Dear Colleagues,
We are excited to share an update with our community on Champlain College’s Civic Action Plan. As you may recall, in 2016 President Laackman signed on to Campus Compact’s 30th Anniversary Action Statement, a declaration of shared commitment to the public purposes of higher education. More than 450 institutional leaders have now signed the Statement. One of our requirements as a signatory is to create and publicly share with our peers a Civic Action Plan that outlines our commitment to civic engagement and community involvement.
Last June, after engaging many of you across our institution and others in our community in an initiative led by Christina Erickson, Laurel Bongiorno and Sandy Yusen with support from Tony Perriello and Amanda Christensen ’16, we submitted our plan framework. We developed our plan as a working document that we will continue to build on as part of our strategic planning process. The Google Site version is accessible here.
Two key insights stood out from our research that are helping to inform our next steps. First, you recommended we balance our external focus with continued attention to our internal community, particularly as it relates to diversity and inclusion, enrollment and retention. As a small institution, we know we can’t take on everything simultaneously, and must weigh our desire for continued progress in civic engagement against our four institutional priorities for this year — enrollment, retention, diversity and inclusion, and financial stability.
To achieve this balance, we are taking a phased approach to our Civic Action Plan. In the short-term, we plan to maintain our existing commitment to community engagement and set a baseline for community service metrics. In the next phase, we will look to build civic engagement into the strategic planning process for the College as we approach 2020, informed by the data we collect.
Another key insight from our research is that, thanks to the efforts of many of you, there is a wide breadth of community engagement across our campus already. We are grateful to all of you who make a positive difference in so many ways through your volunteerism and service. As a near term goal, we will focus on how to better communicate and make visible these contributions and commitments. This includes cross-campus sharing of accomplishments so that our students, faculty and staff can better appreciate our collective impact; further reinforcing these values in the recruitment process of prospective faculty and staff members; and incorporating our practices and programs into materials for prospective students as part of our enrollment process.
Here are a few highlights of our civic engagement initiatives this fall:
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The Center for Service and Sustainability continues to forge new pathways of integrating service learning into our curriculum and expanding our resources for faculty, including a new Service-Learning Course Designation Process and coaching for faculty who want to integrate service learning.
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Our faculty continue to forge innovative connections with our community to enhance students’ experiences. Examples include the EHS 200 Hot Topics Seminar: Refugee Resettlement and Immigration collaboration with the Refugee Resettlement Organization of Vermont, and the Applied Psychology coursework in the Northeast Kingdom, which connects students with the Northeastern Correctional Facility, Newport Food Shelf, and regional social work professionals.
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Earlier this month, Champlain hosted and supported the Vermont Energy & Climate Summit, a full-day gathering of Vermont leaders who are taking creative and collective action to achieve Vermont’s 2025 energy and climate goals.
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This month, we ran our annual United Way campaign, which is an important way we deliver on our civic engagement commitment in the Chittenden County area and beyond.
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We continue to feature a robust schedule of community-related events and initiatives — from Bill McKibben speaking on campus, to tabling during Fair Trade month, to again offering our service trips to Nicaragua and Uganda for students this spring. Occasional pop-up community service opportunities are also available to students. For more information on these types of events, see the Center for Service & Sustainability’s calendar.
We thank those of you who contributed your insights to inform our Civic Action Plan and next steps, and we thank those of you who incorporate civic engagement into your daily work and practices at Champlain. We encourage you to continue to take advantage of opportunities to get involved in events and initiatives at Champlain and beyond to help us maintain and build on this focus.
We are excited to continue this important work and take it forward in ways that deepen our community involvement, that allow us to respond and contribute to pressing societal issues, and most importantly, that expand our students’ experiences at Champlain as they become engaged citizens.
