To:Learn and Serve America Higher Education Consortia Partners

Questions for the Consortia Partners

  1. What percentage of Federal Work Study dollars are going to Community Work Study positions at your institution? This will involve a quick email or phone conversation to the office at your institution that coordinates work study dollars.
  1. In order to write a competitive proposal, we will need to focus our objectives around identifying and resolving a salient community problem that is shared among all of our PA sites. For instance, we may focus on racism or school violence or perhaps even immigration. To that end, can each of you let us know what kinds of issues you are seeing your PA students tackle? For instance, at Naropa, since we work with a large number of Latinos, many of our PA Issue Groups are about racism and immigration.

Dakota Meadows 2005-06 PA Teams

Teen Pregnancy / Football
Dance Cheer Team / Skating Downtown
Political Awareness / Humane Society
Humane Society / Teen Suicide
Skateboarders / Paintball
School Issues / Snack Machine
Weight Room / Sports Uniforms
Plant trees for Elderly / Teen Hang-out
Teen Depression / School Issues
Paintball / Go-Kart
Hurricane Relief / Hurricaine Relief
After-School Hangout / Humane Society
Labelling/School Issues / Child Abuse

Another element of a successful proposal will be contingent upon our ability to show how the grant supports institutional priorities. To get that information, could each of you send us a document that outlines your institutions strategic vision, priorities and/or focus? If your specific department or unit also has a strategic vision, that would also be helpful.

  1. Briefly describe your community partnerships: who are you working with on your PA projects? What kind of populations do your partners serve? Also, who would you like to be working with if you had more funding? Since we have to show that we will be expanding out programs, it’s very important that you think strategically about how you want to expand PA, especially as you work with other higher education institutions. For instance, can you list one or two higher education institutions that you would like to help expand PA? Also, please tell us a bit about what makes your community partnerships unique and of high quality.
  1. This one is slightly more ambitious, but our proposal will have a great deal more currency if we can show institutional support for the proposal. Specifically, we are asking each partner to talk to their Offices of Institutional Advancement or their President’s Office and get a hard dollar (or “in kind” match should the proposal get funded. For instance, MCTC recently got a $20K promise from its President to develop a Center for Public Work—that can go into our match. Also, Naropa is working with it’s Institutional Advancement Office to get a $10K match should the proposal be funded.
  1. Engaging baby boomers is one of the priorities of this year’s competition. To meet that priority, it will help if each of us has a relationship with out local volunteer center. For instance, at Naropa, we simply began talking with our Volunteer Center about possible ways to get adults involved in our PA project.
  1. Each participant needs to show that it’s working with youth who grow up in severely distressed communities: high poverty rates and a variety of social problems. The idea is that engaging them in PA alleviates these problems for youth.
  1. We need to show that each participant has financial support for the program
  1. Establish relationships with State Campus Compacts, especially to help with dissemination of PA model in their State.
  1. Finally, are any of you doing anything significant around the MLK Day holiday? That would help us show bigger numbers, and the Corporation is looking for connections to MLK Day and programs it funds.