Student Leadership Center
Alfred State College is constructing a new unique building, the Student Leadership Center, that will in every aspect motivate students to take initiative to lead.
Watch us as construction progresses.
Two webcams are available so you can follow along; view one and view two.
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Building Student Leadership Through Civic Engagement
We are developing a program to create future leaders to be highly motivated, responsible, and who will contribute to the public good. One of the secrets to developing this program is to provide future leaders with “hands-on” experiences that demonstrate how their choices and actions impact others. This is not done in a text book, but done through student-led projects. This new center will house 25-30 “civic-minded” club spaces that can only be occupied after the student leaders have submitted a student leadership business plan on a project that gives back to the community (campus, local, regional, world) and must include a marketing plan that explains how they will effectively draw other students to their projects.
The Student Leadership Center will be located at the center of the campus and will be the premier place for students to gather throughout the day in a “one-of-a-kind” designed space dubbed the “Commons” corridor. The Commons corridor will place every student who enters the facility in the middle of a hub of activity that will allow students from different majors, ages, and different levels of community involvement to be in direct contact with each other. It will provide new forms of engagement and leadership that will no longer allow the student to be a bystander in regard to their learning and community engagement. It will create an “in your face” flavor of student engagement.
The Center’s uniqueness will intertwine student engagement opportunities with sites of student leadership. The Center will carefully sequence student leadership training with student “store-fronts” of engagement so that we heighten the curiosity of all students who visit the Center and encourage their aspiration to lead others.
Finally, the Center will have a “state-of-the-art” leadership institute for training students, hosting seminars with speakers from around the globe, conducting a leadership lecture series that allows students to learn and practice ethical decision-making, communication skills, leadership, teamwork, and conflict resolution.
The Student Leadership Center will link leadership preparation with civic engagement projects. All participating students will complete 40 hours of a student leadership program prior to on-site activities associated with the civic engagement projects. Each project will provide opportunities for students to plan, execute, and experience a direct relationship between leadership and making a direct difference in the lives of others.
Examples of Projects That Our Students Have Shown Interest In
These projects would involve 95 to 100 students over the course of a year and they would volunteer approximately 15,470 civic hours. This volunteer effort could have an impact on over 1,100 community members in need of assistance. The students would be learning and applying leadership skills to real world issues, while having an immediate impact on the lives of others in need, and more importantly, the Student Leadership Center would be developing civic-minded leaders for the future. Because students and communities will benefit in different ways from the Center’s activities, the benefits of your contribution will be widespread, multifaceted, and powerful. And because the dollar value of the student efforts in the community civic projects will significantly exceed the amount of your support, the impact of your support will be multiplied. To make a gift, use our online form.
ASC Mobile Assistance Fleet
The Automotive Trades students will help design and maintain a small fleet of buses and trailers to serve the disaster-relief and social program needs both locally and nationally. The fleet will serve a building trades team to assist with construction and repairs, a culinary team to prepare and serve food in areas where food access is limited by disaster, and a healthcare team to provide limited focused health services. The highly visible and highly mobile Fleet will be designed to allow participating students to serve for short periods that will not disrupt their traditional studies.
ASC HOT (Hands-On Technology) Camps
This two-week summer camp at the College is designed to excite junior-high students about science-engineering, leadership, and service through creative hands-on summer camp programs. The camps will offer a choice of four educational tracks and will be team-taught by Alfred State students (with minimal faculty supervision). The four tracks will be: Green Technologies in the Home, Car, and Environment; Culinary Cuisines on the Fly in Crisis; Creating Solutions to World Problems through Robotics; and Digital This! Communication Solutions through Animation. All students will leave the camp having completed a hands-on project in their chosen track. Each camp will include outside speakers who will tie learning technologies to service and leadership.
ASC Global Service Project
Teams of students will identify a need either in a domestic or international community and then develop a project to satisfy that community need. Examples suggested by students include -construction of schools or libraries; -design and construction of small production water or power facilities in third-world countries; -working with international aid at medical sites in third-world countries.
In spring 2010, 21 students traveled to Haiti where they were involved primarily in construction, but also helped with some feeding programs and provided some veterinary care to Haitian livestock. Read an excerpt from a journal written by Andrew Catlin, '12 and view photos of the Haitian relief trip.
Building Civic-Minded Leaders in New Orleans
Semester in the South brought building trades seniors real-world experience in an area where the labor was most needed. They learned new building technologies while restoring/building new homes in hurricane-devastated New Orleans, LA, and Bay St. Louis, MS. Working with nationally recognized service organizations, students also built a social consciousness while working with locals struggling to rebuild a sense of community; national experts on rebuilding communities were brought in for the students during their stay. Watch our Semester in the South video to learn more about this experience.
“This exciting project is a genuine investment in New York State - at a time when genuinely transforming ventures are difficult to get off the ground, everyone involved with this project sees both the short- and long-term benefits of this visionary facility.” – Catharine Young, NYS Senator
