April 2016
Eastern Michigan University Office of Academic Service-Learning
“To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with
joy and a whole heart and a free mind.”
- Pearl S. Buck, Writer
In this issue...

YTrikes … pg. 2

Communities That Care… pg. 2

Community Tutoring Initiatives … pg. 3

Service-Learning Seminars… pg. 4
Office of Academic Service-Learning
203 Boone Hall

Faculty Highlight: Zuzana Tomaš… pg. 5

Comm Work Study & B.Side/DI… pg. 6

College Coaching Corps… pg. 7

Upcoming Events … pg. 8
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
www.emich.edu/asl
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engage@AS-L | AS-L Community Programs
YTrikes
YTrikes is a community art and building that will provide 10 adult tricycles (colloquially referred to a “trikes”) to small
businesses, government municipalities, non-profit organizations, and other entities throughout the Ypsilanti community for
various commercial and program uses. For instance, one could use a trike as a unique method of transportation or a model way of advertisement for their venue. Currently, we have 8 Ypsi-based organizations/businesses who will receive a
trike:
 Ypsi Melissa
 Ypsilanti Community Schools
 YpsiReal (as part of the Ypsilanti Visitors and Convention Bureau)
 Ypsilanti District Library
 Friends of the Rutherford Pool
 Mark Tucker of Festifools
 Cultivate
 EMU Giving Garden
We have sought team members to assist our YTrikes artists in refurbishing, designing, and distributing the trikes to community entities who have requested a trike. Work on this project will continue into the summer with a display of the Trikes
as part of the July 4th Ypsilanti parade.
The YTrikes project is made possible with a grant from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs mini-grant, and
operated through the Arts Alliance. For more information about YTrikes, please contact Imani Byrd at ibyrd@emich.edu.
Communities That Care of Ypsilanti
In December of 2015, Eastern Michigan University’s Office of Academic Service-Learning was awarded a grant
from the Community Mental Health Partnership of of Southeast Michigan (CMHPSM) to coordinate the Communities That Care of Ypsilanti (CTC Ypsi) process. Jack Bidlack was appointed as the new CTC Ypsi Facilitator.
CTC of Ypsi is a coalition of local leaders, educators, health professionals, non-profits and residents using the Communities That Care, a national framework and process to promote positive youth development. We collect and use
local data to bring the latest prevention science to our community in order to help make Ypsilanti a great place to
grow up and thrive.
The CTC process helps decision makers in the community select and implement tested effective prevention policies
and programs to address the most pressing risks facing our youth. Utilizing the CTC process a community coalition
is guided through an assessment and prioritization process to identify risk and protective factors most in need of
attention and links those priorities to prevention programs that are proven to work to address them.
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Community Tutoring Initiatives
The Office of Academic Service-Learning has recently launched a series of community-based tutoring
initiatives with local high schools in or near Ypsilanti -- currently, we have programs launched at Ypsilanti Community High School and Romulus High School, both of which are presented below.
Romulus Word Power — Romulus High School
Romulus Word Power is a College Positive Volunteer initiative created to meet an identified community need expressed by
several individuals at Romulus High School. One such individual is Liza Mockeridge, the Early College Coordinator at Romulus High School who works with dual-enrolled Wayne County Community College District students. Ms. Mockeridge and
the AS-L office established an official partnership and launched in February, 2016. We also are in collaboration with the
Bright Futures program in order to lay a foundation for future writing support within the community.
Romulus Word Power (RWP) consists of eight student workers each with a
varying degree of tutoring and student support experience specific to the subject of writing. This team has provided four direct service experiences at Romulus High School and one virtual submission opportunity to date. RWP is poised
and ready for the next round of services scheduled for April and scheduled to
wrap up in May. It is the hope of RWP’s coordinator that the program continues next academic year as the city of Romulus continues to expand their resources for youth and adults alike.
Romulus Word Power is supported through the College Positive Volunteer (CPV) grant, funded through MIchigan Campus
Compact.
The Ypsilanti Community Tutoring Initiative, otherwise referred to as the EMU
Community Tutoring Project, is, as the name implies, a tutoring initiative launched
through the Office of AS-L to assist current and aspiring football students at Ypsilanti Community High School. Generally, the EMU Community Tutoring Project
seeks to integrate core math, reading, and writing skills in tangent with the current
material the students are working on in their courses.
Our community tutors from both Eastern Michigan University and the surrounding
Ypsilanti community were hired to assist the students with their math and reading skills. Essentially, tutors will provide foundational skill-building tactics based
off of the students’ comprehension and assist students in applying those skills
into their current coursework. Thus, the work of a “community” tutor is a bit
more involved than that of a traditional tutor. We are especially lucky that most
of our tutors have had extensive experience tutoring in other capacities (e.g.,
Washtenaw County Community College and 826michigan) that have only increased the quality and capacity of our initiative.
EMU Community Tutoring
Project —
Ypsilanti Community High
School Football Team
This tutoring initiative began in the beginning of March and will last until the end
of May. Currently, our tutors meet with the football players on Mondays and
Wednesdays, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm, before their weight training. However, as the
need for academic assistance extends beyond May and beyond the football
team, this will be the first step of a series of tutoring and academic initiatives to
be provided for the students.
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Academic Service-Learning Faculty Seminars
Winter 2016 AS-L Faculty Fellows
The Office of Academic Service-Learning (AS-L) would like to congratulate our newest cohort of Faculty Fellows on completion of their
Winter 2016 seminar.
AS-L Faculty Fellows are charged with the responsibility to create
service-learning projects that connect the academic rigor and theory
students learn with the benefit of serving their immediate community
into practice.
The W16 semester was unique in that it was the first to enable graduate students to participate. This was done in an effort to expose
freshmen, first-year [and often first-generation college] students in
UNIV courses to civic engagement/service-learning in a sooner,
more effectively and more attuned to their own concerns as beginning college students; integrating civic engagement/service-learning
into the first-year experience.
The Civic, A Collaboratory
“Acting upon a heightened sense of responsibilities
to one’s communities.” — Barbara Jacoby
Civic Collaboratory Cohort
Co-Facilitators:
Ethan Lowenstein & Decky Alexander
Susan Badger Booth, Arts Administration
Brigid Beaubein, Early Childhood Education
Ramona Caponegro, Children’s Literature
Zuzana Tomaš, TESOL
Samir Tout, Information Assurance
Winter 2016 Faculty Fellows
Jessica De Young Kander, Children’s Literature
Ashley Falzetti, WGST
LaMarcus Howard, Academic Success and Support
Services, UNIV Coordinator
Keisha Lovence, Nursing
Cesar Vargas, Holman Student Success Coach,
UNIV Instructor
Highlighted Partnerships
CHL 209 & Jewish Family Services, etc.: helping students
make a connection to what it means to work with refugees
NURS 101 & Hamilton Crossing, YCS Clothes Resale Store,
etc.: helping aspiring nursing students to learn what it truly
means to serve
The inaugural Civic , a study and action collaboratory is
made up of prior academic service learning impassioned
about the integration and application of the civic into the
UNiversity and into their programs and curriculum. The primary intent of the Collaborative is to map EMU’s civic assets and gaps and prepare a directive or directives to institutionalizing the civic at EMU. Through the AAC&U, Universities and colleges across the US are engaged dialogues on
how and what a civic minded university would look like. The
AAC&U publication, A Crucible Moment: College Learning
and Democracy’s Future, outlines framework for civic learning and civic prompts to guide university and community
groups in mapping its civic assets and gaps. In this first iteration the cohort is preparing a white paper on opportunities
to dialogue about the place and purpose of civic learning
and democratic engagement at EMU.
Information on AAC&U’s Civic Learning & Democratic Engagement is available here: http://www.aacu.org/clde
UNIV 101 & YpsiReal: freshmen will explore and work to
close the proverbial gap between EMU and Ypsilanti
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AS-L Faculty Highlight: Zuzana Tomaš
Grow U and CivCity Initiative
Grow U: A Community-Based ESL Program
Grow U is an initiative developed by Washtenaw Literacy, Ypsilanti Free Methodist Church, and Dr. Zuzana
Tomaš in the ESL/TESOL Program. The purpose of this initiative is two-fold. First, we seek to improve the literacy levels and general English language proficiency among immigrants in our community. Second, we provide
meaningful opportunities for pre-service ESL (English as a second language) teachers pursuing undergraduate and graduate programs in TESOL at EMU to engage with the populations they will later serve as teachers
in the future. EMU pre-service teachers work in small teams or in pairs to plan, teach, and assess lessons under the supervision of Dr. Zuzana Tomaš.
CivCity Extra Newsletter Initiative
The CivCity Initiative is a non-profit organization in Ann Arbor. The particular collaboration between CivCity, Washtenaw Literacy, and the TESOL/ESL Program involves graduate students in TESOL preparing the issues of the CivCity Extra newsletter, which targets low-proficiency English language learners and low-literacy American-born adults in
our community. EMU students are also involved in developing pedagogical activities for
literacy tutors in order to help them utilize
this newsletter in tutoring sessions.
Congratulations! EMU wins big at 2016
Michigan Campus Compact Awards!
The Office of Academic Service-Learning would like to congratulate
Ethan Lowenstein for being bestowed as a Champion of Engagement
for his work in the SEMIS coalition and senior Haley Moraniec for being an Outstanding Community Impact Award recipient for creating
and maintaining Swoop’s Student Pantry as well as her other community contributions on campus.
Front cover of CivCity EXTRA!’s first issue,
courtesy of Mary Morgan,
Founder & Executive Director of CivCity
Outstanding Community Impact
Award Winner Haley Moraniec
posing with her trophy.
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Advise MI
Advise MI, a program in partnership with
the Michigan College Access Network
places full time college/post secondary
advisors in underserved and under resourced high schools. Those advisors
are recent graduates of the partner institution. EMU’s partner schools are River
Rouge HS, Belleville HS and John
Glenn High School in Westland.
Our Advise MI advisors are: Ellise
Smith, 2015 graduate; Courtney Morris,
2015 graduate, and Marcia Mollett,
2014 graduate.
EMU was awarded the Impact Award
from MCAN at its March conference for
its pioneering support of the Advise MI
program.
College Positive
Volunteerism
Over the course of the winter semester, the EMU’s CPV program has established a stronger relationship with the
University of Michigan Gear Up program. Two of our student office assistants, Emily and Sina, have accompanied U of M’s program director, Jerrica,
on her visits to classes at Ypsilanti Community High School. While there, Emily
and Sina offer their perspectives as current college students to the juniors and
seniors in various English and History
classes. With Jerrica’s help, they engage the students in thoughtful discussions about important, relevant topics
like the importance of pursuing a postsecondary education and what it takes
to get there.
The B. Side has been busy working on creating opportunities to market its curriculum.
To support the curriculum and program providers The B. Side just uploaded approximately 3 hours of video tutorials. The videos feature Jack Bidlack, The B. Side Director, and Kory Scheiber, the long-time lead instructor for The B. Side and an Intake
Consultant, SBDC-Michigan, Greater Washtenaw Region, both are subject matter
experts and creators of the curriculum.
The B. Side will also be hosting camps this summer at Washtenaw Community College and at EMU for youth. In addition, they will be running an entrepreneurship program this summer with Upward Bound students – creating and operating businesses
for a day.
In January of this year Digital Inclusion (DI) crossed a new threshold by receiving its
501c3 non-profit approval from the IRS. After operating for more than 7 years as a
program and social enterprise, DI had reached a number of milestone and benchmarks that proved the model to be sustainable and successful. The next logical step
for growth and long-term sustainability was to create a legal entity that would support
these steps and continue to meet the mission of Digital Inclusion.
Along with achieving 501c3 status DI has been busy in the community this year installing fixtures and 13 computers at the Community Opportunity Center at Grace Fellowship Church on S. Harris road in Ypsilanti Township, replacing computers for 2
Ypsilanti Housing Commission community center sites, providing 8 computers for
Section 8 residents at Hamilton Crossing, and so much more.
Finally our most recent accomplishment occurred on April 13, 2016 when DI became
a vendor at the Ann Arbor Recycle ReUse Center on S. Industrial in Ann Arbor. This
new partnership will allow DI to sell inventory to customers that understand the benefits and savings of buying refurbished items and will help provide a consistent funding
stream to support DI’s mission.
Community Work-Study Program
The Community Work-Study Program (CWSP) has had a very productive winter
season! Starting out slow, we quickly picked up momentum early February as
we secured a partnership with Upward Bound. This collaboration added six new
tutors who work in the community with Ypsilanti high school students. The AS-L
office considers this terrific match a sustainable relationship for the future of the
CWSP.
As of April 1, 2016, the CWSP has coordinated placements for 18 students in the
local community. Nine of these placements were continued partnerships from the
fall semester. The outlook for future work-study funds being utilized in the community is very positive. We are looking to establish five lead placement providers
for next academic year. Additionally, we are excited to work with
EMU’s University Advising & Career Development Center to implement a soft
skills prerequisite training for all incoming CWSP student participants.
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College Coaching Corps
The College Coaches in Milan High School, William Horton-Anderson,
and Ypsilanti New Tech High School, Evelyn Galvan, have both received Reach Higher grants. These $5000.00 grants enable college
advisors and coaches to support several initiatives such as College
Application Week, College Visits, FAFSA Completion week. College
Coaches William Horton-Anderson and Evelyn Galvan share how
these funds were used at their respective schools .
Ypsilanti New Tech High School — Evelyn Galvan
College Application Week
Events:

College trifolds on colleges prepared by Future Corps

Presentation on overview of application process and Q&A
presented by Future Corps

Team Research activities on interests and personal preferences for colleges such as instate/out of state, big/small,
sport interest, city/rural

HBCU presentation

Scavenger Hunt for 9th graders on college basics

Individual Application Time with Volunteers

YNT Alumni Panel to talk about advice and their transition
to college

College Celebration Day with fun and raffles
Outcomes
 65 out of our 67 seniors participated in CAW activities
 50 seniors submitted 141 college applications during
CAW
 76 were to four year public institutions, 28 to two year public, and 9 to private institutions
 73 fee waivers were used when submitting applications
 41 seniors completed their first college application during
CAW
 20 seniors who will be first in their family to attend college
completed an application
College Cash Campaign
Events:

EMU Financial Aid overview presentation at YNT

Scholarship presentations in class

FAFSA Parent night

Gift card raffle day for everyone that submitted FAFSA
by March 1st in addition to LCAN raffle prize winners
Outcomes
 By March 1st, we had 36/67 seniors (54%) complete the
FAFSA. The baseline from FAFSA completions from
last year was 50% by March 1st. This year we were able
to increase this number by 4%.
Milan High School —William Horton-Anderson
With the Reach Higher Grant, we have been able to do a lot of
great things for our students at Milan High School. Many of our
students have had college dreams for a long time, whether
that be going to their parents' alma mater, heading off to a big
10 school, or going to the community college to save some
money. Many of our students have never been on a college
campus because of their financial burdens, time constraints, or
other various reasons. With this grant, we have brought our
students to Central Michigan University, the University of Toledo, and Washtenaw Community College. Also with this grant,
we have funded a bus bring our students with emotional,
physical, or leaning impairments on a college tour of
Washtenaw Community College to help in the aid of their transition from high school to post-secondary life.
Next, we have used this grant to reward our students for their
hard work. Beginning in the fall, we held a raffle for students
that completed college applications before and during MCAN's
College Application Week. We had an astounding 71% of our
senior class complete at least 1 college application during
those time periods, which was a 22% increase over last year!
We held the raffle that gave away gas cards, laptops, computers, college survival baskets, and various military/college
swag.
Currently we are finishing up FAFSA season, which is probably the most important part of the post-secondary education
process. We held FAFSA days in our school when students
would rotate in and out of the computer lab to have one-onone help completing their FAFSA. Our largest effort and time
was put into this process because finding money for college
and paying for it can be very daunting. As of now, we have a
64% completion rate among our graduating senior class. This
is a 25% increase over last year at this time, and we are 3%
away from our 2015 ending FAFSA rate on December 31st.
For this, we are holding another raffle! Students that completed their FAFSA, and were shown as completed in MiSSG, by
March 1st are entered in to win the chance at 3 laptops. These
laptops will be used to help the student with their postsecondary education and life. Also, the other students that
completed their FAFSA after the date, will have the opportunity to win gift cards towards gas, food, and amazon for buying
books.
Finally, we are hosting the 2nd Annual College and Career
Fair for our juniors on May 19th. We will be buying t-shirts for
the students as a transition gift into their final high school year.
This event will bring college representatives, vocational representatives, and armed forces recruiters to talk to students
about their options after high school! We are very thankful to
the Michigan College Access Network for the opportunity to
receive this grant and help build a stronger "post-secondary
going" culture!
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Contact Us!
Upcoming Events

No Limits College to Career Conference
May 18, 2016

Digital Inclusion & B.Side Summer Camps
June & July 2016

Ypsilanti Fourth of July Parade featuring
YTrikes!
Beginning of July

Bold Futures Conference
August 24, 2016
Office of Academic ServiceLearning (AS-L)
203 Boone Hall | (734)487-6570
Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197
E-mail us at: aa_asl@emich.edu
Visit our websites:
www.emich.edu/asl AND
www.emich.edu/engage
Like our Facebook page @
EMU Office of Academic
Service-Learning
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