OSU Community Center

OSU Community Center (Center for Community Involvement and Outreach)

We need to enfold a number of essential functions at OSU into a center. These include:
• Outreach
• Service Learning
• Community Involvement
• Campus Climate

These share a number of essential characteristics and a central location would foster a network with both programming and academic faculty. It is also critical to reduce our dependence on students to create these essential functions. For too long, students have had to create programs from whole cloth. If these are essential, then we must Pony Up the money and support. Rather than depend on administration, we should enfold their energy into existing structures.

Similarly, we need to support both program and administrative faculty in their effects to serve students. It is essential to understand the issues related to campus climate, to recruiting and retention, and to have this problem attended to in a structural rather than haphazard way.

Additionally, academic faculty are under increasing pressure to provide substantial outreach as part of their research funding. To have individual faculty responsible for creating and delivering materials that is central to the outreach and Land Grant mission of the university is unrealistic. We must seize the opportunity as well as fulfill our mandate to provide programs, products and materials that have a sustainable impact on all our communities.

Related to this, we must support academic programs whose teaching and research provides the experience and rational for administering programs through the center. We need to develop experience in effective program delivery and design, in funding assessment for both campus as well and Oregon-wide programs. We need to support faculty and students in their endeavors to develop and deliver on their experience and expertise as we foster a supportive campus climate. How do we effect changes in poverty, support underserved communities? How do we connect our research to the fruitful application of this knowledge on campus and in Oregon?

Building on successes, overcoming barriers

OSU has a long history of successes. From student-run programs we can build administrative support. We have a successful history of outreach to underserved communities in Extension, 4-H and The SMILE Programs. We have a number of campus groups whose mission is improving campus climate. However, in too many of these programs, particularly those that depend on student volunteers, we have not established continuity. If we have a program that depends on graduate students to run the programs, we lose experience and momentum each year. For less essential programs perhaps this is acceptable but for programs like Community Life, this is not functional. It takes too long, we lose too much. If Service Learning is to rise to its potential as an integral aspect of each students experience at OSU, we cannot depend on the random nature of annual interns and volunteers.

We must create long-term institutional support for offices, faculty and programming staff. We msut provide a home to involeve those wonderful students into an existing, well supported, growing program. We can use their help. We msut not depend on their abilities to create something each year from nothing. It’s wrong, ineffective and inefficient.

Steps to success

In a number of areas, we have taken baby steps. We each know pieces of the puzzle. A few are aware of some details but we have nit yet created a sense across the cmapus that we will make a substantial change and a commitment to goal-oriented management. Unless we have the opportunity to step up, we will nibble around the edges. We must first communicate, convince, and demonstrate the need and our commitment. Then we can begin a step-wise process of creating a center for OSU’s commitment to communities.

Step 1

We need to create a cross-campus administrative unit to bring together these functions.
Where essential functions are missing or depend on volunteers, temporary workers; we set these areas as priorities to allocate funds.
We retool the OSU Strategic plan to better integrate efforts with these functions
We create a students’ group to inform the unit how to best integrate and support ongoing student-run groups

Step 2

We create through the mission and functional units a plan to seek funding through grants and foundations to support both the overall mission and the work of individual units with the structure.
We begin design work for a building to house those units without either an academic or an administrative home.
Through the creation of a strategic plan, we begin delivering services that support outreach, service learning and foster a positive campus climate

Step 3

We break ground on a sequence of buildings to house these functions
We create an endowment to support programs and faculty
We become a national center on outreach, service learning and campus climate