Board Report – November 2007

Report from Lane Community College President Mary Spilde
To the Lane Community College Board of Education
November 6, 2007

It’s hard to believe that it’s already the seventh week. College Council has been busy developing the budget materials you will review later this evening. There is a lot of budget work to do, and I am anxious to get the groups going.

I have presented to a number of groups this month – Eugene Chamber Governmental Relations Committee, Springfield Chamber, Eugene Lions Club, and the Native American Career Fair. A group of volunteers – managers, classified staff, faculty and students – have been volunteering at University of Oregon ball games to raise funds for baseball and soccer. There were two Foundation events this month – the Shining Star Scholarship event and the Harvest Dinner. Both went extremely well. At the Shining Start event, students share their stories. It is a very touching and heart warming privilege to hear from our students. Similarly, the Harvest Dinner was a huge success. The dinner was excellent, our student speaker, an Iraq veteran, told his very compelling story and over $200,000 was raised. This really has become the signature auction event in the community.

Speaking of veterans, I wanted to share some of the services we have available.

We have a Veterans Services office, which provides a full time advisor to act as a liaison between the US Department of Veterans Affairs and Lane. The Veterans Support Group is offered throughout the year for student veterans. The Lane Community College Student Development Seminar Series was launched this year as a college wide series of seminars for staff. And the Student Veterans Resource Center is a new additional resource for both students and community members. This new resource center will be holding an open house on November 30.

You may have heard about some fledgling efforts at Lane to start a Peace Center. I shared this idea two years ago at fall in-service, and many faculty and staff expressed interest. Since then we have been having sporadic conversations about what it might look like. This year, we are using the Endowed Chair Fund to further the work. You might recall that we received a $1 million gift for Visiting Scholars. The first year we used it for the Native Languages program, Chinuk-WaWa. This year we want to focus on the issue of peace. We are planning to host a conference on Peace and Democracy in February. We are exploring integrating parts of our existing curriculum into a Peace Studies program; we are considering a Lecture Series; and we have talked about bringing in experts in non-violent communication from the Rosenberg Institute – not only to build our own capacity but also to enable us to share our expertise with the community.