CLASS Professors Publish Book Chapter on Civic Engagement

July 27, 2018


Article summarizes grant-writing effort to assist local homeless shelter

Placeholder Image
 

SOCORRO, N.M. – Two New Mexico Tech professors have published a chapter in an influential book regarding their five-year project to help the local homeless day shelter.

Elisabeth Kramer-Simpson and Steve Simpson published “Technical Communication Client Projects and Nonprofit Partnerships: The Challenges and Opportunities of Community Engagement” in the book Citizen and Advocacy in Technical Communications.

“The story here is probably not just that the book chapter came out, but that it's an influential work highlighting work that is being done between Tech and the community, which is probably also of interest to a lot of folks here in town,” Steve Simpson said.

The chapter summarizes the efforts of the CLASS Department professors to get students involved with Puerto Seguro, since 2013. Over the years, students have successfully written grants to secure $49,300 to support the shelter’s work. The book chapter gives a detailed history of their successes in creating a grant-writing partnership and developing a sense of community activism with their students. They collected and reported on data and feedback from students.

They employed a purely qualitative approach to the study. This study draws from interviews with student participants, and staff and board members from the shelter, in addition to their observations of class and shelter interactions. They recruited by email and participated in 30-minute, semi-structured follow-up interviews on their experiences writing for the shelter.

They conducted a one-hour focus group interview with seven participants who filled a variety of roles at the shelter. After initial coding, the researchers shared emergent themes with each other, identified overlapping themes, and discussed passages that they coded similarly and differently and abstracted these themes to categories.

One student who participated in the third iteration of the class, summarized the top motivations students had for participating in this project and what students saw as the benefits of writing grants for the day shelter: “There’s the one voice in the back of my head, it’s like, ‘This is a good thing to do.’ Then there’s the other one, ‘This is going to look really good on your LinkedIn profile.’”

Students saw both benefits to their professional development and benefits to the shelter, though the variation in how the students saw the grant-writing benefitting the shelter indicates that some students were motivated by the civic elements of writing these grants more than others.

Another student reported that he liked seeing the issues at the shelter firsthand. The authors quoted him as remembering the visit to the shelter: “You still have that understanding of what the organization does, what kind of atmosphere it has, and what they are concerned with from the mouths of the representatives that gave us the tour.” Hearing from the staff and volunteers directly was an essential part of the experience that we plan to continue in future iterations of this grant-writing client project.

“As a result of this project, we see benefits to the community and to students through our sustained model of service-learning,” they wrote. “We also see costs, particularly to the faculty involved in maintaining these relationships.

Elisabeth continues to sit on the shelter board, attend meetings year round, and write grants even when the class is not running. She also participates in creating the annual budget, and reporting on grant implementation, and consults with board members throughout the year to make needed adjustments as grants are implemented.

“This involvement takes time but ensures successful projects,” they wrote. “Sometimes, students also need more supervision in completing work for the shelter, and not all grants or flyers created are used. We feel that we are modeling civic responsibility for students and encouraging them to take these lessons with them wherever they end up as technical communication professionals. Though the level of civic engagement varied among the students, many appreciated the opportunity to give their time and talents to help the shelter in the community.”

– NMT –