Office of Community Engagement – Page 18 – Collaborating for community impact

You can support our efforts in the community

Posted on April 8, 2019 by anposick

You can support programs that focus on improving community members’ lives.

IU Day is a day to celebrate and support the multitude of connections between IU and the world, including the impact of community engagement. Students from all IU campuses are actively engaging with their communities every day.

At IUPUI, this is a key focus of our office, the Office of Community Engagement. When you support us, you are supporting our mission to cultivate knowledge, relationships, and resources through collaboration that contributes to healthy and vibrant communities.

Your support allows us to offer our assistance to local communities’ efforts to improve their neighborhoods.

When you donate to our Tutoring and Mentoring Program Support Fund, you help us support tutoring programs at IPS School 48, a community school IUPUI has partnered with for years.

Photo of IUPUI student tutoring elementary school student.

When you give to our Family, School, and Neighborhood Engagement Fund, you are helping support workforce readiness programs, which offer scholarships for community members in underserved neighborhoods.

Your donations support community members building their skill sets by taking classes to become a patient access specialist or pharmacy tech, and in the future to work in medical billing and coding.

And when you donate to our Community Forums Fund, you are supporting programs offered through the SOURCE River West Entrepreneurship Center that support Near West businesses and start-ups.

Photo of check being presented to winning entrepreneur.

Learn more about our work in the community by visiting our website.

And if you want to support our efforts, click here to donate. You can support any of our funds by typing the name (in bold above) into the search feature.

IU School of Education Assistant Professor awarded for outstanding scholarship of engagement by Campus Compact

Posted on March 22, 2019 by tfrancis

In February, Indiana Campus Compact awarded Dr. Cristina Santamaría Graff, Assistant Professor of Special Education at the IU School of Education at IUPUI, with the 2019 Douglas Hiltunen Award.

Presented at the 9^th Annual Service Engagement Summit and Awards Gala, the award, established in 2000 to honor the late Indiana Campus Compact staff member, Brian Douglas Hiltunen, recognizes faculty who are exemplars of the scholarship of engagement.

These faculty members are leaders in the field and they share their knowledge with colleagues, students, and the community.

Santamaría Graff joins a list of 23 distinguished engaged scholars from across Indiana who have been awarded the Hiltunen Award in its 19-year history.

She is a former bilingual education and bilingual special education teacher who is currently interested in the ways in which culture, language, and ability intersect in school systems. Through her community-based research project Family as Faculty (FAF), families are positioned as experts or “faculty.” They co-plan and teach special education university courses centered on families’ issues, rights, and challenges in special education.

“I desire for FAF models to be conceptualized more broadly as tangible approaches to creating school-based mechanisms for integrating families as mutual partners with school leaders and centering family leadership as a driving force for how, when, where, and why specific decisions are made for students,” Santamaría Graff said.

Her experience as a fifth grade student teacher in Mexico City in a B-CLAD (Bi-lingual, Cross-cultural, Language and Academic Development) program through California State University, Long Beach, showed her the importance of ensuring her classroom was “an inclusive and welcoming space for all students and their families.” Despite being a new teacher, she was welcomed as a community member, teacher, and in some cases, family. So, when she returned back to the States, she remembered that experience and it became personal, because her father is from Coahuila, México, where “being welcomed ‘formally’ into a school community was an integral part of one’s socialization as a ‘member’ of that community,” Santamaría Graff said. These experiences led to her current work.

Laura Weaver, Director of Programs and Member Development at Campus Compact said, “Her teaching and research, which not only centers around Latinx immigrant families of children with disabilities, but is also in authentic partnerships with them, strives to ensure that the students in her courses are learning to approach teacher education through the lens of compassionate action and critical praxis.”

Weaver adds, “It has been my pleasure to work with Cristina over the past two years during her time as an Indiana Campus Compact Faculty Fellow and have witnessed not only her dedication to the field and her students, but especially to her community partners and her partnering families.”

Santamaría Graff said, “I am greatly appreciative to be honored by an award that recognizes service to the community. She added, “However, this is a shared honor and has more to do with the families with whom I work and collaborate than it does with any individual accomplishments or recognitions. This honor means that families of children with disabilities are being recognized as strong and powerful leaders who embody the values inherent in transformative change: integrity, respect for self and others, compassion, empathy, tenacity, and an uncompromising passion for fairness and equity.”

Fostering student achievement across the community

Posted on March 18, 2019 by anposick

By Amy Conrad Warner, Vice Chancellor for the IUPUI Office of Community Engagement

Photo of Amy Conrad Warner, Vice Chancellor for the IUPUI Office of Community Engagement — Amy Conrad Warner, Vice Chancellor for the IUPUI Office of Community Engagement

IUPUI’s focus on student success isn’t just about college students on campus; it’s also a promise to the thousands of children in schools across our city.

As an anchor institution, one of our key missions is to foster student achievement, and we know that takes on two forms: preparing and attracting our future students and educating our current students on civic responsibility, career readiness and knowledge of the key issues we face together as a community.

Our faculty, students and neighbors are teaching and learning in every corner of our community; take a look at our new community engagement map, showing IUPUI engagement activities within the community.

There, you will find activities that inspire high school students to consider careers in IT and informatics. The Informatics Diversity-Enhanced Workforce, or iDEW, program, exposes underrepresented students in eight Indianapolis high schools to the many possibilities of a career in technology, engineering, science or informatics.

Through our ongoing partnership with Crispus Attucks High School, students are getting a chance to gain experience on a college campus, while also earning college credits and getting a head start on their education. Our Indiana Kids program has enrolled 2,339 students in three years, helping with their homework, pairing them with college students, who can mentor them as they decide their future path, and giving them resources for their next step after high school.

We prepare educators to support thousands of K-12 students in Indianapolis. Through the Community Schools program, IUPUI works with local schools to keep students safe and ready to learn while inspiring youth to reach their own goals. Recently, that work contributed to two professors landing a grant that will pay to train educators to help their students cope with violence and trauma they experience in their lives.

Once we have them here, our goal as a university is to make sure every experience our students have as an undergraduate counts, preparing them for both their career and to be a contributing member of their community.

Our students are actively engaged, from hosting a forum to empower the community with research and open a data-driven dialogue about mass incarceration to analyzing data for a local food truck business.

Research shows that engagement-based learning is having an impact in better preparing our students for their careers, including the First Destination Survey 2017 that found nearly 92 percent of IUPUI graduates were either employed or continuing their education.

Preparing Indiana’s talent pipeline requires a commitment to fostering student success from all of us. It begins before students enter college, while they pursue a degree and following graduation to keep their skills fresh, relevant and responsive to changing demands. We invite you to discover highlights within our community engagement map and help us capture the collaborative work underway to achieve student success.

IU middle and high school program sees growth in third year

Posted on March 18, 2019 by tfrancis

In its third year, an IU tutoring and mentoring program continues to grow.

Halfway through the 2018-2019 school year, the IUPUI Office of Community Engagement in partnership with six other IU campuses served students from more than forty Indiana counties through the Indiana Kids program, supported by a grant from Serve Indiana.

Enrollment of sixth to twelfth grade students was nearing 2,400 total, with more than half of those enrolled actively utilizing the services.

A parent shared her sixth-grader’s experience, saying, My daughter “utilized the IU Indiana Kids help for the first time and the tutor did an AMAZING JOB! From the moment we began the application to finish, it was wonderful!”

The strength of the program is in the ability to offer an online service, both through internet and telephone for students that do not have internet access, no matter where the student lives. Statewide, online tutoring provided by IUPUI students has seen an increase in the third year and continues to grow, which is a goal of the program.

IU campuses provide in-person tutoring, mentoring and workshop opportunities to students in their areas.

Expanding strong community partnerships across the state is another goal of the program. Recently, new partnerships have been formed with public school districts and charter middle and high schools, community centers, libraries, Boys & Girls Clubs of Indiana, Girls Inc. and sports programs. IU campuses are also deepening their relationship with state programs, such as 21^st Century Scholars, in order to expand their reach.

These partnerships have added various after school and summer programming, new workshop topics, more in-person mentoring and tutoring opportunities.

Program leaders hope to reach athletes and athletic programs to emphasize the importance of academics, in addition to athletic ability. Athletes are participating in the program as students as well as serving as tutors and mentors.

Students attending workshop with IU tutors and mentors.

Workshops offered at campuses around the state have also seen more students attending, thanks to word of mouth from past events, program leaders said. Topics covered at the workshops include essay writing, social media awareness, ISTEP tutoring and summer arts and math programming.

The program is also committed to meeting the needs of English Language Learners (ELL) by having bi-lingual tutors and mentors and plans to imbed them into some classrooms around the state.

IU tutors and mentors, and their individual talents and skills, provide all services for the program. Tutors and mentors are provided professional development workshops around such topics as crisis intervention, meeting special needs, cultural competency, implicit bias and building relationships with students.

Looking forward, the hope is for the program to continue to increase activity amongst enrolled students statewide, and grow the number of counties served across the state.

Assessment of the program is underway to determine what is going well and what enhancements can be made to make the program better. Enrolled students as well as caregivers are encouraged to participate in the process.

Enroll in the Indiana Kids program.

Celebrate OCE staff who are succeeding

Posted on March 14, 2019 by tfrancis

Honors, awards and successes in Community Engagement

The IUPUI Office of Community Engagement celebrates its staff members, Amy Conrad Warner, Teresa Bennett, Khaula Murtadha, Nicole Oglesby, Vernon Williams, Kristin Norris in partnership with Anne Weiss, and Cierra Venable for their recent recognitions and awards, which contribute to their work in community engagement and their professional development.

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities named Amy Conrad Warner, Vice Chancellor for the Office of Community Engagement, and David Gard, assistant vice president for economic engagement at IU, to the inaugural executive committee of the Commission on Economic and Community Engagement.

The SOURCE River West Entrepreneurship Center was awarded a $200,000 grant from JPMorgan Chase Foundation, which will allow it to expand beyond the River West neighborhood to all of the Great Places 2020 neighborhoods, including Maple Crossing, Twin Aire, King Commons and Englewood Village. Teresa Bennett, Assistant Vice Chancellor for the Office of Community Engagement, serves as interim director at SOURCE.

Dr. Khaula Murtadha, Associate Vice Chancellor for Community Engagement in the Office of Community Engagement, was recognized with the IUPUI 50^th Anniversary Chancellor’s Medallion for her service to the city of Indianapolis, to the School of Education at IUPUI, to the IUPUI campus community, and to the field of education more broadly, to which she has contributed outstanding research and award-winning leadership.

(left to right) Anne Weiss and Kristin Norris

A manuscript titled “Building Capacity as Anchor Institutions: Infrastructure, Structure, and Strategy,” authored by Kristin Norris, Director of Assessment at IUPUI Office of Community Engagement, and Anne Weiss, Assistant Director of Assessment in the Office of Community Engagement and Indiana Campus Compact, was published in Metropolitan Universities Journal in February 2019.

Nicole Oglesby, Director of Strategic Neighborhood Alliances for P-20 Education in the Office of Community Engagement, has been selected to receive an Outstanding IUPUI Woman Leader in the veteran staff category at the IUPUI Office For Women 2019 Women’s History Month Leadership Awards. For over five years, Nicole led a $2.5 million federally funded program, the Martindale Brightwood Alliance for Educational Success (MBAES), a university-assisted community school initiative (IUPUI-IPS) serving elementary and middle schools within the Indianapolis Public School District. She also provides support and leadership to the IU Indiana Kids program that provides tutoring, mentoring, and college career preparation to middle and high school students statewide.

Vernon Williams, Communications & Community Engagement Strategist for the Office of Community Engagement, wrote and produced a new play ‘Price of Progress’ that explores Indiana Avenue and the growth of the IUPUI campus. The tickets to the two showings of the play sold out a month before showtime. A third day was added only to be sold out once again.

Cierra Venable, Communications Intern in the Office of Community Engagement, was the recipient of the Amos C. Brown, III Award at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Dinner at IUPUI. The Black Student Union with the Black Faculty and Staff Council at IUPUI presented awards to outstanding faculty, students and a community organization at the dinner.

IUPUI looking to grow partnership with Crispus Attucks High School

Posted on March 14, 2019 by anposick

Before graduating from Crispus Attucks High School, Kayla Saunders had already earned college credits and taken classes on campus at IUPUI, preparing her for what life as a college student would look like.

Kayla participated in the IUPUI SPAN Division, which helps students get a head start on college, by taking classes on campus with other college students and earning credits toward their future degree.

“Being in the SPAN allowed me to network with professors and other faculty, and allowed me to feel more comfortable when actually going to college, as I already knew what to expect from a cultural standpoint and from an academic standpoint,” Kayla said.

The SPAN Division has been a part of IUPUI for 35 years, offering six accelerated college immersion programs. And the programs have grown continuously, from just over 20 students to more than 300 served each year, SPAN Director J.R. Russell said.

In April 2007, the IUPUI chancellor, numerous IUPUI school deans, and the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) district superintendent of schools signed into action a formal collaboration and memorandum of understanding (MOU) between IUPUI and the IPS Crispus Attucks High School (CAHS). The memorandum, signed by then-IUPUI Chancellor Charles R. Bantz and then-IPS Superintendent Dr. Eugene White, outlined a desire to explore ways in which IUPUI and IPS could strengthen their urban academic collaboration by creating clear pathways for early college enrollment as well as curricular engagement between the two institutions.

In 2008, IUPUI and IPS developed and launched an accelerated university immersion initiative and scholarship program; the IUPUI CAHS SPAN Scholarship Initiative. This program serves as a gateway for CAHS students to enroll in on-campus IUPUI courses taught by university faculty. The core mission of this collaboration is to provide early enrollment opportunities for CAHS students in IUPUI courses while increasing the number of underrepresented students who enter, remain, and successfully complete a postsecondary education. SPAN provides university administrative scholarship oversight, policy development and implementation, IUPUI faculty and CAHS teacher curricular exchange opportunities, and academic and logistical support.

IUPUI has committed up to $250,000 per academic year to cover the cost of tuition for eligible CAHS students. IUPUI CAHS SPAN Scholarship recipients may enroll in up to 18 credit hours tuition-free at IUPUI through the SPAN Division during their junior and senior years of high school at CAHS. This represents a scholarship of approximately $5,000 per student. Scholarship recipients have successfully completed 4,081 credit hours at the IUPUI campus. IUPUI also offers additional resources, including speakers who can come to high school classes or professors who can work with high school teachers.

Since 2010 (the first graduating cohort), a total of 317 IUPUI CAHS Scholarship recipients have graduated high school. A total of 50 scholars have earned college degrees, 30 of which are from IUPUI and IU, and 138 are currently enrolled in college.

But since the program was started, significant changes have been made within Indianapolis Public Schools, including the closing of three high schools causing enrollment at Crispus Attucks High School to more than double.

With those changes in mind, leadership of the program that partners IUPUI and Crispus Attucks met recently to see how else the university can better help the school.

Dr. Khaula Murtadha who was at the signing of the 2007 MOU noted, “Consistent leadership on the part of Crispus Attucks’ principal, Lauren Franklin, has made a difference in this partnership as well as our IUPUI leadership. Franklin’s commitment stems, in part, from her experiences as culturally competent educator and a family lineage of graduates from the School. For our part, IUPUI is serving an anchor institution in the community and with that comes an unwavering responsibility of support.”

George Sims, assistant principal at Crispus Attucks, said he would like to see the school’s relationship with IUPUI continue to grow in multiple ways.

“We would like to see more students with an interest in applying to IUPUI SPAN. We would like to see more teachers taking advantage of the partnership and invite more guest speakers to come in to meet with our students,” Sims said.

As their student body continues to grow and enroll, he would like to see more resources offered to Crispus Attucks students, including giving freshman an idea of what to expect in college, all with the goal of better preparing their students for success in college, Sims said.

“Our partnership with IUPUI makes higher education accessible to our students. It demystifies the college experience and shows our students that it is possible for them to attend,” Sims said.

For Kayla, who is now enrolled as a health sciences major at IUPUI and a mentor in the SPAN Division, that was exactly what the program did for her, she said. She graduated high school with 18 credit hours, and will be graduating college in May, with plans to start graduate school, also at IUPUI.

She has seen firsthand how the program better prepares students for college, not only through earning credits, but also by being in actual college classes, she said.

And as a mentor, she gets to help students just like her through the IUPUI CAHS SPAN Scholarship Initiative.

“Since I also was once in their shoes, being a high school student and taking classes at IUPUI, I am able to relate to them on various levels. I honestly love working with the students, and SPAN allows students to develop academically and turn into scholars,” Kayla said.

Capstone event shows off students’ work

Posted on December 6, 2018 by anposick

A project by IUPUI students to preserve the history of the only elected president from Indiana is just one of dozens that will be featured in this semester’s Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing Capstone event.

Students in Zebulun M. Wood’s media arts and science class have been working with the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site for several semesters on projects to help digitize the museum.

Their work includes scanning artifacts so they can be stored and viewed digitally, and creating the first online virtual reality presidential museum, which Zeb hopes can be done for other presidential sites, too.

Students also created a crowdfunded 3D printing of a life-sized Benjamin Harrison, individual pieces of which can be printed and mailed by sponsors all over the world, and then repeatedly assembled and reassembled by museum visitors, a project they also hope can be replicated at other presidential sites across the nation.

Students worked in collaboration with the University Library Center for Digital Scholarship, which scanned the items for the students to create the virtual museum and 3D-printed statue.

Their project will be one of many on display on Friday during the school’s Student Project Showcase, from 4 to 7 p.m. in the Informatics & Communications Technology Complex, at 535 W. Michigan St. The event is free and open to the public.

Students will be displaying thousands of hours of invested into community-engaged projects, from apps to virtual reality experiences and assessing and creating marketing projects.

Photo of attendees at IU School of Informatics and Computing capstone event

Photo of attendee at IU School of Informatics and Computing capstone event testing out VR.

Zeb hopes that leading the way in this work will help his students build their skills, and also, create the potential for more jobs in the future.

Sarah Worthington, a student who served as team leader on the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site project, said she learned a lot through the work, including how to handle situations that didn’t go as planned.

“I had to relearn how to take constructive criticism, when I thought that I already knew how to do so, and to communicate in situations that I would otherwise have preferred to brush off or avoid,” she said.

“I used to think that my career would be me sitting at a desk, being told to do something, doing it, and then getting paid, but this project showed me that there’s a lot more to it than that.”

“Working with students allows the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site to explore and test novel solutions to longstanding museum challenges, including reaching diverse communities and building and sustaining the next generation of visitors,” said Charles Hyde, president and CEO of the site.

The students helped the museum avoid the status quo and come up with exciting – and often unconventional – solutions, and expects the partnership will continue, he said.

“We’ve challenged ourselves to become recognized as ‘the most innovative, impactful, and civically-engaged presidential site in the country by 2020,’ and our student and faculty partners have been invaluable in sharing their time, talent, and technical experience in helping us achieve this ambitious vision,” he said.

Improving the health of a community is an important, but monumental task

Posted on November 28, 2018 by tfrancis

By Amy Conrad Warner, Vice Chancellor for the IUPUI Office of Community Engagement

Amy Conrad Warner, Vice Chancellor for the IUPUI Office of Community Engagement

Health, or the lack thereof, has wide-ranging impacts on a community, from quality of life to the local economy and the workforce.

As an anchor institution, IUPUI is working with local communities to address issues that impact residents’ health. But in order to do that work well, students, faculty, staff and researchers have to know what issues a community faces.

Three years ago, IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI researcher Tess Weathers uncovered a disturbing trend in Indianapolis neighborhoods: where you live strongly predicts how long you will live.

For those who live in areas with higher incomes, such as the Carmel area along the Monon Trail, the news was good and their life expectancy was longer at just under 84 years.

But go south along that same trail to the neighborhoods closer to downtown, and life expectancy quickly drops to about 69 years.

The ‘Worlds apart: gaps in life expectancy in the Indianapolis metro area’ study is still routinely cited now, including prompting a partnership between IUPUI and Eli Lilly to try to reduce the prevalence of diabetes – which is a significant health condition in Indianapolis. The goals of the Diabetes Impact Project are to increase screenings for residents at high risk for diabetes, improve access to continued care and foster an environment that supports controlling and preventing diabetes.

The data sends a strong message of inequity in our own neighborhoods. And one of the key issues that leads to that inequity is a lack of local resources.

That is also a significant issue that IUPUI is working to address.

The Near East Side Community includes 17,170 residents in 19 neighborhoods with a poverty rate of over 47% and unemployment near 25%. To improve access to care, a Student Outreach Clinic was established at Neighborhood Fellowship Church to serve those in need.

Today, IUPUI student volunteers studying medicine, dentistry, law, nursing, rehabilitation, physical therapy, social work, and members of the Timmy Global Health chapter operate and manage the free clinic.

The clinic provides free medical, dental, social and legal services for residents in the area each week, with the goal of addressing the health care gap in the community and conditions such as infections, high blood pressure and depression.

In 2017, the clinic had 863 patient encounters, volunteers served more than 13,000 hours, 3,300 prescriptions were dispensed and students raised more than $17,000.

In addition, a team of two professors, one from the IU School of Nursing at IUPUI and one from the IU School of Social Work at IUPUI, and two community partners recently were selected to be Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellows, winning a $420,000, three-year grant. They will continue work with two charter schools in the Near West and begin work with Washington Township Schools to create trauma responsive environments that the schools and community say are desperately needed.

Through these efforts, IUPUI is working to address the health of our community with the goal of having a significant, lasting impact.