William Paterson (Michigan politician)

Transcription

Keith Edwards: Civic engagement is like pitching a pebble into the river. It has this ripple effect that allows you to make connections with the community. And by making those connections we can add solid value to our students and to the community. The Cass River Watershed Plan is one that takes a look at water quality and management practices for maintaining the quality of the Cass River. Students will be actively involved in both field experiences as well as taking a look at public policy and best management practices to make recommendations. Sara McDonell: My responsibilities as a part of this project are taking pictures of this process just to put on the Cass River Greenway website and collecting water quality information as well as facilitating and bringing together community members again to work towards the common goal of restore the Cass River. Bob Zeilinger: Basically every initiative, in almost every project that we do, U of M-Flint has been a key member of that team. The Cass River that we're standing next to is got some 900 square miles of watershed, so one little community, one group of people can't do it together, you need the whole community to work together. Thomas Henthorne: The Behind the Bowtie project was one where we had a local community group approach our department and ask us if we would be interested in developing an exhibit for the 100th anniversary celebration of Chevrolet. Folks associated with the Sloan Museum, with local car clubs, and with college and cultural organization, and with the Vintage Chervolet Car Club of America and they've asked us if we could come up with a theme that somehow told the car collectors something different about Chevrolet that they didn't already know. These car collectors are pretty sharp and they know everything about their cars from the headlights all the way to what kind of screw holds in the tail light. So Behind the Bowtie was a way to get them to understand the people that made the car and we focused on actually the people that worked for Chevrolet in Flint over its 100 year history. I think the reason people are willing to work with the university is that they understand that everybody really has a teaching role in this community and their part and the partnerships that we form are simply an extension of the classroom. Sandra Morgan-Jones: Genesee Early College is a high school located on the campus of the University of Michigan-Flint specializing in helping students explore the health and medical careers. Our students have exposure to technology labs and to science labs and to professors. When our students come to Genesee Early College, they have a very narrow view of what community is like. They get an opportunity to really meet the people in this community and find out ways they are helping. Janay Mateen: More than just getting a grade, it's really trying to help people with their lives. Jonathan Mateen: We end up knowing people and creating relationships with nurses, patients, you know, doctors, and I think that really adds to people saying like hey, I wanna stay here and help out this. Andy Fink: We started talking about, ya know, getting rid of a bunch of little commmunity service projects and doing something big and then I told him ya know, I want to build a house and he looked at me like I was crazy. Ahmed Dandachi: I went along with it because the scale of it. It's huge, something that really gave back to the community. Andy Fink: All in all, we have 50 members in our fraternity. The Student Veterans Association also helped out and Habitat for Humanity provided us with supervisors. We first thought of the idea in April and then began pursuing building the home in July and the family moved in in December. Ashley Gorton: On the day we moved in, it made our Christmas. They were really and honestly and truly my heroes because they have made an amazing gift for my family. Ahmed Dandachi: It's important to give back to the community because it is, ya know, it's your community so you really have to make it better otherwise it's going to stay the same and we all wanna make things better. Janet Haley: Hope is hidden in the middle of Flint, in the back of a cemetary. Restoration of Spirit, the Glenwood Cemetary site-specific Theater project, began as an initiative from the Genesee County Historical Society to raise awareness for Glenwood Cemetary located in the heart of Flint. And many of Flint's founding men and women are interred there um, C.S. Mott, the Crapo family. Theater could help raise awareness for the cemetary as a valuable, historical feature of our city by creating a costume, dress-up tour. We had a group of theater students and history students who did research. They worked together as a group to create a promenade piece. There was 35 in the audience and had 12 shows and they were all sold out. They would travel with the characters through the cemetary. The project's intention became to reveal place, revive history, and restore spirit, or to restore civic pride. Reinventing it, reimagining it, and celebrating it, valuing it. Mona Munroe-Younis: The Carnegie classification is really for universities that have an institutional commitment to civic engagement that ripples out at all levels from university-wide partnerships to faculty research and student civic engagement and departmental commitments. U of M-Flint is really unique in its commitment to civic engagement and we actually want to be a role model for other campuses. Chancellor Ruth Person: Since 1970, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has classified American colleges and universities using nationally available data. This information is used by both the higher education community and the general public to better understand the similarities and differences between institutions. The University of Michigan-Flint is classified as a post-baccalaureate comprehensive institution in the top tier of masters programs. In 2008, Carnegie added a new voluntary category for community engagement. Application for this designation is voluntary and highly competitive. Of the more than 4,000 institutions Carnegie classifies, only 311 are found in this category. I am very pleased to say that the University of Michigan-Flint is one of these engaged campuses. D.J. Trela: The Carnegie Classification is a validation of all of the efforts of our faculty, staff, and students in making connections with our community in the past 55 years. Mona Munroe Younis: The Carnegie Classification exemplifies that we are who we say we are, we're academics in action.