getting them away from the numbers and chalkboards of the classroom and into communities where they could witness firsthand the useful application of otherwise remote mathematical and scientific theories.

The third goal Dr. Fitch had for her class was to maintain, and even enhance, the rigor with which students learned. Each analysis required at least sixty samples, and six hours of preparation in order to be studied properly. When students were uninterested by the course, they quickly tired of the repetitive work involved in chemical analysis. But when they were doing real work to solve real problems, when people s health and lives were riding on the calculations being done correctly, students would understand the need to engage in that level of rigorous study.

Today, the class is anything but notorious. Each semester, fifteen of Dr. Fitch s students sample and analyze the lead content of a city site. Students have tested local parks and pipes, and presented their findings to the City of Chicago. One student from Croatia brought what he learned back home and taught others to analyze the lead emissions of different gasolines.

In addition, students provide an after-school program for a group of sixty children, many of them girls and minorities who are typically not drawn to science. Students present what they have learned and teach the children to gather lead samples safely. Upon teaching children, students often realize just how much they have learned, and are forced through a different kind of rigor, this arising from the necessity of explaining concepts in terms and ideas simple enough to be understood by elementary school children.

By incorporating service-learning into her teaching, Dr. Fitch has brought both rigor and relevance to a course that was once considered little more than dull and difficult. In the process, from Dr. Fitch s experience, students now learn more, retain more, and are more excited not only about their studies, but about the meaningful application of those studies to solve real-life problems.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Bio and C.V. for Dr. Fitch: http://www.luc.edu/depts/chem/faculty/fitch/fitchgroup/Prblurb/prblurb.htm

Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~iubnurse/home/service/service.html

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Website: http://www.manchester.edu/Academic/Programs/departments/hpe/index.htm

Contact: Robert K. Chalmers, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Professional Programs at 317.494.1382

This information originally appeared in “”Science and Society: Redefining the Relationship”" by Stephen Miller. Published by Campus Compact, 1996.

Increasing youth service opportunities by 20 percent

Mentoring 200 youth and adding six job shadowing programs

Creating an inter-generational after-school program

Giving 1,500 children a new book

Providng a medical history passport for 1,370 foster children

Doubling its telemedicine school sites and establsihing a speaker’s bureau to youth

Contact: Elmer Freeman at e.freeman {at} nunet.neu(.)edu or 617.373.4591

There are several factors that influence whether faculty will view service as a central element in their scholarship. Three key components community relationships, institutional support, and scholarly integrity are illustrated in the example of Regis College. At that school, a service enclave a small group of faculty that has adopted the role of public servant as a primary responsibility illustrates what scholarship can look like when faculty recognize the importance of professional service.

Regis College is a small, liberal arts college in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Not far from Regis, Boston-based parochial schools have recently begun efforts to extend enrollment through scholarships to low-income children, many of whom are from recent immigrant families. In the spring of 1997, principals of three grammar schools and one high school expressed the need for health services for their students, many of whom were underserved. While basic services would be available at public schools, the parochial schools had no way of providing them.

When this need came to her attention, Regis s nursing department chair Amy Anderson visited the school and was, she recalls, appalled at the unmet health needs of children. Working closely with the schools and the local department of public health, the nursing department set up clinics at each school. The close relationships and communication that the college established with the schools and other health services helped the effort come off without a hitch. In the fall of 1997, the clinics went into operation, each staffed by a nursing faculty member and students.

With full funding from Regis College, the four clinics have been able to provide immunizations and conduct physical examinations. Student health problems are discussed with parents and students receive important vaccinations with parental approval. Classes in prevention and health promotion are offered for parents and children. In the course of the school year, the clinics have treated 859 children, most of whom would have received no health care otherwise. With additional funding from the college to purchase new equipment in the fall, the faculty and students will be able to perform hearing tests on all children.

The institution doesn t provide only financial support for this effort. The service that faculty are providing is given the same emphasis as would teaching or research. In terms of faculty workload, serving at the clinic once a week is counted as the equivalent of teaching one course on campus.

The growing relationship between the college and the school clinics helps improve the health of children in the community while fulfilling the service mission of faculty at the college. Through the clinics, nursing faculty have been able to engage their discipline in meeting a defined need in the community. Although the connection between the discipline and community need may be clear in a service profession such as nursing, it can be made with some effort in any field, from engineering where faculty can use engineering skills to help communities design solutions to problems to philosophy where faculty can lead community members in thoughtful discussion and decision-making related to community issues.

The relationship that faculty have developed with the community, the level of support they have received from their institution, and the extent of the tie between their discipline and service they provide make this an exemplary case of professional service in academic scholarship.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Regis College Department of Nursing: nursing {at} regiscollege(.)edu

This past semester, a course, called “”Navajo of the Southwest,”" was jointly developed by a professor of Anthropology and the Associate Dean of Students. Students studied the art and culture of the Navajo, as well as the history and the current social, political and economic issues. As a part of the curriculum, the class traveled to New Mexico for an Alternative Spring Break, working with Navajo children on the reservation to create a collaborative mural. Before leaving for New Mexico, students also learned about issues of diversity and culture while engaged in service, basic group process theory, and tools for successful collaboration. Over seventy students applied for the fifteen spaces available in this class, which was an overwhelming success. Through relationships developed with Navajo while in New Mexico, students became aware of the issues surrounding uranium mining on the reservation, and continue to be activists in working to gain compensation for Navajo who contracted cancer as a result of their work in the mines.

Website: http://www.massart.edu/at_massart/ (“”Community Service-Learning”" is in the left sidebar)