Week 4

             This week I did not volunteer at Starke, I went to the High Impact Institute at Siena College. Our team was made up of Savannah, Lindsey Graves (she works in the Tri-C doing interfaith work for the university), and a community partner from United Way. The purpose of the High Impact Institute is to help schools deepen their community engagement within higher education. Throughout the conference we worked with our team from Stetson to develop plans for our high impact practices, met with other schools to share what we have been doing and to ask questions, and went to workshops to learn more about what other schools are doing with their high impact practices.

            This summer I have learned a lot about the Bonner Foundation and other Bonner schools. I have been to SLI and now High Impact and am amazed with how different other schools do things. Stetson has a very well developed program so we are able to share a lot of what we do with other schools but there is still a lot that we can learn and add to our program. I have been talking to some students from other schools about Site Based Teams to see how they utilize them in their program so that we can improve our Site Based Team model. I also learned some ways that other schools encourage students who are not Bonners to become more engaged in the community at regular sites.

            The Stetson team focused a lot of our time on discussing place. We want our Stetson students and faculty to know more about the Deland community and Volusia County. We developed some ideas that we can use for FOCUS and new faculty orientations. It is important for everyone in the Stetson community to understand the larger communities that they are also a part of. We also discussed creating forums for the community to come together to discuss different issues facing it. We are hoping to continue developing these forums and using them in the future.

 I had an amazing time at this conference. Not only did we network with other schools and meet other amazing Bonners, but we got to see Kyle, Jason, and Julie! I cannot wait to be able to use what we learned this upcoming school year!