Awards-2008 Winners

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Service Learning Collaboration Awards

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. . 2008 Service Learning Collaboration Award Winners
The Community College National Center for Community Engagement announces the winners of its 2008 Service Learning Collaborations Awards. This national competition recognizes exemplary community college collaborations in five categories: Collaborations with Social Agencies, Business and Industry, Universities, K-12 Schools, and International Service Learning.

Collaboration with Social Agencies
Raritan Valley Community College

International Service Learning
Carroll Community College

Collaboration with Business & Industry
Gillette College

Collaboration with K-12 Schools
Cochise College

Collaboration with Universities
Salt Lake Community College

Left to right: Susan Williams, Lori Moog, and Janice Buttler (Raritan Valley Community College)
The CCNCCE is honored to recognize Raritan Valley Community College, located in Somerville, New Jersey, as the 2008 recipient of the Service Learning Collaboration and Civic Engagement Award in the Category of: Collaboration with Social Agencies.
Raritan Valley Community College's social agency partners include Martin Luther King Youth Center, Agape House for Homeless Families, El Centro Hispano-Americano ELS Program, Girl Scouts Beyond Bars Program, Interfaith Hospitality Network, and Somerset Youth Shelter, just to name a few.
All of RVCC's service learning activities are curricular based and tied to course objectives. Students provide a minimum of 30 hours of service, which is done in lieu of other course requirements such as a term paper or final exam.
Each semester hundreds of RVCC students enrolled in Sociology, Psychology, Human Service, Education, Math, English, and Spanish courses serve as tutors and mentors, providing academic assistance, personal attention, recreation, and companionship activities.
Through funding from the SAFE grant, hundreds of students enrolled in the course "Trends in Nursing" worked in small groups to research an emergency preparedness topic related to health care targeted at the elderly, pregnant women, the homeless, and disadvantaged. These students then matched their findings with the community agencies needing assistance and collaborated with agency staff to develop their service projects. Student products developed through these projects included workshops, information brochures, fact sheets, PowerPoint presentations, and training sessions.
Students in Business Law, Accounting, Science, Fine Arts & Communication, and Computer courses provided all types of services to social agencies, from providing legal services to low-income populations to providing web page development to numerous non-profit organizations.
Annually, more than 1000 students contribute over 300,000 hours of service to approximately 200 community organizations. Based on Independent Sector's estimated dollar value of student volunteers, at $18 an hour, this translates to an economic donation of $6,000,000!
Contact Person: Lori Moog
Phone: 908-526-1200 x:8284   Email: lmoog@raritanval.edu

Dell Hagan Rhodes, Carroll Community College

The CCNCCE is honored to recognize Carroll Community College, in Westminster, Maryland, as the 2008 recipient of the International Service Learning Collaboration Award.
Carroll Community College's Belize Service-Learning Project addresses the needs of the Maya community in Big Falls, Belize, a remote village in the southernmost district of Belize, bordering Guatemala.
The children in this community speak English in the classroom but speak Mayan dialects at home, so proficiency in English is extremely important to their education. Students and faculty from Carroll Community College traveled to Belize and offered a 2-week summer English literacy camp for children, which was co-designed by CCC students and Belizean teachers.
The goals of this project were to:

Help the community build educational foundations for its children
Provide opportunities to CCC students to learn about and discover the strengths of other cultures
Open lines of communication through international exchange, and
Provide school supplies and teaching aids to the children.

Belizean teachers indicated what area they wanted their students to work on a well as suggested curriculum foci. CCC students prepared lessons in language arts, math, science, and art and the Belizean teachers offered feedback and augmented the lessons as necessary. CCC faculty not only worked closely with the students, but acted as mentors to the Belizean teachers, introducing them to new methods and instruments to enhance their teaching tools. The outcomes gauged from CCC's Global Service-Learning assessment showed remarkable student growth.
As was stated by Dell Hagan Rhodes, the Service Learning Coordinator for CCC, the success of this project "proves once more that learning should not be a stagnant experience, but rather, as service learning provides, a living, breathing opportunity for students to not just learn, but evolve."
Contact Person: Dell Hagan Rhodes
Phone: 410-386-8413   Email: drhodes@carrollcc.edu

Left to right: Mark Englert, Mike Nickel (Northern Wyoming Community College District), Paul Young, and Kevin Drumm (Gillette College)
The CCNCCE is honored to recognize Gillette College, located in Gillette, Wyoming, as the 2008 recipient of the Service Learning Collaboration and Civic Engagement Award in the Category of: Collaboration with Business and Industry
Gillette College and Campbell County Memorial Hospital have developed a dynamic collaborative partnership to educate nurses and to meet the health care needs of their community. Campbell County Memorial Hospital has a shortage of nurses and Gillette College must have more space and faculty to education additional nursing students.
The college and hospital are collaborating in the construction of a new health science center which will house the college nursing program and also provide classroom space for the hospital's education programs. This will enable Gillette College to increase their nursing students from 36 to 60.
The hospital offers clinical sites for learning experiences in medical/surgical, obstetrics, mental health, surgery, emergency, intensive care, home health, hospice and long term care. Students are also given five hours of their practicum course each semester for health related community service activities. The hospital provides opportunities for students to participate in the community health fair, sports, screening physicals, flu clinics and activities for elders.
The nursing program has a strong clinical focus. Students have 12-15 hours of clinical experience per week throughout the 2 year program. Two expert nurse clinicians who work at the hospital also work at the college for 170 days each school year with their salary being paid by the hospital. The hospital also encourages nurse managers and resource nurses to share their knowledge with students in classroom and clinical settings.
This partnership helps prepare students for the real-world work environment. Gillette College graduates are ready to practice as novices with less orientation than many other nursing program graduates and 68% of their graduates are hired by the hospital. The college encourages other nursing programs and hospitals to explore similar partnerships to grow their community capacity of nurses.
Contact Person: Nancy Larmer
Phone: 307-686-0254 x:1203   Email: nlarmer@sheridan.edu

Left to right: Michel Ouellette and Dave Pettes (Cochise College)
The CCNCCE is honored to recognize Cochise College, located in Douglas, Arizona, as the 2008 recipient of the Service Learning Collaboration and Civic Engagement Award in the Category of: Collaboration with K-12.
Cochise College's "Mentoring for Success" program entitled "COOKIES-Creating Optimistic Outlooks and Keeping Interest in Educational Success" is designed to promote the academic success and positive personal development of a young, at-risk population, hone college students' leadership, interpersonal communication, and service aptitudes, and form a close educational bond between Cochise College and the Douglas Unified School District.
This program gives college students an opportunity to apply concepts learned in the classroom to real-life situations, to provide positive mentoring and support, and be positive role models to K-6 students who may be struggling academically and developmentally.
The target school, Sarah Marley Elementary, is the school in the district which has the most educational risk indicators such as poverty, language barriers, homelessness, and Title I students.
Each of the program's college students volunteer a minimum of 4 hours per week at the school site helping students in grades 3 through 6 in a variety of subjects.
In addition to classroom and after school tutoring, college students participate in a number of activities designed to help the elementary school students, including AIMS workshops, field trips to Cochise College, Springfest, and Earth Day, to name a few. National research clearly indicates that such activities positively affect K-12 students as evidenced by improved school attendance, increased enrollment in post-secondary education, a more positive attitude towards school, and reduced negative/antisocial behavior.
College students learn about themselves as mentors as they work with students who require more individualized attention than may be available for them in the home or at school. The range of interpersonal skills that they use with elementary-aged students not only benefits others, but benefits the college students by enabling them to build skills that will be useful to them both now and in their future endeavors.
Contact Person: Dr. Michel Ouellette
Phone: 520-417-4073   Email: ouellettem@cochise.edu

Left to right: Gail Jessen (Salt Lake Community College) and Katie Olson (University of Utah)
The CCNCCE is honored to recognize Salt Lake Community College, located in Salt Lake City, Utah, as the 2008 recipient of the Service Learning Collaboration and Civic Engagement Award in the Category of: Collaboration with Universities.
The Thayne Center at SLCC and the Bennion Center at the University of Utah came together in 2004 to create "Partners in Service & Learning (PSL).
Partners in Service & Learning utilizes a steering committee of community partner representatives to plan biannual training events for over 200 community partners shared by both institutions. The PSL collaboration has since expanded to include Westminster College and LDS Business College.
PSL has planned and hosted eight training events for their community partners, not counting the Spring 2008 event. These events provide a unique space where a diverse mix of community organizations are able to share best practices of service learning partnerships.
Faculty are able to share the needs and focus of their class while community partners share the needs and focus of their organization. Through these events, many service-learning partnerships have been formed, and community partners have been educated on the difference between service-learners and volunteers and on the different roles, expectations, and requirements of the students that work with their organizations. This has led to more focused and fulfilling learning experiences for service learning students.
The Exchange, SLCC's service-learning website, contains a database of available community partnerships and service-learning projects. Through this website, students are able to select service opportunities that speak to their academic and/or career goals, and also come to understand the complexity of community-identified needs and how to best address them.
SLCC's model of collaboration has shown that a community college can successfully partner with a public four-year university, a private liberal arts college, and/or a faith-based institution to simultaneously strengthen the program of each institution and the community as a whole.
Contact Person: Gail Jessen
Phone: 801-957-4688   Email: gail.jessen@slcc.edu
2007 Awards