Wartburg College
EN-9: Community Partnerships

Members of the colleges faculty and staff are currently partnering with the City of Waverly to help improve the cities ecology. Most efforts are focused on the establishment of prairies in areas which have been returned to natural landscape after bring developed, and the improvements of the dry run creek, which caused significant flooding in the past. This partnership has been going for years, and will likely continue, if not indefinitely, until the dry run creek project has been completed.

Community Builders is an ongoing collaborative experiential learning project, under the auspices of the Leadership Institute and Education Department, in which Wartburg College students work with youth and senior citizens to meet the mutually reciprocal needs of all those involved. The purpose of this project is to use the assets of community members with different backgrounds and skills to build and strengthen the community they share. All sixth grade students in the local school districts have the opportunity to participate. The college recruits Wartburg students, and community members to lead the groups, which are called neighborhoods. The neighborhoods meet five times a year to learn about the community, and how they can serve. Part of the Community Builders program is partnering with community agencies to allow college students to serve alongside community sixth graders. Some service partners are sustainability connected, like the city recycling center, and college garden. The campus supports this partnership through staff/faculty support, coordination, and participation. The program has been going for awhile (although no record of specifically which year it started could not be found) and will continue for the foreseeable future. http://www.wartburg.edu/cb/

Break Away Service Trips happen at least twice a year, during the fall break and tour week (between winter and May terms). Each trip is led by at least two student leaders, advised by a non-student adult, usually a faculty or staff member. Trips happen locally and distant. Nearly every trip is connected to sustainability; poverty relief, disaster relief, environmental work, and fighting racism. All trips, local or distant, do a service element together prior to the actual trip, during their team building phase. These service projects are conducted in our immediate community, and usually tie to their full trips mission (i.e. working with the community meal before traveling to help with homelessness in Atlanta, GA). In the past few years we have worked with local non-profits like Habitat for Humanity to help alleviate poverty and homelessness in our own community. These efforts work to help the people of our community, the most important part of sustainability, supporting economic prosperity, social equality, and wellbeing. These trips are supported by the college through a program coordinator, leadership board, partial trip funding, and student leaders. Some departments will even allow staff to earn their regular salary while leading a trip. These trips, and the Service Trip program, and systemic to establishing Wartburg College as a service driven institution. Service is one of the core pillars at Wartburg, demonstrated in many ways, one of which is service trips.

Break Away Service Trips happen at least twice a year, during the fall break and tour week (between winter and May terms). Each trip is led by at least two student leaders, advised by a non-student adult, usually a faculty or staff member. Nearly every trip is connected to sustainability; poverty relief, disaster relief, environmental work, and fighting racism. The timeframe of the partnerships depends on the partner. We have been partnering with an organization in New Orleans for at least four years, annually sending groups to help with wetland improvements in the Louisiana Delta to help decrease the impacts of hurricanes. For several years we have also worked with an organization along the Mexican border to help alleviate racism towards immigrants. During the two years covered by this STARS report (12/13, 13/14) service trips worked towards zero footprint. Throughout the trips, participants completed worksheets, tracking their footprint. Following the trip, each group pooled fund proportionally based on their footprint, to purchase carbon credits. https://sites.google.com/site/wartburgservicetrips/home

websites included as applicable in each section above.