2011 COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT PROFESSIONAL OF THE YEAR:
Dr. Tom Hurst
McPherson College
Dr. Hurst serves as the Director of Service for McPherson College, a smaller private college in Central Kansas affiiated with the Church of the Brethren. In 2006-2007, only a handful of students and faculty participated in service despite the college’s service-oriented mission that flows from its faith tradition. When they hired Dr. Hurst and challenged him to expand the service program. It took him only four years to generate sparkling results. In the past academic year, under Tom Hurst’s direction 509 of the 622 undergraduates, and 92 faculty and staff, engaged in meaningful service work at 176 different events. All told, these dedicated individuals provided more than 11,000 hours of service. Dr. Hurst has helped lead McPherson faculty to establish service-learning opportunities in a wide range of disciplines – from education to the arts to even the schools nationally recognized automotive restoration program. In recognition, McPherson College was the only Kansas higher education institution to be recognized “with distinction” by the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll in 2010. Before accepting his current position, Dr. Hurst served as the Director of Campus Ministries, where he worked to meet the spiritual needs and community service needs of the campus community.
2011 OUTSTANDING COMMUNITY & CAMPUS COLLABORATION:
Greater Butler County Campus-Community Partnership
Danica Murray (Butler Community College)
Becky Wolfe (Leadership Butler)
e Greater Butler County Campus-Community Partnership was initiated in 2009 and formally launched in 2010. It brought a dozen major community organizations together with engaged members of Butler Community College for sustained effort to “build capacity of area nonprofit agencies and activities by matching needs to resources.” Its objectives are to provide for partners the following: 1) a “centrally located and up to date list of nonpro t agencies and activities and of volunteer opportunities”; 2) regular opportunities “to network and exchange ideas and resources”; and 3) continuous improvement and training opportunities. It is unique in bringing campus and community together in challenging economic times, providing Butler Community College a new and e ective means to ful ll its mission to the community, while empowering area non-profits with strengthened resources to serve the needs of clients. It is innovative in its simplicity: the partnership takes action to create opportunities for non-profits to strategically partner and to maximize the potential impact of dollars within Butler County. The partnership continuously seeks ways to connect the dots between organizations and available resources. In addition, it provides an avenue for local, inexpensive board development and training to improve board responsibility and governance. Without increasing a single partner’s budget for the project, the Greater Butler County Campus-Community Partnership has increased the assets available to all non-profits in the region.
2011 EXCELLENCE IN COMMUNITY BASED TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP:
Dr. Cheryl Lester
Associate Professor of English
University of Kansas
Informed by the experience of growing up in post-war Detroit, Dr. Cheryl Lester teaches and researches migration, immigration, and diaspora, particularly as they figure in 19th- and early 20th-century southern, African American, and Jewish literature in the US. She has primarily published on literary texts that contribute to the cultural construction of southern and black migration over a 40-year period (1915-60), particularly as this large-scale demographic change transformed southern identities, racial formations, and segregated spaces in the US South. Dr. Lester has recently joined a working group at KU to study and teach cultural constructions of aging, as nearly 80 million Baby Boomers reach the age of retirement over the next 20 years.
Since 2006, Dr. Lester has connected students in her Jewish-American studies course with Audio Reader, a reading and
information service for blind, visually impaired and print disabled citizens of Kansas and western Missouri, to create
meaningful service and learning opportunities for KU students and a valuable service to the community. Audio Reader airs
more than 160 hours weekly of printed matter and special information, most of which is read by volunteers. In creating this
service-learning partnership, Dr. Lester has worked hand in hand with Janet Campbell, the Director of the Kansas
Audio-Reader Network. In Dr. Lester’s classes, her students have volunteer to read Jewish content, creating over 500 hours of
programming and exposing students to questions about who has access to print culture and who controls what circulates in
print. Students learn from this vibrant partnership that people lack access to print information for diverse reasons; besides
vision impairment, recent immigrants and people with little or no formal education or learning disabilities lack
English-language print literacy. By learning about the listeners who require and benefit from the services of Kansas
Audio-Reader Network and the volunteers who provide those services, students are able to apply what they read about
turn-of-the-century Eastern European Jewish immigrants to other groups who need alternative services and media to gain
access to information essential to daily life. As one of her students this past year put it, “All of this great work is funded by
local businesses and donors who realize the importance of the printed word. is was probably the most touching aspect of
our project. After [speaking to] an Audio-Reader listener, I found out that when she graduates this spring she plans to start
donating to Audio Reader. This fact alone is worth noting, that users of the service feel so strongly that they are willing to
donate their own money to ensure that access is continued not only for themselves, but others as well.”
