Westminster University - Utah
EN-9: Community Partnerships

Climate and Energy film series in partnership with local non-profit Utah Clean Energy. This is an educational film series contributing to the community education on climate change. This series runs each spring semester. http://www.westminstercollege.edu/environmental_center/index.cfm?parent=6676&detail=14397&content=15372

The Westminster Bike Collective is branch off of the Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective. The two work collaboratively to restore old bicycles, fix current students' and community members' bikes, and to encourage alternative forms of transportation that are carbon emission free. A bicycle collective is a group of people who care about biking and use it for transportation, recreation, or a combination of the two. A collective also provides people with an outlet for biking support in the form of maintenance and community. The Westminster Bike Collective is open seasonally in fall and spring and has been running since 2011. The college provides both space and staff funding for the campus site. http://www.bicyclecollective.org/locations-a-hours/wesminster

Westminster College has a strategic partnership with the nearby community of South Salt Lake. Their Promise South Salt Lake program focuses on three primary goals: 1) Every child has the opportunity to attend and graduate from college 2) Everyone has a safe, clean home and neighborhood 3) Everyone has the opportunity to prosper https://www.southsaltlakecity.com/department-listings/promise-so-salt-lake a) Beginning in October of 2012, the college prioritized this program for service and support. We provide student volunteers and paid employees to mentor programs, food access programs, local schools, and many others. b) The partnership is focused on supporting the college-going atmosphere of South Salt Lake (SSL). By tutoring, mentoring and emphasizing the benefits of higher education for the kids in K-12, we believe it will impact the economic prosperity, social equity and well-being of those children in the future and also their families - with an end result of positively impacting the SSL community as a whole. This partnership has involved projects with a specific environmental focus as of this semester, which will address SSL’s ecological health. c) Employee time is devoted to the partnership through the work of Julie Tille, Lu Marzulli who directs the Diversity Center, Peter Ingle who is an education faculty member, and through a formal SSL Task force comprised of faculty, staff, students, and SSL members. Additionally, our advancement team has supported this partnership through extensive fundraising. We also host students from SSL for campus events like tours, using the climbing wall, attending theater and athletic events, and offer them space every now and then for some of their own programming. d) Relevant stakeholders are identified by those that attend our frequent informational sessions, choose to participate in their monthly tour of SSL centers, serve on our task force, have participated in our Diversity and Civic Engagement Learning Community that has a SSL focus, and those who have self-identified in one way or another and choose to support the partnership in various ways. e) Pursuit of some type of higher education by SSL youth is one of the measurements we will examine, and we hope that the number of SSL youth that do pursue a type of higher education will increase as our partnership with them continues and the number of projects increases. Additionally, the partnership has the potential to create a systematic change at Westminster for those students involved as they will have a much better perspective on collaborating with international and diverse populations.