Hall Endowment for Community Outreach Grants
Project Abstracts
Fall 2009
Project Director: Misty Bell
Project Faculty/Staff Mentor: Patricia Cost
Project Title: Everyone Deserves A Lifetime
Catholic Community Services of Utah helps people who are homeless and hungry, fleeing their homes because of persecution, and those fighting addiction in the Intermountain region. Our regular visits to Catholic Community Services provide a unique opportunity for Weber State students to get to know the high-risk populations in our area. So far this year we have attended many food distribution days bringing a new kind of excitement and perspective designed to help the citizens of our Ogden Community gain the best experience through Catholic Community Services as they intermingle with our volunteer students.
In continuation of this effort to enhance the partnership with Catholic Community Services we are holding a food and hygiene drive, conducting a survey, and developing and printing an outreach brochure. Our goal is to make a difference within the Ogden community. The food and hygiene drive will help individuals, businesses, faith communities, and organizations with providing assistance to needy individuals while raising awareness about the root causes of poverty and hunger. The holidays are a season of escalated demand for food and we hope to provide Catholic Community Services with plenty of food so that everyone can have a holiday meal. The new effective brochures will remind the community about Catholic Community Services and how to participate in their programs and services. These projects will be very successful, but stringent financial limitations have been a difficulty.
Project Director: Stephanie Bossenberger
Project Title: Dental Health Education, Dental Screenings and Dental Sealant Project for Inner-city Ogden Elementary School Children
The objective of this project is to plan and implement a dental health education and dental sealant project for inner-city Ogden elementary school children. The purpose of this proposal is to provide dental health education, dental screenings and dental sealants for elementary school children in inner-city Ogden. Specifically, this proposal requests funding for the bus transportation of the elementary school children to WSU=s Dental Hygiene Clinic on the Ogden campus.
Project Directors: Dr. David Berry and Dr. Patricia Cost
Project Title: Training Bi-lingual Weber State University Students to be CPR/First Aid and Certified Babysitting Instructors Who in Turn Can Teach CPR/First AID and Babysitting in Their Communities
We plan to educate, prepare, and impact the lives of the Hispanic population in the Ogden community by certifying 12 bilingual CPR/First Aid and six Baby Sitting Instructors and then offering these courses free of charge to this underserved population.
Project Director: Amir A.H. Jackson
Project Faculty/Staff Mentor: Kaydee Summers
Project Title: Nurture the Creative Mind
The Nurture the Creative Mind Program (NCMP) is a program that teaches students self confidence, open-mindedness and self expression while cultivating creativity and learning. The NCMP opens the minds of students to the many ways that poetry is used in their everyday life, while teaching them the educational benefits and structure of poetry. This expands their existing thoughts and beliefs which allows the students to become embracing in others facets in education and life. This can help them in life to become multidimensional students who in turn will become multidimensional adults.
Project Director: Adam Johnston
Project Title: OttReach: Taking Science To School
OttReach: Science in the Parks has been a successful outreach program, serving students of Ogden Schools by coordinating with the district’s summer lunch program. In its three years of existence, the program has engaged kids in parks of Ogden where they naturally congregate for lunch and play. The program simply extends “play” into the scientific arena and to thousands of student-visits over the past three years. (See community.weber.edu/ottreach for more information and various press coverage.)
Based on the success of the summer program, “OttReach” seeks to expand during the academic year, working with Ogden schools and classrooms. These school visits would take two forms: general assemblies and “a la carte” science. General assemblies have been conducted by the project director in the past and have been useful promoting scientific endeavors. More novel is the concept of “science a la carte,” in which teachers or other community programs can order a presentation and laboratory for their specific needs from a menu of possibilities. Examples include interactive labs on physical and chemical changes, microbes and disease, the nature of air, science fair design, etc. Teachers (or groups of teachers) can arrange for specific dates and topics “to order” by coordinating with the Ott Planetarium office.
Project Director: Michelle Jones
Project Faculty/Staff Mentor: Kari Petersen
Project Title: Alternative Spring Break
The main purpose in organizing and attending the Weber State University annual Alternative Spring Break trip is to render service to those in need. As students, we have the objectives to help out the Ventura County Habitat for Humanity to build quality homes for financially underprivileged families who could otherwise not afford such accommodations.
The second objective is to increase the awareness in the student body that community service is commonplace and insight others to engage in philanthropic activities. We will be working directly with Habitat for Humanity providing direct, selfless service in the form of skilled and unskilled manual labor. The project requires student recruitment, briefing, travel, service, and reflection.
Project Director: Paul Oldham
Project Faculty/Staff Mentor: Kari Petersen
Project Title: Bridging the Gap
Bridging The Gap proposes to take residents of assisted living group homes on an outing to the Eccles Dinosaur Park for a tour and lunch at the pavilion with the volunteers. We will partner with BeeHive Assisted living group homes with the help of volunteers including members of the Social Work Club and the First Gen Club. We propose to take a WSU bus to each of the three group home locations and then to the Dinosaur Park. We would spend the afternoon at the park for as long as the residents would like.
Project Director: Stacy Palen
Project Title: Title I and Head Start Waivers for Planetarium Visits
The Ott Planetarium supports local K-12 educational efforts through field trips to the planetarium. Over the last several years, our impact has grown from 12,000 annual visitors to more than 22,000. We partially fund these activities through fees charged to visiting classes. We charge $50 for a one-hour visit, which includes a planetarium show, hands-on activities, and question and answer sessions with our staff of WSU students.
Title I schools have a high proportion of disadvantaged children. Head Start programs serve similar, but younger, populations. Both of these groups, particularly in these difficult economic times, struggle to find the funds for field trips for their students. The most effective approach for the Ott Planetarium to help these populations has been for us to waive fees for visiting Title I schools and Head Start groups, and to assist the teachers in locating other funding for buses (for example, through the Utah Aerospace Education Foundation). Various granting agencies and donors have provided the funds to allow us to make fee waivers possible in the past. This year, we find ourselves without funding to provide these fee waivers to Title I schools and Head Start programs.
Project Director: Scott Sonntag
Project Faculty/Staff Mentor: Glen West and Meg Leatherbury
Project Title: Fishing for Education
Our objective is to design and build two educational aquarium systems to enrich the education of Mount Ogden Jr. High (MOJH) students and Ogden Nature Center’s (ONC) students and community visitors. Our community partners are MOJH, ONC, Utah Department of Wildlife Resources (UDWR), and WSU Zoology Department. We plan to place the completed systems in MOJH and ONC by April 16th 2010. The closed systems will house Weber County Utah area native fish species and be used as educational tools to supplement multiple areas of the UT Core Curriculum throughout the years. The systems will also be used to teach and raise awareness to students and the community about local Utah native fish. The cost for materials for two tank systems will be $8,648.44. This will be the only expense as all other resources and labor will be donated. We will request that MOJH and ONC report annually to the CIC concerning the effectiveness of this system in their facilities.
Project Director: Cole Spicker
Project Faculty/Staff Mentor: Kari Petersen
Project Title: CARES
CARES is a program that is engaged with elementary-aged students that generally come from a lower socioeconomic background. We want to present to these children opportunities and activities that they would be exposed to otherwise. Through the efforts of Weber State students, it is hoped that these children may develop stronger self-esteem and self-value. Similarly, WSU student volunteers will serve as tutors academically (at each planned event, there is a minimum of .5 hours out of the total 3 hours dedicated to homework and other course material) and mentors—getting the students excited about future academic and non-academic plans. Service is another facet of CARES that is extremely important. Typically two events are held each month; one of those events has a service-component.
This year, CARES is excited to work with Gramercy Elementary, a lower Title 1 school, and their YMCA after-school program of nearly 50 students. Both the students and faculty from Gramercy Elementary and Ogden School District, have exclaimed how happy they are to host CARES and WSU students this year. We have the goal of a 2:1 mentor to student ratio (nearly 25 WSU students). To plan, diversify and execute these events two times a month, a committee of dedicated WSU students has been created. Each committee member has the responsibility for recruiting more volunteers and helping current volunteers.