Speaker series highlights service opportunities
Utah State University’s Center for Community Engagement, or CCE, made a change to its Christensen Community Scholars Program this year, making it easier for program scholars and other students to integrate community work into their academic learning.
“Initially, it was one-credit class that all the scholars in this program needed to take,” said Nelda Ault-Dyslin, assistant director for CCE.
The program, which gives students the opportunity to incorporate service-based community work into their education, now only requires scholars to attend three Community Voices & Engagement Speaker Series events to be eligible.
“Any student in any major can integrate their work with the community. Whether they’re doing volunteer work or a practicum or an internship, we want to recognize that they are working with the community,” Ault-Dyslin said. “We also want to give them a good foundation of best practices in community work because there’s good ways and bad ways to try to make your community better.”
The speaker series events invite local community partner organizations to come and speak on a variety of different issues affecting the Cache Valley community and what people can do to address them.
“One of the purposes is to expose the students who come to this series to different volunteer opportunities that they might not have run into,” Ault-Dyslin said. “We wouldn’t choose something that we don’t already have a way for students to get involved in here locally.”
In the past, the series has had speakers from organizations involved in disability awareness, food security, immigration, refugee resettlement and others.
“I really like the idea of exposing students to different things because I think about when I was a student doing very similar work,” said Maia Taylor, staff assistant for the CCE. “I had a very narrow focus on the kinds of things that I was doing, and part of that was purely interest. But when you learn about these other opportunities, you find these different areas of interest and ways to collaborate with what you’re interested in that you may not have thought about before.”
This year, Ault-Dyslin and Taylor wanted to ensure the changes made to the series expanded awareness and access for students looking to get into community service.
“This is all really about planting seeds because when it comes to community work, it moves very slowly,” Ault-Dyslin said.
By planting these seeds, the duo hopes to encourage program scholars and students interested in the event series to get involved in community work down the line.
“You hear on campus all the time to get involved, get involved, get involved, but get involved looks really different to different people,” Ault-Dyslin said. “Someone may hear that and think, well I’m not going to run for office, or I’m not going to be a leader of a club.”
Ault-Dyslin and Taylor emphasized that the CCE provides students with a variety of different ways to get involved on campus, ways they don’t have to organize themselves.
“We do all the footwork to organize it and bring it to students because students just don’t have time, and not just because they have a busy schedule but because they only have roughly four years of schooling here,” Ault-Dyslin said.
According to Taylor, students from any major or college have the ability to take something away from the ideas and organizations highlighted in the speaker series.
“These are people who have started organizations and businesses from nothing — it was an idea. That is hard to do, and all students can come and learn from their experiences,” Taylor said. “We don’t get a lot of business students, but I think that they could actually take a lot from these kinds of speakers, even if they don’t necessarily want to get involved.”
While the series was created for scholars in the community engagement program, Ault-Dyslin and Taylor encourage any student who’s interested to “get their feet wet” by attending an event.
“Community is just learning where you are, learning about your people and finding your space. These are people actively in the community working with the larger community beyond USU, and there is a lot that goes on there,” Taylor said. “It’s really easy to not see that as a student focused on academics and getting through school.”