Acceptance Journeys: A Social Marketing Campaign to Reduce HIV in Milwaukee
Project Leader: Shawnika Hull, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, College of Letters and Science
Duration: Three years
Acceptance Journeys is a social marketing campaign created through the collaborative efforts of a community based organization, Diverse & Resilient, researchers at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (UW-Madison), The City of Milwaukee Health Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh and the UW-Madison Population Health Service Fellowship. The campaign, launched in Milwaukee in 2011, focuses on the African-American community with the goal of decreasing HIV risk for gay men of color by addressing homophobia, a factor leading to increased HIV risk.
Building, Serving, Learning: Biogas in Uganda
Project Leaders: Jonathan Patz, Director, Global Health Institute, Professor, Environmental Studies and Population Health Sciences, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; and Robert Beattie, Faculty Associate and SAGE IGERT Assoc. Director, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Duration: One year
This service-learning opportunity partners undergraduate and graduate students from Makerere University in Uganda with their Nelson Institute counterparts to design and construct a biogas system at the Lweza Primary School in Uganda. The system will convert a mixture of latrine, food, and animal wastes into a clean-burning source of cooking fuel and organic fertilizer. The system will provide 700 Ugandan children and 20 teachers with improved public hygiene and a reliable source of renewable energy while empowering Ugandan graduate and undergraduate students with applied environmental skills training from the UW-Madison. Baldwin support leverages existing university resources and expertise to extend on-going sustainability outreach efforts internationally by building upon five UW programs: (1) Nelson Institute Community Environmental Scholars Program (CESP), (2) The Village Health Project (VHP), (3) College of Agricultural & Life Sciences, Health & Nutrition program, which supports ongoing student involvement in the Lweza community, (4) Global Health Institute (GHI), and (5) NSF CHANGE-IGERT.
Camp Badger for Teachers (CB4T)
Project Leader: Philip R. O’Leary, Professor and Chair, Engineering Professional Development, College of Engineering
Duration: Three years
The need for teachers to better understand engineering as they prepare students to be college and career ready will be fulfilled by Camp Badger for Teachers (CB4T). Recently announced Next Generation Science Standards, that include new efforts to bolster the understanding of engineering within STEM curriculum, have created a critical educational need for Wisconsin teachers. Building on a pilot program conducted in 2012, this program will provide fourth through ninth grade teachers an opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of engineering from local, practicing professionals and UW faculty, while exploring the best techniques for bringing this knowledge to the classroom. In the summer of 2013, 15-20 teachers will spend five days observing 32 middle school students at the UW’s Camp Badger Exploring Engineering Summer Program, meet with engineering leaders, and interact with STEM education professionals regarding the best methods for instilling engineering into their curriculum. This program will expand in 2014 and 2015. It is anticipated that upwards of 100 teachers will benefit from the proposed program and that these teachers will interact with over 10,000 students in only the first year after they attend Camp. Camp Badger for Teachers will be led by the UW-Madison College of Engineering, partnering with the School of Education and CESA #2.
Dostoevsky Behind Bars
Project Leaders: Judith Kornblatt, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literature, College of Letters and Science; and Toma Longinovic, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literature, College of Letters and Science
Duration: Two years
“Dostoevsky Behind Bars” proposes to build on an experiment that brings together graduate students from UW-Madison language, literature, and culture departments with inmates at Oakhill Correctional Institution. Who would have thought that prisoners would commit two hours an evening to talk about literature with young scholars who never dreamed of venturing inside a prison? But this is just what happens. In the second half of each session, prisoners share writing of their own, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, who spent four years in a Siberian prison camp where, it is commonly understood, he developed his mature voice and many of the themes of his later novels. (“Notes from the House of the Dead” is a highly fictionalized account of that experience.) With a Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment grant, we propose to create a sustainable and scalable “World Literatures” program in Wisconsin prisons by opening up the project to students in all humanities programs at Madison, and creating a set of teaching materials for long-term use in conjunction with the Oakhill and potentially other correctional institutions near UW-System schools. In addition, we hope to include undergraduates in the project, with one graduate student mentor and one undergraduate student volunteer in each of the evening classes. This is the humanities truly at work.
Engaging to Close the Gap: Community, University and School District
Project Leaders: Gloria Ladson-Billings, Interim Assistant Vice Provost and Professor, Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education; and Elizabeth Tryon, Assistant Director, Morgridge Center for Public Service, School of Education
Duration: Two years
The achievement gap is arguably the most high-profile education issue in Madison today, and entities ranging from the School Board to the Urban League to the City Government are increasingly pressured to “fix” it. However, Ladson-Billings (2006) indicates that the gap in test scores and grades is reflective of an “education debt” – a result of cumulative social, economic and political inequalities. Using a collaborative approach that focuses on utilizing strengths, sharing knowledge and resources and building relationships and capacity, the Meadowood Neighborhood Center, the Vera Court Community Center and the Boys and Girls Club/Family Voices will partner with the Madison Metropolitan School District, the City’s Neighborhood Resource Teams, literacy faculty and graduate students and the Community University Exchange program to address community identified academic and family involvement gaps related to the education debt in the Madison schools.
Flambeau Community Growing Center
Project Leader: Sara Patterson, Associate Professor, Horticulture, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and Michael Geiger
Duration: Two years
Park Falls, located in the Flambeau river valley, is home to approximately two thousand four hundred Wisconsin residents, including more than one thousand elementary, middle and high school students. Recent surveys highlight the need for a focus on healthy eating and renewable resources. A partnership between Flambeau River Papers (FRP), local schools, and the University of Wisconsin has the potential to improve the health, environmental behavior, and environmental education of Park Falls’ residents and develop a sustainable and educational facility complementing many of the local food needs of residents. This project, to construct a greenhouse that would serve as a community-growing center and backbone for a wellness program, originated as a result of discussions based on FRP engineer Dave Wagner’s identification of several instances of steam waste within factory operations and Nurse Practitioner Tracey Snyder’s (Marshfield Clinic) in-depth health assessment of general health and food habits of mill employees. FRP would provide year-round energy from the mill’s steam waste and recycling of wood wastes, thus providing sustainable energy efficient sources for maintenance of this Community Growing Center. UW Madison will provide leadership in selection and development of sustainable crops and educational outreach programs to the local schools and extended community. Ideally, we envision creating a means to empower the community through education and relationship building while improving health and reconnecting citizens with the Earth.
Latino Earth Partnership (Colaboración Ambiental)
Project Leaders: Cheryl Bauer-Armstrong, Earth Partnership RESTORE Director, Arboretum, Graduate School; and Richard D. Hall, Earth Partnership RESTORE Program Manager, Arboretum, Graduate School
Duration: Two years
Latino Earth Partnership (Colaboración Ambiental) will build capacity and “grow” the next generation of stewards so Latino youth find strength in their cultural heritage and are inspired to explore STEM careers. UW-Madison’s Mariana Pacheco suggests that resource, asset, and strength-based approaches employ Latina/o students’ cultural knowledge to transform difference-as-deficit to difference-as-resource models. This is the intent of Latino Earth Partnership. The Arboretum is developing a renewed focus on its land and relationships with surrounding communities to jointly address storm water impacts. Community Dialogues in our Indigenous Arts and Sciences Initiative confirmed that Relationship, Respect, Reciprocity and Responsibility are fundamental guiding principles for multicultural engagement. Building on this model, we are collaborating with Centro Hispano, Nelson Institute and Latino-serving schools and organizations to integrate Earth Partnership place-based curricula and resources with neighborhood programs.
Math Research Experience for High School Girls
Project Leaders: Tullia Dymarz, Assistant Professor, Mathematics, College of Letters and Science; and Betsy Stovall, Assistant Professor, Mathematics, College of Letters and Science
Duration: Three years
This is a program for high school girls from around Madison to work on math projects with Graduate student mentors. Every week the high school students meet with mentors for an hour and a half. The students and mentors work together on projects in small groups under the guidance of faculty members. The projects are not meant to test students, but they are intellectually challenging. They teach students mathematics and applications to science beyond their knowledge from high school and they give the students a sense of what it is like to do research in math and science.
Nutrition, Environment and Food Systems in Ethiopia (NEFSE): Youth Leadership as the Foundation for Creating Sustainable Rural Livelihoods
Project Leaders: Amy Charkowski, Professor, Plant Pathology, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences; and Heidi Busse, Associate Researcher, Surgery, School of Medicine and Public Health
Duration: Two years
Chronic food insecurity and malnutrition are major public health problems in Ethiopia. The Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (SNNPR) is one of three regions that account for 80% of child mortality in Ethiopia. To help Ethiopian youth develop the skills and tools to create innovative solutions to their communities’ challenges, UW-Madison will partner with the International Potato Center, Hawassa University (HU), and local NGOs to develop youth leadership programs in southern Ethiopia. We will launch the Nutrition, Environment and Food Systems in Ethiopia (NEFSE) Youth Leadership Institute, incorporating elements of existing curricula, making adaptations to the Ethiopian context, and developing modules in thematic areas prioritized by local stakeholders. This is a new dimension to an existing food security and health program, which is coordinated by CIP-Ethiopia.
UW Odyssey: New Services for College Success
Project Leaders: Laurie Greenberg, Sr. Development Specialist, Division of Continuing Studies; and Emily Auerbach, Professor, Liberal Studies and the Arts, Division of Continuing Studies
Duration: Two years
Since 2003, the UW Odyssey Project has helped adults near the poverty level overcome adversity and achieve dreams through higher education. Each year, Odyssey admits 30 low-income adults into a transformative two-semester humanities course taught at the Goodman South Madison Public Library. UW English Professor Emily Auerbach and a team of other award-winning UW faculty engage Odyssey students in great works of literature, philosophy, history, and art. Odyssey students gain six UW credits in English literature—also hope, empowerment, and a voice. Since 2004, sixteen Odyssey students have completed college degrees. While we have success stories of Odyssey students getting college degrees, we see the need to provide new services we believe will help more of our students overcome the obstacles they face to completing college. Working with partners from UW’s Adult Career and Special Student Services and Madison College’s Admissions Advising Center, we will offer a series of workshops devoted to three critical program areas: 1) Career assessment & planning; 2) Academic success skills & advising; 3) Seeking funds for college. Students will follow up with one-on-one appointments with career and academic counselors to design individual career and study plans. We believe that these new services for Odyssey students will improve college completion rates and offer more students a successful start to a career and a new life.