Weekly Update, May 9

Congratulations to Suzanne Gaulocher and Dale Stowell, named LBCC’s Distinguished Alumni at the annual Alumni Reception May 7. Suzanne, of Menlo Park, Calif., is the director of Community Engaged Learning at Stanford University. She was nominated by LBCC counselor Mark Weiss. From Arizona, Suzanne attended LBCC from 1992-1994, then transferred to OSU where she earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology. She earned a master’s in public health and interdisciplinary studies, and a doctorate in environment and resources from the University of Wisconsin. Dale is the executive director of LBCC Institutional Advancement and Foundation, hired for the position in 2012. His nomination originated from the LBCC Foundation board. From Philomath and residing in Albany, he attended LBCC from 1977-79, studying journalism, then transferred to Portland State University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. Dale came to LBCC after a 17-year stint in the Washington State community college system.  

The Destination Graduation team is currently beta-testing software changes that will help make it a mandatory class. When students register, the system will first check to see if they have the DG attribute (which all new students under 24 credits should have). If they have the attribute, but haven't picked a DG section, the system won't let them register but instead will give them a popup telling them to select a DG section. If students drop DG after registering, another popup will tell them they have 24-hours to re-add a section or they will be dropped from all their classes. Staring this fall, visiting their advisor and completing an education plan will be mandatory for students to pass DG. All DG sections are moving to ten weeks (one hour per week), and an online option is in development, but won't be ready for fall term.

Dave Henderson was hired May 1 as the new vice president of Finance and Operations, replacing outgoing VP Jim Huckestein. Dave has served as interim vice president for the past two months. He will be responsible for the college finance and budget, information technology, institutional research, facilities management, public safety and risk management, food services, bookstore and printing operations. He comes to the position with 13 years of experience working on major programs with the state legislature, and four years with Marion County working on capital and IT projects. His past experience includes directing all operations of three Oregon offices of U.S. Representative Greg Walden, directing the business services department of Marion County, and serving as the administrator for the Oregon State capitol, leading its five support units. He has extensive leadership in facilities management, facility services, financial services, human resources and risk management. Dave has a bachelor’s degree from OSU, a certificate in public management from the Atkinson Graduate School of Management at Willamette University, and a certificate in management and supervision from Portland Community College.

Carol Raymundo has accepted the position of coordinator for Disability Services and Student Assessment, a promotion from her current position as instructional support for disability services. Carol has a master's degree in Instructional Design and Technology, a bachelor's degree in Business and Organizational Leadership, and is working on her reverse LBCC associate degree. Carol has experience with the laws related to equity for our broad range of learners and disability access, knowledge of our student assessment programs, and the ability to strategize about teaching and learning design.

Foundation Supports New Non-Profit Business, BlueSun

by Dale Stowell, Executive Director, Institutional Advancement

Diana Howell, BlueSun COO, pays first installment to
Foundation Executive Director Dale Stowell.

BlueSun staff, Dale Stowell and Corvallis Chamber
members attend a ribbon cutting April 2.

With an eye on opening new streams of revenue, the LBCC Foundation provided a loan to help open a staffing agency that will help place disabled people in jobs throughout the region and potentially generate funds to help support the college.

BlueSun Inc. is a staffing agency led by Distinguished Alumna and former LBCC Foundation board member Diana Howell. It will open March 1 at 517 S.W. 2nd St. in Corvallis.

The nonprofit business will coordinate vocational resources, such as job training and special equipment, for people with disabilities to place them in jobs best suited for their skills.

BlueSun will serve all people with disabilities, said Howell, but the focus will be helping military veterans and people with autism.

Like any staffing agency, BlueSun will generate funds by receiving a percentage of the salary of each individual it places for work from employers. Oregon law requires all tax-supported bodies to give nonprofit staffing agencies serving the disabled the first chance to fill jobs before contracting with for-profit staffing agencies.

By maintaining a low overhead, BlueSun projects it will generate revenue in excess of expenditures in its first year.  Howell believes that BlueSun could generate enough revenue in the first year to pay back LBCC Foundation’s $100,000 loan and to begin sponsoring grants for clothes, transportation and other things that will help people with disabilities get to work.

The loan terms include interest and a 10 percent share of the net revenues of BlueSun for the next seven years. The businesses plan underwent an extensive review by LBCC’s Small Business Development Center and Foundation legal counsel. It required a revision of the Foundation’s investment policy to allow 5 percent of Foundation assets to be invested in alternative investments.

Three people from the LBCC Foundation – board members Dan Bedore and Doris Johnston, and Foundation Executive Director Dale Stowell – serve on BlueSun’s five-member board. Many foundations invest in – or own – other businesses. In fact, the LBCC Foundation already generates revenue from rental income from a duplex it owns in Corvallis.

The idea grew from discussions at the Foundation’s summer retreat, which focused on ways to begin building systems to eventually raise an amount equal to 10 percent of the college’s operating funding, or about $4 million a year.

Employees will be placed as temporary workers under BlueSun for a trial period. If it’s a good fit, employers can directly hire them.

Howell worked for DePaul Industries as area manager from 1996 to 2001, helping to establish a similar staffing service that still successfully serves the Portland area. She left DePaul in 2001 for Barrett Business Services Inc., where she worked until last month.

“We were, as a for-profit, filling quite a few of the jobs over the years that should have gone to the nonprofits,” Howell said in a recent Gazette Times interview. “That was a lot of opportunities for people who really needed those jobs. We have customers lined up, breathing down our necks saying, ‘When are you going to be open?’ and we have the people.”

Blue Sun has already placed two employees, and the contractor finishing the remodel of the new office already signed a contract with Blue Sun to hire disabled veterans to fill its temporary staffing needs.

The need is definitely there, said Howell.

Interact Communications: What is Interact and How Will it Help the College Web Redesign and Rebranding Initiative?

Mark Mastej from Interact leads a focus group with, left to right,
Jeff Davis, Mary Browning, Joel White, Cyrel Gable, & Lin Olson.

Interact Communications provides communication services that are specifically designed with two-year colleges in mind.

LBCC hired Interact to help redesign the college website and college brand around our audience needs, including unique navigation, graphics and content. The goal is to help the college to get our message out to the community, and shape our overall image. (read more about Interact: www.interactcom.com/)

This week, Interact Communications is conducting the last round of focus groups to help with the work of rebranding, including college messaging, taglines, slogans and generally how we communicate with our students and community members.

The four groups include: local high school students; current students; a combined group of faculty, staff and management; and a combined group of business leaders, community members, foundation friends and college alumni.

Interact first visited LBCC in August to conduct focus groups involving more than 120 individuals including recent high school graduates, current LBCC students, college employees, LBCC alumni, and local businesses.

A second phone and online survey was conducted in September to measure public awareness and opinion of the college, including our current image. This data will be used to help the college select messaging that leads to greater understanding of the college.

Feedback from the focus groups will be used by Interact to set recommendations for a navigational structure for the new college home page, as well as a general list of college descriptors, taglines, slogans and general web communications.

The new website is scheduled to be launched after the end of the 2012-2013 school year. As the project develops, it will be shared with the college community for further feedback prior to launch.

If you would like to learn more about Interact and the college web and branding redesign project, contact Dale Stowell in College Advancement, 541-917-4

Helping Students Achieve Their Dreams

By Dale Stowell

Linn-Benton Community College was a major step in achieving my dream. Now LBCC is part of a program that can measure if the things that contributed to my success can also help others through a national initiative called Achieving the Dream.

Achieving the Dream isn’t another project to add to our workloads. It’s a method that lets us measure whether ideas to increase student success or completion work here – and if they do work, who they work for. It also enables us to adjust to increase that success and broaden its reach for all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds.

The ability to do that is meaningful to me for many reasons. My own experience is one of them.

My success as a college student was far from assured. I didn’t even make the internal commitment to be a college student until two months after my high school graduation, and during my senior year, because of a lack of sophistication and knowledge, I hadn’t done even something as basic as taking the SAT to prepare for college entry. It’s fair to say that I wasn’t focused.

But that didn’t matter to the people at LBCC. I remembered that the journalism advisor at the time, Jenny Spiker, had visited my high school newspaper class in Philomath, and for that reason more than any other, I became a journalism major here.

I had a connection, and that connection deepened because I saw Jenny either in class or at the Commuter office every day. I developed a relationship with her and my teammates on the newspaper staff. Some terms I was a great student, and during terms when my life got in the way, I was a not-so-great student, but I was never anonymous or alone at LBCC.

Even when I didn’t believe in myself, people believed in me. The responsibility and accountability I felt in relationship to others kept me coming back every day whether I was tired or rested, struggling or excelling, or cheerful or depressed.

There’s research that suggests that this is a kind of experience that supports student success. When I look at Destination Graduation (DG), I can see LBCC actively trying to ensure this experience happens to more students, regardless of who they are or what program they choose.

In fact, DG looks similar to a program initiated and measured at the Achieving the Dream college I worked at before coming to LBCC. That initiative helped increase fall-to-fall retention by 10 percent.

Achieving the Dream will give us the tools to figure out if things like DG are working, and in what ways we can make them better. It can help validate – or help to refine – work that’s already been done through Foundations of Excellence, outcomes, the completion agenda, and others. We not only have two coaches from Achieving the Dream helping us, we have the experience of 160 Achieving the Dream schools from which to draw ideas and experience for what has and hasn’t worked.

Achieving the Dream is just getting started here. A data team is collecting three years of data so we can better understand the places we lose students. We are putting the pieces in place so we can begin to measure things, and pick out the key initiatives we want to measure in the next year.

If you want more information about Achieving the Dream, check out the New Directions page at http://www.linnbenton.edu/about-lbcc/new-directions. You’ll find an Achieving the Dream link and other information about the ongoing efforts to increase student success at LBCC.

You can find a list membership in the Core Team and the Data Team. Chances are you know someone, so feel free to ask them questions and learn more about this new support for student success at LBCC.

(Dale Stowell is executive director of Institutional Advancement, a member of LBCC ATD Core Team, and LBCC Alum.)

LBCC receives $2 million, the largest private gift in its history

Future site of the Advanced Transportation
Technology Center in Lebanon.

The LBCC Foundation has received the largest single private gift in the 45-year history of the college from an anonymous donor.

The $2 million dollar donation is to be used as a matching gift to support the construction and development of LBCC’s new Advanced Transportation Technology Center.
This is a major achievement for the college, and another important step in the college's fundraising efforts.

While many people were involved over a long period of time, Foundation Development Director John McArdle and President Greg Hamann played key roles in making the donation happen.

LBCC finalized the purchase of an 11-acre site in Lebanon last week that will become home to its auto and diesel programs, and allow space to add hands-on training on alternative fuel technologies. The Lebanon site is the former home of PACE Manufacturing, and includes a 35,000-square-foot industrial building.

“We are humbled and very grateful for this historic contribution,” said Hamann. “Our donor was clear that this gift serves as an inspiration for others to support the college, and this contribution will help stimulate the support of others.”

The gift, in addition to support from the Lebanon Urban Renewal District, the Lebanon Industrial Development Council, and state lottery funds, brings money raised for the project to $4.3 million. The total cost of opening the center is estimated at $6.85 million.

While the anonymous contribution is designated to support the development of the ATTC, it coincides with planning efforts to significantly increase private fundraising in the LBCC Foundation, according to Foundation Executive Director Dale Stowell. Money would support initiatives at LBCC to help greater numbers of its students complete degree and certificate programs that lead directly to jobs and the ability to participate in and contribute to the community.

“This gift is a perfect example of what we need to do as a community,” Stowell said. “Because of it, we’ll be able to expand programs where we have students on waiting lists on one side and jobs waiting to be filled on the other. The students in this program will have clear goals, and that is a key to making sure they finish what they start. It supports both students and our communities."

The center will also mean this region will be able to build the infrastructure to support alternative fuel technology, which could significantly reduce costs for businesses that provide on or rely on transportation, Hamann added.

Plans call for the ATTC to provide training that involves applications, development and adoption of alternative energy in biofuels, electric vehicles, compressed national gas (CNG), propane, hydrogen, hybrid, and new technologies in addition to industry-specific and contracted training for people already in the auto and diesel mechanics field, and first -responder training to enable them to respond safely to incidents involving alternative fuel vehicles.

When the auto and diesel programs move from their current homes on the Albany campus, the project will also create room to expand programs in welding, machine tool technology and mechatronics.