Luchetti, Lauren (CP)

Okay. Hello.

Thank you for watching.

Um, my name is Lauren Lucchetti and I am the

campus camp activist, a serving at North Central College in

Naperville, Illinois.

And this is my Vista project building capacity for low

income student work of positions while elevating community engaged learning

courses. So, first we'll start off with a little bit

of background information about the institution and how my project

fits into the bigger picture.

Eso in the fall of 2019 North Central College instituted

a new, uh, calendar.

And so we switched from the trimester calendar two semesters

and simultaneously instituted a new curriculum and set of gen

add requirements.

So 34 courses now contain a nem bedded community engaged

learning component, and all students must take one of these

courses in order to graduate.

One of the new courses that um was started was

the Transfer Seminar, which is modeled after the high impact

practice first year seminar.

And it's a course that carries the C e l

designation and partners with our on campus coffee lab.

And so we have an on campus community partner in

an effort to intentionally and bad transfer students into their

new campus community.

And then to help facilitate this new all college CEO

requirement, a new student worker position began.

And so it's the engaged learning facilitator, or elf position.

And the Elf position is a campus leadership and professional

growth opportunity for federal work.

Study eligible students and is the vista I supported else

in their work eating and uplifting CEO courses with special

attention being placed on the transfer seminar.

And so the project boat gets Number one is the

elves, Um, and so this this program provides low income

students to targeted benefits pay to help out with basic

needs on then specific career readiness curriculum to increase their

chances for employment post graduation.

So this is an opportunity for students who are committed

to promoting a culture of engagement on campus and else

gained valuable applied experience by serving as liaisons between faculty

teaching CDL courses, the students enrolled and the community partner.

So the basics of their job included our weekly Alte

meetings, where much of our team collaboration, discussions and vocational

training took place.

Um, additionally, the else held office hours where student could

come discussed C e l with their elves, um, they

attended their assigned section of the transfer seminar, and they

were trained on the volunteer portal to use it as

a means to connect students to coffee lab volunteer opportunities.

So for that vocational career readiness curriculum, it was essentially

divided up into four parts and spread over two months.

So we started with self exploration, some strengths, tests and

personality tests, Um, that we moved to career exploration.

Um, And then from there we talked about kind of

job related skills, resumes and cover letters, interviewing, and that

our final section was discussing postgraduate life.

And so we focused on the skills needed to enter

directly into the workforce.

Or how do we shift to graduate school, Um, or

than the third option we talked about was postgraduate service

opportunities. And so we asked to the office for a

lot of feedback about the program, and each of them

kind of, um just wrote down these types of statements

of what this program has meant.

And so I chose this one.

They were all very good, and I will just go

ahead and read this one real quick.

So I applied for the position of engaged learning facilitator

because I was intrigued by the prospect of forming connections

between campus and community partners.

And beyond that, I didn't really know what the program

was about or what it would do.

The program that has developed in this past year is

so unique, and I think it has the potential to

really make a difference on this campus as someone whose

career goals lie with the nonprofit work.

I'm so excited to help leave the spirit of volunteerism

throughout North Central.

Being a part of the development of the community Engaged

Learning Program has encouraged me to expand my creative problem

solving skills, work with other amazing people and gained valuable

skills that I know I will take with me into

my future.

Career paths, Um, and so you can kind of see,

just like the multifaceted personal benefits that, um, we saw

the else get out of this program.

It was clearly something that they enjoyed.

And we're really excited about that.

But then we had some tangible outcomes.

Um, but we have the Alps, take a survey before

the career readiness curriculum, and after we saw them improve

on average in all of these learning outcomes, except for

that first bar chart there, which is about academic schools.

And that makes sense.

It wasn't really something that we covered in our programming.

It focused much more on getting ready for postgraduate life.

Um, of course, there are some limitations with the survey

will never be able to truly prove that our curriculum

is what caused this change.

And additionally, there was only four Alps this year, and

so it was a pretty small sample.

However, given kind of the the qualitative feedback that we've

gotten from the elves, as well as some concrete outcomes

that we saw, we believe that this program has had

a positive effect on them.

And so kind of.

Some of the tangible things that came out of, um,

are four else this year was the two that will

be continuing on in education.

They started applying for internships, interviewing for internships, starting to

write a thesis, submitting an application to direct a play.

And these were things that were all goals that we

sat in the career readiness curriculum during the goal setting

section and that are two seniors have secured postgraduate service,

your opportunities that will be serving with city year, um,

starting this summer and we're really excited about facts and

so then capacity building for the Al programme because it

was a new position.

I was able to be very involved with building the

program from the ground up and then also day today,

just supervising the elves.

And so the capacity, capacity building efforts kind of fault

fell into these two broad categories of content creation and

program structure.

And within that content creation, we have these three kind

of subgroups.

So there's the career readiness curriculum.

So we now have the surveys for the pre and

post tests.

We have the Power point, which was the primary method

of delivering the curriculum.

We have all the worksheets that they used.

We have a timeline for instituting this curriculum and all

the links to the personality tests and worksheets are all

in one place.

And so then the second piece of that is training

materials. So now there is an elf Training Mallon Manual,

a volunteer portal guide.

Ah C E l brochure for car 200 handouts for

faculty on working with else and all of these things

that, and that will be able to use to train

the house in the future.

And then, finally, that online drives so kind of this

infrastructure that will easily transition from year to year.

So there will be no one owner of anything.

So the CEO Google drive, um, where everything is housed.

It will all just be shared with everybody from year

to year.

There's a CEO canvas.

So all of our flyers will not be lost from

year to year.

Um, and then an instagram and Facebook that will pass

on as else come into the program and graduate out

of North Central.

And so then project focused.

Number two is CEO and specifically card 200.

Um and so the Vista support ultimately was able to

touch every C e l course this year.

So there was 58 courses over the two semesters.

11 of those, 58 were transfer seminars.

And within the transfer seminar, 325 students were involved in

direct community engaged learning hours which ultimately ended up cut

totaling 2 442 hours.

And in this chart, you can kind of see the

breakdown of how many of these students were low income.

How many were veterans um Syria and then capacity building

for C E.

L. So, using the transfer seminar as a pilot, I

was able to create an infrastructure for all CEO courses

to use North Central's virtual volunteer portal as a means

for registering for hours.

So community partners can directly upload their needs onto the

portal and students can log on.

And volunteer director Lisa there doesn't need to be a

middleman coordinating the hours.

Um, and then the system is now set up to

keep track of these hours by person and by class,

which makes it very easy to report back to faculty

of exactly how these hours are getting done and making

sure they're approved.

Um, additionally, there is now a volunteer portal guide, so

students can read that, um, and really learn everything that

they need to know for using the portal for CEO

hours. And so then we have some challenges and the

future, so we kind of have to talk about Covert

19 and project trajectory.

In March, North Central began remote instruction in response to

Cove in 19 and using the previous semesters seat yelled

data is ah, way to figure this out.

Um, It seems that most students begin and ultimately complete

their hours after that mid semester point, which would have

put us March April that most students would have completed

their hours and some of these hours were able to

shift to remote work.

So there was still things being done with CEO in,

you know, march in April.

But ultimately we believe that we lost somewhere around 140

hours. Um, additionally, this has kind of changed our outlook

towards next year.

We've had to do some restructuring, and I'll kind of

talk about, um, the path forward in the next slide.

And so we'll talk a little bit about challenges.

So kind of the two big challenges that continued to

pop up throughout this project was the availability of ours

and community partner responsiveness.

Um, and so really, we boiled that down to the

fact that you have six sections of Ah, of course,

partnering with one community partner.

And that's like hundreds of students.

And it's hard for one community partner toe have the

capacity to handle all of those volunteers completing roughly 15

hours of work, Um, and so moving forward.

Our solution is that next year.

Card 200 will partner on a class by class basis

rather than the course is a whole.

So each individual faculty member teaching one of these transfer

seminars will be able to choose the community partner, um,

and choose the model that they want to go for

the course.

And we believe that will solve that problem.

And so then, kind of big picture the path forward

for the 2020 2021 school year.

Um, we had originally planned on having eight Elf's and

so trying to double our program because it was such

a success for them.

Unfortunately, due to the way everything's shaken out these past

couple months, we will have three else.

So to returners from let from this year and one

new one, um, and is a way we've kind of

tried Teoh innovate around this, and so we created a

new position that will be more of like a like

a teacher's assistant role.

I guess so.

It's an unpaid for credit healthful like opportunity, Um, and

they will continue working with Card 200 in the model

that was used this year on DSO.

That will be that and then hopefully with that are

three paid helps will be able to focus on other

aspects of engaged learning.

So other high impact practices.

Specifically, we're looking at developing new living learning communities around

our new gen add curriculum and also scaling up internship

practices in preparation for an out the all college internship

requirement that will be coming in a couple of years.

And so really, just big picture.

Um, we're looking to expand the health program because it

was such a success for those four that we were

able to employ it and use it as a model

for how to make campus work experiences impactful.

Um, so yeah, and here's my culture.

So thank you so much for listening.

Um, again, I'm Lauren Ricchetti, the campus compact vista at

North Central College.

Um, let me know if you have any questions.

Luchetti, Lauren (CP)

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated