At first glance, the choice to refurbish the chairs in Hoversten Chapel is just good financial management. The move to refresh versus replace the chairs saved the College more than $40,000.

But that’s only the surface of the decision.

What really went on gets to the heart of what it means to be a good steward. It makes exceptional what could be written off as a one-dimensional, mundane decision. It is a concrete example of how the College can live out its mission to be an engaged member of the community, a thoughtful steward, and a responsible leader.

When the College this past summer opted to refurbish the 17-year-old chairs, staff requested a bid from All About Upholstery, a locally owned business.

“We had worked with Tonya, the owner, on a smaller project in the old coffee shop, and she was great,” said Matt Rumpza, director of purchasing and central support services. “By making the decision to re-upholster the chairs, we were making an environmentally friendly and cost-sensitive decision. We felt that given our mission, our interest in being a good community neighbor, and our desire to be environmentally mindful, this was a no-brainer.”

DuRoche lives, works in Cedar-Riverside neighborhood

Tonya DuRoche, who lives in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, worked with her team to refresh 597 chairs. The job included new upholstery, replacing the seat and back cushions, regluing joints, and touch-up varnishing. It was rewarding work, too.

“It might sound cheesy,” she said, “but contributing to the comfort of students who are studying and those who are practicing their spirituality in the chapel is a way to contribute to the future.”

DuRoche, who is committed to her community and other local businesses, sources nearly all of her fabrics from a family-owned company in Minneapolis. That means the money spent by Augsburg to have All About Upholstery do the work had a multiplier effect in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Studies show that money spent locally stays in a community longer than money spent at companies with headquarters outside of that community, state, or region.

Money spent locally has greater impact on community, state

In fact, the 2004 Andersonville Study of Retail Economics found that $100 spent in locally owned independent stores returns $68 to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. Money spent at a national chain only returns $43 to the community.

DuRoche also hires and trains local employees. She completes a mix of residential and large-scale commercial work for tribal businesses such as casinos and helps stabilize other local businesses by providing suppliers with a fairly steady stream of business. In turn, her suppliers are able to provide a stable income for their employees. This interconnected way of doing business is important to her.

“It’s a way to be an entrepreneurial role model, to give back to our community,” said DuRoche, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. “I’ve always wanted to be an artist or work in the medical field. This gives me the chance to offer a kind of healing by creating beauty in surroundings.”

To learn more about the work DuRoche does through All About Upholstery, visit her page.

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The opening session on Tuesday, May 22, is “Transformative Conversations: The Art of Building Bridges and Civil Spaces.” In this session, a student panel will share their experience of dialogue across differences. Participants will explore concrete skills that can support the authentic connections necessary for creating an inclusive campus community. The session will also provide an opportunity to apply the concepts of intergroup dialogue in conversations about political and religious issues that often become divisive in an election year.

The closing session on Wednesday, May 23, “Fighting Poverty in Augsburg,” includes a student panel with faculty and staff who became engaged in this discussion during last fall’s Life of the Mind retreat. This session aims to:

1. raise awareness in the College community about the reality of poverty and its consequences for many Augsburg students;

2. provide resources for students, faculty, and staff to address some of the consequences of poverty, such as acquiring textbooks and finding housing options for homeless students; and

3. explore realistic short- and long-term solutions to address the issue of poverty among Augsburg students.

Session details:

Some of the session topics are:

— Why adult learners are exactly alike and completely different from traditional-aged students – Judy Johnson and Jessica Fox-Wilson

— Developing intercultural competence through international experiences – Orval Gingerich and Cheryl Leuning

— Using the neighborhood as a classroom – Matt Maruggi and Mary Laurel True

— Calculus in Nicaragua – John Zobitz, Andrea Dvorak, and Mark Lester

— Queer in Queernavaca/LGBTQ students abroad – Antonio Ortega

— Hiring diverse faculty – Nancy Rodenborg and Andrea Turner

— Reimagining the theater department – Darcey Engen, Martha Johnson, Sarah Myers, and Rick Shiomi

— Developing intercultural leadership – Akiko Maeker and Paul Maeker

Please register by Monday, May 21 to provide a count for meals and session attendance.

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This annual event will be coordinated this spring by the Thrivent Fellows in cooperation with West Bank Community Coalition, CHANCE (Cedar-Humphrey Action for Neighborhood Collaborative Engagement) from the Humphrey School, and the Trinity Lutheran congregation. Augsburg’s Campus Kitchen program is providing food for the dinner.

Maya Keith ’13, a Thrivent Fellow, said the dinner will feature foods representing the different cultures in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.

“The purpose is just to get people from the neighborhood together to share a meal,” Keith said. Minneapolis City Council Member, Cam Gordon, will speak at the dinner, and the Brian Coyle youth group will do a presentation, but Keith said the programming will be kept to a minimum so that people can simply talk with each other.

Volunteers are needed from 4-5 p.m. (set up) or 5-7 p.m. (servers) or 7-8 p.m. (clean-up) or all three shifts. If interested in volunteering please contact Maya Keith at keith@augsburg.edu or Shana Strong at strongs@augsburg.edu

About the Thrivent Leadership Fellows program

Augsburg students, staff, and faculty are engaged in actively strengthening their communities both on- and off-campus. The Thrivent Leadership Fellows Program exists to harness and direct that energy through organized volunteer events and activities. Eight student Thrivent Fellows work together to bring a variety of volunteer opportunities to the Augsburg community, like cooking classes that benefit local shelters, food shelf drives, and ACT tutoring sessions. Through sharpening their leadership and communication skills, the Fellows aim to get the Augsburg community involved in grassroots volunteerism.

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With a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society’s Legacy Campaign, the students carried out an intergenerational project to produce a permanent piece of art at the Baker Community Center, home of the Jane Addams School. The students teamed up with youth from the Youth Farm and Market Project and hosted monthly community dinners showcasing traditional foods from cultural groups. The teens cooked the foods with elders from the Hmong, East African, and Latino communities. At these dinners, where roughly 150 community members enjoyed a meal together, the Jane Addams School teens conducted their interviews. The students asked how the elders had made St. Paul their home and what traditions they had kept alive from their home countries.

The teens had expected each culture to be very different from the others, but they were surprised to discover how much each group had in common especially with regard to values. The students learned that no matter where they were born, the elders valued family, tradition, community, hard work, honesty, and cooking and sharing food.

The community members’ similarities became the focal point of the students’ work. The students wanted the neighborhood to see that by getting to know one another, people would find out that they had more in common with each other than they thought, and they wanted this to be conveyed in the art piece.

The students commissioned Chaka Mkali and Andres Guzman to create a 40-foot mural on a wall that faces Baker’s playground. The mural, shown here, can be seen from blocks away and had been a hot spot for graffiti in the past. The mural was completed in two months and is now a beautiful addition to the growing Baker Center.

The teens proudly represented the West Side and their project at this year’s PeaceJam in Minneapolis where they presented their project to Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Oscar Arias Sanchez.

The mural is a “Sharing Community Stories’ partnership between the Jane Addams School for Democracy, the Youth Farm and Market Project, and the Minnesota Historical Society.

The Baker Community Center is a vibrant cultural learning center on St. Paul’s West Side neighborhood. Augsburg students Mallory Carstens and Lexi Stadstad have worked at Baker and the Jane Addams School through the Bonner Leaders program.

Adapted from a story by Caritza Mariani

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The President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll recognizes institutions for their commitment to and achievement in community service. The President’s Honor Roll increases the public’s awareness of the contributions that colleges and their students make to local communities and the nation as a whole.

“Community service is embedded in the very notion of being an Auggie,” said Augsburg College President Paul C. Pribbenow. “Students at Augsburg represent many backgrounds and come from diverse faiths, countries, and life experiences. That richness is bound together in our shared commitment to serving our neighbor in our urban Minneapolis location or around the world.”

The Honor Roll recognizes more than 600 colleges and universities for exemplary, innovative, and effective community service programs. Honorees are chosen based on a series of selection factors including scope and innovation of service projects, percentage of student participation in service activities, incentives for service, and the extent to which the school offers academic service-learning courses. Augsburg was selected for top honors from among more than 850 applicants.

“I’m very proud of the students and faculty of Augsburg and they should be proud of this Presidential Award,” said U.S. Sen. Al Franken. “Their dedication to serving their community stands as an example to other colleges and universities all over the country.”

The other Presidential Awardees are Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.; San Francisco State University; Loyola University in Chicago, Ill.; St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Tex.; and California State University in Monterey Bay, Calif.

Serving the Community

Much of Augsburg’s community service takes place in course-embedded service learning. At Augsburg, deliberate incorporation of experiential education, service-learning and civic engagement significantly enriches the curriculum and learning experiences of students, resulting in learners with broader worldviews and stronger neighboring communities. All incoming freshmen participate in City Service Day on the day before classes begin in the fall. Through City Service Day, course-based service-learning, and other programs, more than 1,700 students contributed nearly 200,000 hours of community service during the 2009-2010 school year.

Every year, more than 35 courses at Augsburg include a course-embedded service-learning component. Students average 25 hours per semester in service-learning experience directly connected to course objectives and learning goals. Augsburg’s service-learning partners are in schools and community organizations in the inner city of Minneapolis. The majority of these sites serve refugee and immigrant populations within a mile of the campus.

As further evidence of the College’s commitment to service, all 570 benefits eligible employees get two days paid leave each year to use for community service.

Student, faculty and staff volunteers (over 300 per year) serve approximately 2,000 meals per month through the Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College. This student-run program rescues surplus food from campus food service, food banks, local farmers and farmers’ markets and prepares it into meals for low-income community members. The program provides nutritious, balanced, and free meals to local community partners as well as nutrition education programming to youth organizations. This highly successful program is one of only 20 in the nation.

Augsburg College is in its third year of the Bonner Leaders Program. Through the program, students develop deep community relationships and engage in long-term policy advocacy throughout their four years at Augsburg College. The 40 Bonner Leaders were students with diverse ethnic and geographical backgrounds who took on unique community-leadership roles. Through service placements with non-profit community organizations, each student worked an average of 325 hours over the course of the academic year supporting ELL classrooms, running an employment education computer lab, coordinating a low-income housing program, providing community health outreach, and working with a financial literacy program. The Bonner Leaders have provided 13,000 hours of community service work in the last three years.

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The report, “A Tale of Two Cities,” is a joint project of the National Council on Citizenship (NCOC), the Florida Joint Center on Citizenship, and the CDC. It compares Minneapolis-St. Paul with Miami, which is shown to be the country’s least civically engaged city. While the two metro areas differ in many factors, the report indicates that these differences—including demographic measures of education and income—do not explain the disparities in their civic engagement.

The report research identifies several areas that contribute to the higher levels of Twin Cities’ civic engagement:

• Schools in Minnesota collaborate more effectively with community organizations, teach students civic knowledge, and help build a civic atmosphere of trust.
• Twin Cities residents seem to enjoy stronger social networks—more often families eat together, connect via the internet, and talk to neighbors.
• Citizens in Minneapolis-St. Paul have higher rates of satisfaction and trust of their government, and their public institutions foster greater collaboration among diverse populations.
• Twin Cities residents are more than twice as likely to volunteer as Miami residents.

In a commentary for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and a blog posting for the American Democracy Project, CDC director Harry Boyte draws parallels to the Civil Rights movement, recalling when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed to spread a “culture of civic empowerment” and promote nonviolence and a desire to change.

Just as “the Montgomery Way” helped spread democratic change in the South, Boyte believes in a Minnesota Way, which “teaches the skills of collaborative work across differences, connects institutions to the life of the communities, and generates a spirit of optimism that people can share their future together.”

He points out that the “civic treasures” in Minnesota—including educational institutions like Augsburg that work across differences to foster a culture of civic empowerment—are critical factors in preparing students to discover how they can become agents of change to spread democratic hope and reform.

Read Harry Boyte’s St. Paul Pioneer Press commentary at .

Read his blog post at American Democracy Project at .

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For six weeks the students have done research on the East Riverside neighborhood and created artwork that reflects their research. Initially students created flyers advertising a “neighborhood block meeting” and placed them in the four block radius between 6th Street and Riverside and 20th Avenue to Cedar. A meeting was held, students conducted interviews, attended an annual meeting, and created artwork based on their findings. The students have also worked with Neighborhood on Wheels, an organization that uses bicycles equipped with computers, generators, and sound and compiled their artwork into a digital piece that will be projected on Tuesday night. The piece covers the history of the neighborhood, attributes of the neighborhood and uses artwork to illustrate the findings. It is hoped that the piece will be used in the future for informational meetings on campus or by the neighborhood organizations to open up the dialogue between the college campus and the neighborhood.

Fine Arts Keystone presentation — “Crossing the Street”

Tuesday, Nov. 4, 8:30 p.m.

Outside Foss Center main entrance

In the event of rain, the project will be presented on November 11, 2008.

Article submitted by Susan Boecher, outside artwork by Jonny Knoll, main article artwork by Femi Solaja

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Pedal power

This spring, the program acquired a three-wheeled bike to be used as a delivery vehicle for some of its routes. A volunteer can carry about 40 meals per trip in the bike’s basket. Currently two routes are being done via bike — one route to the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center and the other to homebound seniors. A third is being planned. As far as distance, routes vary from several blocks off campus to more than 10 miles round-trip — a great workout for volunteers that deliver the food.

Although it takes more muscle power to get the meals delivered, there are good reasons for using the bike ,says Campus Kitchen Coordinator, Brian Noy. “Besides going green, it also helps to promote healthy living and connects students to the community.” Adding that it’s easier to see and interact with the community when you’re not driving around in a van. It also saves Campus Kitchen the cost of gasoline.

Presently, more bike delivery volunteers are needed, and the program is seeking a bike trailer that would allow the use of different bikes.

Locally grown

Spring and summer usually mean fewer meals that can be reclaimed from dining services. Locally grown produce can be used to offset this decrease. Most of the produce used by Campus Kitchen comes from community supported agriculture (CSA) shares that are delivered to campus. The Campus Kitchen is a drop site for two CSA groups, and there are currently 22 shares being delivered. Students, faculty and staff have purchased most of these shares from two Minnesota CSAs:

– Plowshare Farms (Alexandria, MN) – www.ploughsharefarm.com

– Big River Farms (Stillwater, MN) — sold out — www.mnfoodassociation.org

Campus Kitchen uses unused or donated portions of the shares so nothing goes to waste. To learn more about CSAs, go to www.landstewardshipproject.org. Most shares need to be purchased by the beginning of June.

A little help from your friends

Getting enough volunteers can also be a challenge for Campus Kitchen in the spring and summer. With fewer student volunteers, service learners and faculty on campus, Noy relies on the Campus Kitchen intern and other community volunteers. For more information about volunteering, contact Noy at 612-330-1624 or noy@augsburg.edu.

Volunteer schedule:

– Cooking, Mondays, 7-9 p.m. – at Augsburg College *

– Delivery, Tuesdays, 3:30-5:30 p.m. – at the Brian Coyle Community Center

– Cooking, Wednesdays, 7-9 p.m. – at Augsburg College *

– Delivery, Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. – at Peace House homeless shelter

– Delivery, Thursdays, 3-5:30 p.m. – to seniors who live independently

– Cook/Deliver, 1st, 3rd, 5th Sundays, 5:30 – 9:30 p.m. – to Secure Waiting homeless shelter *

* Greatest need

For more information, please visit .

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This is the Augsburg Central Nursing Center, a place that provides instruction and practice for nurses as well as much-needed health care for members of the community. According to Dawn Bowker, a graduate nursing student at Augsburg, the center also provides growth for the nurses and their clients.

Since 1992, students in Augsburg’s nursing program have worked at the Center. Many of the clients are people who have been marginalized in some way — they are uninsured, under-insured, and sometimes homeless. “They are pushed to the periphery,” Dawn says.

Ruth Enestvedt, Augsburg nursing faculty member and co-coordinator of the Center, says their model of practice is framed by an understanding that people need healing rather than a diagnosis and a prescription for treatment. “We assume that people are experts in their own lives,” she said. “We provide useful, relevant service that respects what the person brings to the situation.”

One of the most important lessons Dawn learned through her work at the Center was to listen to clients’ stories and not to pre-judge them. “Like with homelessness,” she said, “we often assume the person has made poor choices. But people who develop a serious illness can lose everything because of the cost of their care or the symptoms of their illness,” she added. “They are still valued individuals, they still have pride.”

Linda Holt, the Center’s other co-coordinator and Augsburg faculty member, adds that people’s stories provide explanations for the choices they have made and insight into the best options for healing. “It is in listening to the stories that people have to tell that horizons are broadened and new, previously unimagined possibilities arise,” Holt wrote.

Dawn sees advocacy as a significant role of the nurses, one that requires creativity and open-mindedness. She said, “For example, if I tell you that you have an appointment next Tuesday at the Southdale clinic, I assume you will have no problem getting there. With the Center’s clients, I can’t make that assumption. I cannot take for granted that they have access to transportation, healthcare coverage, or the ability to keep that appointment.”

Listening and sharing helps nurses find solutions for their clients and creates the mutual respect that offers growth for both parties. Dawn says that she has learned about respect and embracing differences and has formed new friendships as a result of her work at the Center.

Oh, and the shampoo and tube socks? They were donated by the sunday school children at Central Lutheran. In addition to the donated space, these items from the church reinforce the message of caring to the Center’s clients.

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After much thought, Tom came up with a solution. He applied for and received a grant from Forecast Public Arts and the Minnesota State Arts Board, and thus the Augsburg College-Cedar Riverside Pottery Cooperative was born.

Every Tuesday, fifth- through eighth-graders from Cedar-Riverside Community School spend part of their school day in Augsburg’s ceramics studio. The nearby charter school serves a population overwhelmingly drawn from immigrant families — many of its students are challenged by language barriers, culture shock, separation from family members, poverty, and trauma caused by war. The pottery cooperative has offered these young students a reprieve, an opportunity to connect with college students, and art education. Furthermore, it has offered Augsburg students one more way to make an impact on the community.

Together, the students are creating a ceramic bas-relief mural. Participants from both communities bring objects that have significant meaning to them, whether representing their faith tradition, thoughts, values, concerns, or even just a favorite toy, and reproduce them in press molds. Once completed, the mural will be a rich display of symbols and icons of cross-cultural perspectives.

Tom expects that the mural will keep growing and evolving for many years, so that graduates of both Augsburg and the charter school will be able to return to campus and see their work as part of a legacy.

“Giving ownership to both Augsburg College and the Cedar-Riverside community through a collaborative effort will promote a deeper level of understanding and commitment as integral parts of a whole,” says tom. “By acknowledging our commonalities, we can then concentrate on understanding our differences. Now, more than ever, there is a need to provide a focus for thought as life unfolds.”

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