By the time Jacqueline Smith approached the stage, the auditorium was almost full. She glances around the room, looking at the diverse individuals before her. A vibrant community gazes back, identified by their name tags. By 6:00 p.m. more than a hundred people had crowded into the lecture hall, and there were dozens more still streaming through the doors.
Surprisingly many audience members are strangers. Even though they may work in the same town or are involved with Arizona State University, circumstances often prevent them from encountering one another. The dialogue increased the chances that individuals could connect with a resource or program or find a potential partner. Around me community members exchange business cards and contact information as they discuss business, sports, and summer weather. It was as though the initial sparks of collaboration were visible.
Tonight was the culminating event in a series of Communities Connect Dialogues, designed to encourage collaboration in the community. “A gap exists between our good intentions and our actions,” Smith says. “The world is full of good ideas that don’t spread quickly enough.” Together with our local and global partners, ASU plans to develop answers to the great Challenges Before Us, producing knowledge and discovery that inspire meaningful change.”
Have you ever googled “ASU and the community” or merely contemplated the university’s economic and social impact on the surrounding community?
Maybe you wondered what community means or thought about what community you belong to.
Do you want to know that your university is positively affecting its students as well as the community in which it is based?
Perhaps you inquired how you could get involved and create change.
If you’re like me, you may think about these questions on a daily basis. I find that these moments usually occur after someone inspires me, and yes, generally someone inspires me each day. Something always seems impossible until it is done. No matter how enlightened we become, we still face the realities of life. Challenges will never disappear. Fortunately, inspiration is everywhere. It doesn’t really matter how you find inspiration –it only matters that you do.
Each dialogue showcased collaboration in the community. ASU saw a need and an opportunity for change. The purpose was to ignite passion and launch new ideas. Presenters volunteered to share their stories in a rapid five minute presentation. As you might expect, one of the features of these dialogues was bringing together people that normally wouldn’t connect. For ASU, this is part of redefining who our community is. Communities have specific knowledge and resources that drive innovation and solutions. Narratives allow noteworthy opportunities and experiences to surface. Everyone has a story and a life experience that they can share to help someone that is struggling. Each dialogue demonstrated that the university was one step closer to creating the community it wished to see. A highly successful university establishes new relationships and improves existing partnerships with every event.
A passion burned deep within the hearts of the presenters. The flames could be seen throughout the desert, igniting those close to it. Passion is not something we can obtain instantly. Instead it is developed by tribulations, observations, situations, and failures we experience in life. We don’t find passion, passion finds us.
“What I found were people, people like you and me, people that needed help”
-Tim Huffman (Guerrilla Marketing: Reaching Out to Homeless Youth)
“Engage the world.”
-Odesma Dalrymple (Engineering in a Societal Context)
“Design is what you do, not what you’ve done.”
-Mark Dudlik & Andrew Coppola (The Burgeoning Phoenix Design Scene and How You Can Be Involved)
“Our role is to serve as a catalyst. Our goal is to make sure all the cities cooperate together.”
-Norris Nordvold (FRIENDS of the West Valley Recreation Corridor)
“We are the bridge that takes students into the community”
-Deborah Ball (ASU Service Learning)
“Our goal is to bring together Arizona’s brightest and innovative thinkers.”
-Tomas Carillo (Tedx Phoenix)
These quotes were taken from all four dialogues. I chose them because they demonstrate the positive direction our community is headed. At ASU there is an opportunity to do something great at a local and global level. A university is measured not by who it excludes, but by who it includes. Let’s generate hope. Let’s communicate and collaborate. Let’s embrace challenges and catalyze change. ASU cannot do it alone, but we can do it together.
During the past two years, Prosumer Mujeres, a research group in the Center for Healthy Outcomes in Aging, has worked with local Latina women from Mountain Park Health Center to discuss the benefits and barriers to physical activity, as well as possible intervention programs. Through ASU’s partnership with this exceptional group of women, Prosumer Mujeres has created many effective recruitment and retention strategies for physical fitness programs throughout the Valley.
Prosumer Mujeres has now expanded to include local and national community leaders with diverse professional backgrounds. These leaders raise the visibility of the board’s mission and goals in promoting Latina health. The first inaugural dinner, held April 29th, was an exciting introduction to the board’s efforts, its accomplishments and our commitment to Latina health. Also discussed were the four areas of the Advisory Board’s focus:
1) monitoring research relevance for Latinas
2) resource development for Latina health
3) community integration for research and service-learning opportunities
4) participatory roles in forming research directions for Latina health
Adriana Perez, fellow with ASU’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation recently spoke about Prosumer Mujeres’s ongoing efforts to promote Latina health at the 2nd Annual Invitational Geriatric Conference and the result of the group’s work has been showcased on NBC Nightly News, the local Channel 8 Horizonte, and through Radio Campesina, serving Hispanic communities of Yuma, AZ; Phoenix, AZ; Bakersfield, CA; Salinas, CA; Visalia, CA; and Tri Cites, WA.
Prosumer Mujeres looks forward to continuing its partnership with ASU and the Center for Health Outcomes in Aging in the interest of promoting and advancing best practices in Latina health.
Students from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the School of Sustainability will work with Dr. Claudia Mesch, art history, and Julie Anand, photography, from the School of Art, to explore art and sustainability issues raised by artworks in the ASU Art Museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will include both past and present examples of artists exploring human interaction with the land, urbanization, natural and manmade materials, pollution, cultural sustainability and sustainable processes, and will explore how artists have brought issues of sustainability to a broader community, encouraged participation and dialog, and proposed creative solutions.
The exhibition, curated by Mesch and Heather Lineberry, Senior Curator and Interim Director of the ASU Art Museum, will include historic precedents, like the 19th century Hudson River school painters who painted classic American landscapes with encroaching signs of industrialization, as well as selections of work by contemporary artists like Matthew Moore, who has created compelling land art works on his family’s farm in the middle of the suburbs in West Phoenix, and Eddie Dominguez, who uses ceramics to explore human history and impact on the earth.
The students in the seminar will bring their different disciplines to their discussions and research. As the conversation deepens, the projects that emerge from the class will be accessible to the public in the gallery on a class bulletin board and on the website including a class blog. Class sessions with guest speakers from the fields of art, science and the humanities will be open to the public. The students in the seminar will also interact with the artists in residence during the larger fall season.
Visit the About section of our Web site or our blog for project details.
Over the past 2,000 years, organized learning has evolved. Today, however, there are social, economic and cultural needs not being met. American society has undergone massive shifts over the past 50 years but our universities have hardly changed at all. The very identity of the university is at stake. So, ASU is changing that identity. ASU is reinventing higher education in America. By breaking the mold, ASU has created a place where local solutions have global impact. Join us. And pursue the work you believe in.
Jacquie Scott, faculty chair of the Barrett Honors College, talks about The Human Event, being open to new ideas, and what it means to be passionate about learning.
Jacquelyn Scott Lynch joined the faculty of the Barrett Honors College at ASU in 2001. She holds a B.A. in Economics and English from Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Arizona State University. Her scholarship focuses on Darwinian literary criticism, Irish and African American literature, and social and biological theories of race. In April 2007, she received the college’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Academic Service, and she was honored with ASU’s inaugural Faculty Achievement Award in Teaching Performance.
ISIRC 2009 International Social Innovation Research Conference
Social Innovation: Reconfiguring Markets,
Blurring Sector Boundaries and Challenging Institutional Arrangements 14th - 16th September 2009
Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
The Saïd Business School at Oxford University will be hosting the conference which brings together SERC and the International Social Entrepreneurship Research Conference (ISERC). There is plenty for both the experienced and new researcher (and for the practitioner-researcher). There are two leading journals vying for the best papers and a book is planned from the conference. Information about the Conference and its themes can be found in the attached flyer.
There are two tracks for submissions -
· Full papers for the main body of the event and
· Abstracts focusing on work in progress, praxis orientated case studies, or early stage doctoral research.
The submission deadline for both these is June 26th 2009
For general information regarding the Conference, please contact
Pippa Hichens – pippa.hichens@sbs.ox.ac.uk
Pippa Hichens|Events Coordinator
Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship Said Business School|University of Oxford
Park End Street|Oxford|OX1 1HP|UK
Tel – + 44 (0)1865 288491
Fax – + 44 (0) 1865 288959
ASU Professor Ariel Rodríguez knew students in his Program Planning course would love the chance to enjoy a 2.77-acre classroom with sunshine, waterfalls and artwork.
But he threw them a curveball in the form of a challenge at the Downtown Civic Space Park: Create events that inspire the people of Phoenix to join you here.
The course recently taught 20 students how to create, organize and oversee several community events that brought hundreds of residents and visitors to the park.
Students in the School of Community Resources & Development partnered with the City of Phoenix and ASU’s Parks and Recreation Student Association to offer the free activities. This included a big-screen outdoor showing of the movie “The Dark Knight,” complete with complimentary popcorn and refreshments, which drew a crowd of more than 200 people.
“We had an opportunity to see, literally 200 yards away from our College, how the theories we were learning in class could be put into practice immediately in the park,” says Samuel Richard, a senior in the College of Public Programs.
Rodríguez says, “The park is an ideal place to develop programs that can simultaneously impact people living at the Westward Ho, ASU students at Taylor Place, people coming from Tempe on the light rail…and other residents in the community.”
In the course, students learn the need to focus on planning event details such as equipment rental, security, weather contingency plans, waste disposal, marketing and venue seating.
“They even had to work out small details like making sure the grass in the park wasn’t watered shortly before the movie, or it would be wet where people were sitting,” says Rodríguez.
Students have also offered a gardening seminar for clients of an adult care facility operated by the Foundation for Senior Living in Phoenix. They arranged transportation to the park and taught the seniors to plant flowers which they were able to take home. Another event brought several seniors from the nearby Westward Ho to play board games.
For more information about the School of Community Resources and Development, visit http://scrd.asu.edu.
Corey Schubert
Manager of Media Communications
ASU College of Public Programs
602.496.0406 office
The New American University pursues applied research that contributes to the public good, assuming major responsibility for the economic, social and cultural vitality of the community that surrounds it.
Improving the health status and health care of people in our community is a central part of this mission. People of Mexican background — a large segment of the population in Maricopa County, Ariz., for example — have a high prevalence of diabetes and experience an undue burden of diabetes-related complications.
To help address this health problem, Dr. Luis E. Zayas, ASU Assistant Professor of Social Work, will conduct a pilot study this summer to investigate how adults of Mexican ethnicity in Maricopa County — who recently were screened and diagnosed with T2 diabetes mellitus — seek health care for, manage, and cope with their diabetes in the community, given their access to health care, socio-economic resources, and cultural practices.
The goal is to better understand and learn from their experiences in order to develop culturally informed, community-based strategies to facilitate prompt medical care and proper self-management of diabetes for recently diagnosed adults in this population.
The pilot will involve semi-structured and structured interviews with adults of Mexican ethnicity in Maricopa County who have been diagnosed with diabetes in the past 3-12 months.
Results from this study will inform the development of health care interventions to be tested, in collaboration with various community stakeholders.
Corey Schubert
Manager of Media Communications
ASU College of Public Programs
602.496.0406 office
Follow the College of Public Programs on Twitter! @coppasu
An Arizona State University program that helps parents transform their children’s educational experience has won the regional 2009 C. Peter Magrath University Community Engagement Award and is a finalist for the national award.
The program has “graduated” more than 7,000 parents of students attending 41 different schools, and indirectly impacted more than 24,000 low-income, minority youth throughout the greater Phoenix region since the program began three years ago.
Established in 2006, the C. Peter Magrath University Community Engagement Award recognizes the outreach and engagement partnerships of four-year public universities. The award program seeks to identify colleges and universities that have redesigned their learning, discovery, and engagement functions to become even more sympathetically and productively involved with their communities.
This award recognizes an extraordinary partnership between ASU and the Phoenix K-12 educational community. The program relies on collaborations with area school districts, as well as community leaders and community service organizations to operate and be successful.
Parents of K-12 students receive training through the nine-week program that creates a community where parents and teachers collaborate to improve each child’s educational environment, both at home and at school, so that all children can achieve their greatest academic potential.
With a focus on retention, graduation and academic success, the American Dream Academy instills an understanding of the value of attaining an education, and can offer a pathway out of poverty for many people. For information about the Center, visit http://cdcr.asu.edu.
Corey Schubert
Manager of Media Communications
ASU College of Public Programs
602.496.0406 office
602.370.6128 cell
Follow the College of Public Programs on Twitter! Twitter (@coppasu)
The models and collaborative tools created by the scientists helped the city’s decision makers determine the criticality of the balance of needed investments into infrastructure to keep up with demand, land-use proposals currently being considered, and possible conservation policies.
Tonight was the culminating event in a series of Communities Connect Dialogues, designed to encourage collaboration in the community. “A gap exists between our good intentions and our actions,” Smith says. “The world is full of good ideas that don’t spread quickly enough.” Together with our local and global partners, ASU plans to develop answers to the great Challenges Before Us, producing knowledge and discovery that inspire meaningful change.”