Mary Rees: Good afternoon. We'll wait just a moment before we start, while people come and join the Moorpark update for September 14.
Good afternoon. We'll wait just one more moment for everyone to join us for our Moorpark campus update.
Well, good afternoon and thank you for joining September 14 Moorpark College Campus Update. I want to remind everyone that the update is closed captioned. If you click on the bottom on the CC
you will see that it's all being closed captioned. The update is also being recorded and will be trans- the transcript will be put on the president's web page after it is finished with the transcript.
For today's update, we're going to have update notes from President Sokenu, as well as Business Service updates, Academic Affairs, and Students Support updates, and today we have a campus spotlight on the Foundation and with John Loprieno.
As always questions and answers are welcomed, please put them in the Q&A and we'll do our best to answer those questions as we go through today's update.
Julius, good...afternoon.
Julius Sokenu: Hi, everyone. Thank you Mary. Welcome, welcome, welcome, September 14th, it's astounding how, you know, the whole month just keeps going, and then we've gone from Summer into Fall, and although it fits still feels like
like Summer in a lot of places. I hope everyone has been safe and secure in light of all the fires and, as such, I'm hoping that folks are taking good care of your health and well being.
Talking about care and safety, thank you to the folks who are working on our screening stations. I want to thank John Everlove, Cherisse Meichtry,
Mariel Stegmeir and our 12 screeners who consistently make sure that we as a college community
are safe by making sure that it follow through the protocols that have been established. I do want to
thank folks for following through with the, with the protocols, particularly with the mask, we have not had any instances of
any kind of violent reaction against wearing masks, and for those who are concerned about it they've tried their very best to, you know, communicate
and we appreciate that, the members of the community as well as our faculty and staff are being compliant. I do ask that if you have any kind of reservations and concerns, please make sure you share that with us, do not,
do not have a hissy fit with the
with the screeners they are there to do their jobs and we appreciate you respecting them and respecting the roles that they are charged to uphold.
In terms of good news at the college, we recently received a $2.9 million STEM Impacto grant it is an HSI grant from the, from the federal government and Moorpark College has been acknowledged as an institution that supports
Hispanic as a Hispanic serving institution, our Hispanic students and our other
minoritized populations, and particularly this funding helps us to build a pathway from high school to the college to the workplace and provides resources such as tutoring, wraparound services as such as Counseling.
It helps to provide work based learning opportunities for our students, and equally as important, it helps to provide a coordinator to oversee this particular project.
What if you remember, we have a handful of projects that are aimed at helping us serve our students better. So for the math faculty folks have been working on Project Promesas.
Engineering has been working with students and particularly with
disproportionately impacted students on the Ames project, and now we have this grant and it is an honor for us to be able to
serve our community and serve our students, in this way. The grant is 2.9 million for a four or five year period so it's about $580,000 a year,
which is, which is a good chunk of money, which we can see a lot of effective student outreach happen, other effective curricular innovations happen and
we're especially proud of the fact that this further solidifies the reputation of Moorpark College as serving our Hispanics, our Hispanic Latinx students, and particularly paying attention to the resources we provide to our disproportionately impacted populations.
I also want to say a big thank you to the folks who worked on our September 11 remembrance day event on Friday.
A big shout out to Dina, Dina Pielaet our Marketing Coordinator, a big shout out to John Loprieno
the director, Interim Director of Institutional Advancement Marketing and Communication, a big shout out to Johnny Conley from the Veterans Resource Center for identifying two remarkable veterans who participated on the video, Ryan Spires and Ben Scotti, and a big shout out to our
support team, our vice presidents, and to each one of you who were able to participate in that event, it was emotionally charged, it was meaningful and if you have not had a chance to take a look at the video, please go do so.
As always, we aim to honor... the fallen heroes of September 11, but it is not just by saying we honor them, but in through our actions and we the message from that event was that
we continue to honor them through our actions of service, service to our community, service to the college, service to our students, service to the nation, and being proactive in issues of justice and being proactive and issues of freedom.
I also want to use this opportunity to
inform you of some events that are coming our Constitution Day is this Thursday the 17th of September.
This is an opportunity for us to share what the Constitution means to us, now more than ever, in the face of a pandemic, in the face of social and racial unrest.
in the face of potential economic downturn, and in any moment in time where the the demography of a nation is quite dynamic,
we need to come back and revisit the message of the Constitution and see if we're actually living up to it, and if we're not, how do we do that And as we do, how are we furthering that message for generations to come? So that will be from 1 to 2 p.m. this Thursday, you should get that
announcement I think actually it went out this morning and there will be an alumni panel and facilitated by
Professor Roland Petrello.
Guided Pathways retreat is on the 25th of
September from 9 to noon. Guided Pathways work group is put together a really dynamic opportunity for us to engage the progress we've made so far and our goals, and our hopes, and our plans for the future. So if you could please make sure you join, join us for that event as well.
I know that there has been, some concern has been brought up regarding, you know, the what's how do I want to say this,
is regarding our economic future, and folks are concerned that, you know, there might be layoffs, or furloughs, or and I just want to reiterate that for this academic year now through June,
no intentions, no plans to furlough anyone to lay anyone off, we have a hold harmless from the, from the State Chancellor's Office. We have a state budget that yes, the deferrals have over $799 billion, but there are difference. So we are not laying anybody off, we're not cutting any positions,
as we have been looking at in the past, we are looking at schedules to make sure that it's effective and efficient,
so there will be some, you know, some modifications and might be some trimmings here and there with the schedule,
but we are not we are not eliminating positions and we have no plans to do so in the immediate future. Next year we will have will have to be very cognizant of how we manage our resources because that
the prediction is that we will be in more of an economic dire straits than we are right now.
In terms of our spring schedule, thank you to the faculty and staff who are working on that schedule, we will be predominantly on online as we are this semester and
we might bring a few things back on campus, but for the most part we will be again 90/10 in its distribution of instruction and courses.
Okay, so, September 15 to October 15 is Latinx Heritage Month,
and I'm so used to call it Hispanic Heritage Month, I keep saying that, I have to learn to use the use the language, and as you will see on screen part of the events celebrating
most populous and and growing
demographic group in the American population, part of the events to actually look at, you know, cultural virtues and personal experiences and the whole identity conversation, you know,
what we call people, how we refer to people, and how we see people define, you know, how we engage, and so I appreciate the panel,
Dr. Josepha Baca, Maria Thayer, and Nicole Bicakci from our ASMC, and as well as Dr. Marnie Melendez. And then October 6, there will be a speaker, and as you can see is a local author and the author reading from their work
as well, and there are other programs that are in process, and yet to be confirmed, but these are just some of them really numerous programs that will be deployed during
Latinx Heritage Month. Thank you to the Multicultural Committee Day group as well as under the leadership of
Professor Tamarra Coleman, who is doing this great work. I also understand that there is a, there will be a call for submissions of artwork and poetry, etc., and that information will be forthcoming, a little bit later on. Let's see what I'm missing here...
okay. And then the last thing is I just wanted to thank the folks who are working on our social justice
initiatives, the various work groups and there's so much that's happening, and a lot of productive dialogue that is really leading to action items and we are very
grateful for the work that you're doing and look forward to see the next level of planning and the actions that will come from that.
We do these campus updates, currently, we've been doing them, we're doing them once a week, when the
when the pandemic first began, we we've sort of moved them when we introduced the social justice work groups we were doing them every other week,
and so this is sort of we're moving it, we've moving to a new semester, and this is an opportunity for us to get from you,
our college community, your recommendations on how often we conduct these campus updates. We've heard loud and clear that they are are useful. So we would like that, that's also evident in the fact that we have 146 participants
on online right now. Thank you, thank you. So we would like you to identify for us, how often you would like to see the updates happen. Would you like to see them continue as a weekly event?
Would you like to see them having bi weekly? Would you like to have them happen monthly? So if you could please engage the poll and select which of these particular
offerings you would like to see that will help us
determine where we go next, or what we do next with these campus updates.
Okay, so 19% would like, thank you so much for the survey, by the way, Matt, Dr. Matt Calfin.
"How often would you like, Moorpark College Campus Updates to occur?" 19% said weekly, 64% said bi weekly, and 17% said monthly. So thank you for your feedback.
We've heard what you've said, and we'll go, go ahead and plan around the feedback that we're getting from the various constituency groups and
we will, we'll communicate that to you soon as possible. Again, thank you for much for participating in the survey, that's all for me, for now... Jennifer?
Jennifer Clark: Thank you, Julius. Hey, good afternoon, everybody. So Happy Monday. So glad to be here with all of you today. I just have a couple of quick updates from my area or from Business Services, I should say,
and then I'll pass the pass the mic over to Mary. I just wanted to update everybody on how we're doing with our CARES Act funding.
This is the the $2.571 million that we received for students, this is direct aid to students. So over two and a half million dollars.
So far we've awarded about $1.7 million to over 2,200 students, well over that amount, and we're still awarding.
So we are well over halfway to reaching our goal, and it's only September. We've got just over 880,000 or so left to award, and we're going to, like I said, we're going to continue to award until it's all gone.
I also wanted to just briefly touch on the operational plan. Thank you, Julius for, you know, mentioning the folks that have been working so hard to make our campus safe,
the screeners, you know, all the way up to, you know, to Cherisse and Mariel
from Athletics, to John Everlove for, you know, his coordination efforts, and really the entire FMO team, really everyone from
from maintenance operations, because all those guys that have been supporting the tents and other screening locations every single day, whether it's,
you know, making sure that you know we've got electricity, to refilling supplies, to just making sure that things that that our screeners and our locations have everything that they need to do their job.
The last thing I wanted to mention about our operational plan, I think Mary may touch on it also, is I wanted to just let give everyone a heads up that
QR codes in buildings and in classrooms will be rolling, we'll be rolling out to you soon.
The QR codes are the little the items, the squares that you scan, every time you come onto campus and you get your temperature taken
at one of those screening locations, you have to scan your your temperature and your location.
We're going to be adding those to classrooms. So we're really going to need everyone's assistance to sort of facilitate this process, particularly with our students.
This really really makes a big difference to our Student Health Center folks that are working the back end of all of this data that's being gathered
for any potential, you know, positive case that we have, this is all for contact tracing purposes, of course, if we were to have a, you know, a positive student this provides data for us in a much, much more a sort of
if you will, quicker, more efficient in a way for the Student Health Center, rather than rather having to do everything manually,
you know, make phone calls manually, look at various databases manually, this really assists Sharon and her staff in the Student Health Center.
So there'll be a lot more information coming on that, but I just did want to mention that, that is coming soon. We will also have it in buildings for our classified staff and
faculty, of course in classrooms, you guys will use the same QR codes that the students are using in classrooms. But as I say, there'll be more information later.
Thank you, that's all I have from my area today, Mary?
Mary: Thank you, Jennifer. Yes, we're very pleased the, with the screening all the work that's been going on on that and the QR codes will only provide another level for us to help
monitor where people are on campus to make it easier for contract tracing if we do need to go there.
A huge kudos to everybody, the faculty, staff, administration for their support of students this fall. There was a concern with students coming back in the fall, moving into the largely online world, whether there would be frustration and
lack of retention for the students, and I'm delighted to say that the students are hanging in there, you're supporting them, they're continuing to move forward on their educational plans. So we are really pleased, the students, we came and went through census without
without with a continual increasing with more students coming in. So it's really a positive statement about all the support that everyone is providing to help our students through this really hard time for them so
hard for us, but considering for our students so much more. So thank you for all of your work helping out with the retention for our students and helping them move forward towards their personal successes.
We've have a few additional reopenings going on campus that we're very excited about the zoo is going to be reopening this Saturday,
clearly with safety measures, clearly with social distancing mask, and all of the
defined, I guess, new criteria for our world, but we are pleased that we will be able to join the other zoos in our area, LA Zoo, and Santa Barbara Zoo and that are also open.
Following that next week, part of our ICA, our Athletics, some of our athletic courses will be able to start meeting on ground again with social distancing, following all safety measures,
but they're going to be a staging of some of those courses, coming back to on ground. These are all part of our original plan for our 90% online and approximately 10% courses with some component of on ground.
Many of the lab courses we did start those at the beginning of the semester, we were asked to hold back on some of the, the online or on ground intended courses for ICA, for the Athletics and Kinesiology, the high FLEX classes as well as the some of the Performing Arts,
till after Labor Day to see how our county was doing. We have received the go ahead to start doing a phase in of the Athletics.
These are athletic courses, they're not competitions, they're not practices, these are our conditioning courses and we are very excited to start bringing some of them back to help support our student athletes.
We hope this will continue to go well, and we'll be able to bring back the additional ICA courses and hopefully move on to some of
the ones that were originally scheduled in for FLEX and some in the Performing Arts. So this is all part of our plan for fall and we're just staging coming in.
Trying to have our number one criteria is safety for our faculty, students, and staff, administration as well as support for all to move towards our students success plans.
Thinking of plans, this is our time for program plans which are going to be do the end of the month. So we look forward to that opportunity of reflection for all of the programs, as we look at how we're doing for helping our students.
One of the other things to consider as Jennifer mentioned, the QR codes that we're going to be having on campus again, continually looking for ways to improve safety on campus. [printer printing in the background]
The spring is going to be a very similar to this semester where, again, we'll have online for the majority 90% and with the
other part about 10% that have some on ground component, these are in cohorts, small groups, coming in smaller amount of times or just a few times during the semester.
For the spring, we're going to be looking at capping the classes, the large lecture classes to 40. If people are interested in doing a large or extra large classes, we still will have those,
but for your lecture classes this semester that are and in the past that we have run at 55 in order to help support our faculty and our students, we're going to for the semester, lower the caps to 40 for those courses,
to allow us to get used to this particular environment, these new pedagogies, and like I said to help support the faculty and the students in these. Lab classes won't be won't be affected.
Extra large and larges won't be affected, this is going to be, if there's any questions, you can talk with the, the deans on those as well. So that's kind of our plan for continuing to hopefully smoothly roll out our fall plan and start working on our plans for spring.
Amanuel?
Amanuel Gebru: Thank you Mary.
Good afternoon everyone, just want to remind you of a few updates, let me turn up my mic.
So you seen the email for the Employee Assistance Program EAP, Empathia, we'll be providing webinar for all our employees to discuss common reactions to these times,
the importance of self care, and also more support that is needed for our faculty and staff, so I'll post information on the chat, but
the webinar or the information, the workshop is on Friday, September 18 from 9 to 10a.m. so please sign up. I'll put the link up after I finish doing the update so that you can sign up for the webinar.
And then also, we're seeing a decrease in our ACCESS students who are part of the program. So please refer them to our ACCESS program and you students that are having difficulty or challenges,
use our students services syllabus that has information, but many students are now using the services as we transition into online education,
but we want to remind you that ACCESS is open, available, remote. I will post the contact person to put on there, including Silva, who is the Program Coordinator,
but please continue to encourage our students to use our ACCESS services so that they can support them as they transition to online education.
And then also the last update is our Raider Central Grab and Go, I really want to thank Tim Lumas who's our part time staff, who's been helping lead this effort, the last two Fridays,
but also Johnny Conley, his supervisor, and then also with the help of Kristen Robinson and the Raider Central Advisory Committee, they've been doing a wonderful job in getting this thing going.
It's every Friday from 12 to 4 p.m. in lot H near the field hockey area. The last two Fridays, we've served over 80 students, over 200 family members,
and gave out about 80 emergency food boxes from food share that includes raw rice, oats, can foods, fruits, some protein, such as chicken and tuna. So we are doing our best to support our students and our community through the Raider Central
program and then also I will post information for our main contact, which is Tim Lumas who's going to be the person that's helping every Friday with this,
in addition to Johnny Conley, who's also kind of the lead person working with him. And then the last thing is please encourage all of our students to utilize our support services, Counseling, Financial Aid, tutoring, all the service areas.
Most of you should have, all of you should have the student services syllabus that has all the services and all the information and all the context for our support.
So please encourage our students to utilize the services early in the semester so we can make sure they are continuing to transition to our online remote services. Thank you, Mary, back to you.
Mary: Thank you Amanuel, we did have some questions about late start students not being on the roster and disappearing. If you can get back with either Amanuel or I on some specifics on that, I don't know if those are students that were dropped for non-payment or what the specifics are, but
get back with us and we'll try to figure out what we can do
to help you reach out to those particular students.
I'm delighted to say we're going to now be able to hear from our foundation, John?
John Loprieno: Hello everybody.
Well, as you can see I have this amazing new title. I'm the Interim Director of Institutional Advancement Community Relations and Marketing. In addition to being Department Chair for
Performing Arts. It's been great to do all of that, and part of my responsibilities in the new position are working with the Moorpark College Foundation.
We've been doing a lot of things over this last summer in working with the Foundation and
like everything that's happening in this Covid world things are starting to reset and I'd like to say that the Foundation is one of these organizations that is resetting and finding a new path forward and
I would like to tell you about what I did this summer. What I learned on my summer vacation. I'll tell you where we were with the foundation, where we are with the foundation now, and where we hope to be going soon.
Let's see if I can get this to work.
There we go. So when we think about the face of the Moorpark College Foundation, what's the face you think of first?
Some people think of this, I've been around for a while. I've worked with the Foundation on the 40th anniversary, the 50th anniversary,
we've had some stops and starts and you know sometimes we can talk to people
they'll talk about things that may not have have gone too well, but what I'm saying is we're at a point where we're at a cultural shift right, we're going to change things and
we're going to get you to think of a face more like this. And of course I had to give a theatre faces in because theatre is still alive and well and coming back, baby.
So what we started thinking about where the Foundation was again, I'll put Hamilton here, "you don't know what you don't know."
Julius, Dr. Sokenu, our executive team Mary, Amanuel, Jennifer,
they have been keeping the Foundation going over the last year, we didn't have a foundation coordinator and James Schuelke, who was in this position before me
left, so there was about a good three, six months there where, there was not a lot of support from the Foundation from the college,
in terms of the infrastructure, in terms of the day to day operations. So Julius and the executive team really stepped up
and kept that going, Jennifer, in particular, I think she came to Moorpark two weeks before Covid and she inherited all of that federal funding the CARES Act and just heard about that.
She was so busy with all that yet on top of it, she was able to work through the foundation finances and really help us come up with a lot of things that we needed
as we'll talk about in the next slide. We also have Jill Haney our Board Chair and our foundation board, they have also kept the Foundation going
through some of our leaner times and they really deserve to be recognized, in particular, faculty members, Tim Weaver and Michael Hoffman all full board members as well as
retired Faculty members Tom Harris and Sylvia Sullivan, they have been part of the foundation board for years and have really kept it going.
I'd like to also talk about Maria in our Scholarship Office, Maria is amazing. This last year we gave out $160,000 in scholarships
due in part to a lot of Maria's individual efforts she continues to stay in touch with our donors, she continues to
to reach out to companies and people who have who set up these scholarships and she builds that every year. And a lot of that happens from her own initiative, and her own record keeping, and her own tracking of these scholarships
and she's really doing some amazing things in the Scholarship Office.
And another thing that we don't know that we don't know, and this was news to me that we have this tax deductible payroll deduction program. Yeah, that's the thing.
I didn't know was a thing and certainly, once I found out it was I did enroll in it because it's very exciting to be able to
help the college and help students with scholarships. This last year, in particular, I was able to give out the DFC Scholarship
as part of an award that I received and Savannah Simpson was the person that I gave the scholarship to. It was a $500 scholarship
and here's Savannah performing in Romeo and Juliet. She was also in Three Sisters, directed by Suzanne Fagan and here at the bottom, you got her
NPR sketch that she wrote, and she co-produced the Holiday Spectacular with me. She's got a lot of talents. She's transferred to CLU,
I couldn't think of a more deserving student for the scholarship and it's very gratifying to be able to award a scholarship to a student at the end of the semester.
So what have we actually done this summer? Since May when I stepped in,
we hired a consultant Kathy Krass to come work at the Foundation and she's done an amazing job. She's really been an inspiration to the full board and the executive team of the Foundation.
She's a real go-getter and, you know, I really have to step up and I thank Julius and Jill for continuing the commitment we had decided and the board decided to hire Kathy prior to Covid and
it would have been very easy to say, you know, "Now's not the time to do this, maybe we should wait,"
but both Julius and Jill and the board, were very committed to moving forward and trying to change that that culture in the Foundation and we've been very excited with the work that Kathy has been helping us to do.
One of the first things we did we hired a foundation coordinator Alicia Hoffman, you can see her contact information in the chat if you need to get in touch with her.
Alicia has been working with Michelle Perry and the Business Office who also has been working with Jennifer to keep all of the accounting and the books of the Foundation over the years.
Alicia is trying to get our arms around that Michelle's been a huge help as well as Jennifer. And one of the things they've been doing is securing a contact management database system.
For the first time since the the Foundation was formed in 1980 we're consolidating all of the Foundation, EATM, Alumni, Scholarship, PAC
contacts, our past donors, our donor history, and for the first time we're going to have them in a searchable database so that we can continue to reach out to our donors, we can track their donations.
They say, one of the things I've learned from Kathy, is that 80% of all donations to foundations and nonprofits come from small donors.
This contact manage data, database system will be critical as doing that and I jokingly like to say that
Maria has been doing such a good job, a system like this will have weaponize her and get her out into the community and helping us even more, and helping our students even more with the great talents that she has.
We've also restructured our internal foundation committees our Finance Committee, our Alumni Committee. We've created a new Board Development Committee
for looking for new board members for recruiting them and or their orientation process. I'm pleased to announce that Tim Holland is our newest board member for the Foundation, he's from Moorpark, he was a student at Moorpark he had two kids who are students at Moorpark,
and we're very happy to have him on our board now. And Subhash has also helped us by connecting us with people from his advisory board people that we provide,
they provide internships for our students as well as employment for our students once they finish the Bio
technology program, and we've had meaningful conversations with a couple of people who have connections to Moorpark College,
we've helped them with their industry by supplying them with employees, and now they're looking at coming on our board and talking to us about
being part of our board and helping our students across campus, that's very exciting. Thank you Subhash for that.
We've also created a Job Ready Alumni Forum, the first one was on the 3rd of this month on Nursing Christina Lee is amazing, she should have her own podcast.
She brought in two great alumni, as well as an industry professional, we talked about how you transition from Moorpark into the industry. We talked about
how the industry looks at Moorpark students and how they interview students what all is it as they look for.
It was just a great conversation all the way around. This also will be on the chat. It's there posted on the
Foundation website, please get a chance to listen to this, if you do because Christina does an amazing job as well as the conversation starts talking about what's happening here in our community with Covid.
It was very heartwarming and very touching in some, in some respects, and it was just a great event, all the way around. We're looking forward to the next one, and thank you, Christina for making that happen.
And then finally, we've generated a case for support.
The case for support that we're working on right now is actually got three different components.
Obviously scholarships, we can continue to the work that Maria has been doing. We're always going to be building scholarships for students, in this next
push in our campaign. We've got our Rising Scholars Program that's newly emerging, if you don't know what that is, that's where we identify students in the middle school,
and we help tutor them and mentor them through high school, through their time at Moorpark College, and onto a four year degree. It's an exciting program and the board has really been energized by this and we're excited to be involved with it.
Finally we have the Basic Needs Center. This is the one thing that has really caught the eye of our foundation and the one center
the tent pole for, for what we're going to do in October, when we launch our campaign
to raise money for the, the Basic Needs Center to provide food for students, shelter referrals, emergency funding, whatever emergency basic needs that they are students may have.
You may be aware of the fact that we put together a basic needs work group on campus.
Here's the group of people that were involved with that. A lot of the information that was brought to the Foundation and now with the Foundation is using in this campaign that we're going to launch on October 3
came from this work group. We really appreciate their, their work.
You may have seen their presentations and some of the professional development committees and these are the numbers that our foundation has been looking at all summer and they're very strong and again, hopefully you've seen these. This was from a survey
where 38% of our students responded that they were insecure, food insecure in the last 30 days. 49% responded that they had housing insecurities, and sadly 16% said that they were homeless in the previous year.
Again, our foundation has been looking at these numbers, day after day, very moved and when we started talking about our first campaign,
and what we're going to focus on this obviously rose to the top, and this is where we're actually looking at, these numbers 38, 49, and 16 that easy to remember, they're tough to remember. And I think one of the most critical things about this is that these are numbers from 2018.
I can only imagine if we were to take this survey again at the end of this calendar year, what these numbers might look like now in a Covid situation.
But these numbers being so huge, I think there's very little doubt that all of us have had contact with students. I've talked with faculty members
who have talked about helping students by giving money out of their pockets for food,
helping them find a place to stay for the night, or just helping them in general with basic needs fixing a car or something like that. The generosity of our faculty is is
unprecedented and clearly this is a priority for the campus. So these numbers are big numbers and because they're so big I would venture to say that we all know students that have these needs.
We mentioned Savannah earlier, Savannah who earned that scholarship based purely on her own efforts. She was also a member of all of these groups.
Savannah has been here at the college, she's, she's worked and she's had multiple jobs while going to school.
She has continued to be in the Theatre program. She took out a student loan to continue to be able to do those extra-curricular activities and
when I told Savannah that we were working on this campaign, and that we were looking for testimonials, she
eagerly volunteered hoping that that her experiences might be able to help students who are in a similar, similar way, which I think speaks volumes about Savannah, her commitment to the college, and her past experiences.
Another thing that I learned this summer is that, well, a big, big donors when they're looking to make big donations to an institution like Moorpark,
they do their due diligence, obviously, they start to research the organization, they look at the board, how often the board members are giving, how much the board are giving regularly, and also look at the other stakeholders in that organization, they look at the numbers of our
organization and the people we have involved and what their commitment is to the Foundation.
So right now, if they were to look at our numbers, they'd see about 175 full time faculty, 675 part time faculty,
and our classified professionals, our supervisors or administrators, ultimately, we've got about 1,035 people.
If these investors start to look at our commitment to payroll deduction, now, these will payroll deductions, as of May.
If they were looking at our giving rate, this is what they would see our full time faculty are giving about 10% in the form of payroll deduction, our faculty as a whole,
about 3% and our full campus about 3%. These are tough numbers to look at, but it's the reality and it's known that when these investors look at what our stakeholders are committing to the, to the funds that keep us going,
we need to show a strong support there. So maybe the best way to attack this would be to have maybe a friendly competition between programs between different divisions, maybe, you know, I got to tell you a spoiler alert here, English is winning this battle right now.
Here we have Sydney Sims wearing the crown even animated Sydney, Sydney looks great and a crown. She's got that kind of stature. So to Math and to Comm Studies and all the other programs.
Are we really gonna let Sydney where this crown undisputed? Although, we don't wanna get her too angry because she do she will stick a dragon on us, so we gotta be careful with that.
So what do we do? Where do we go? How do we move forward on this?
The reality is that Julius, and the board, and the executive team for a very long time have been pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill,
and with the work that I've been doing with the Foundation and our all our conversations about the Basic Needs Center. I look at this rock now, and I think
it is enblazoned with the numbers 38, 49, and 16 so when we look at what we can do and where we go forth, what's, what's our call to action here.
Certainly the monthly donations would be helpful, a $50 a month donation leads to a $500 scholarship. I have to believe that all of you know a Savannah. In fact, you probably know, two or three Savannahs,
students that can really use the help and assistance in the form of scholarship, not to mention the support and the pat on the back for the hard work that they've been doing, but this is not just about money. It's not just about giving financial donations.
You can help us recruit board numbers as Subhash has done, connecting us with industry professionals, maybe an industry, industry that you've come from, maybe somebody locally, the parent of a student that you've been working with
who may be interested in helping Moorpark because their students have done so well.
You can continue to make connections to industry partners who are on advisory boards through the industries where we're supplying interns, where we're supplying employees
make those connections with those industry partners and help them come to the Foundation and work with us, whether it's in a cap-
campaign that were about to raise on the 3rd of October, or just coming to talk to us about potentially being a board member.
Participate in the alumni forum as Christina has done. That was a huge help to the Foundation and to our campus. So we will be doing more of those, and we hope to focus on each of the Career Education programs.
And finally, just stay foundation minded. Remember that we do have a foundation at the college. The Foundation is a critical part of we've already heard how many times about
how funding may be difficult in the coming years, not all of our student needs will be met and even with the Basic Needs Center, now we've had to cobble together just the funding to get it up on its feet to, you know, find the space,
fix the space so we can get up and going, so stay foundation minded and realize that you know when we're talking about the face of the Moorpark College Foundation, if we're going to have this cultural shift, if we're going to have this paradigm shift,
we can't continue to do the things that we've always done and expect different results. So if we're going to talk about the face of the Moorpark College Foundation and
how we're raising money, and if we're raising money for scholarships, the faces, we need to think about are these faces. [a picture of faculty and students shows on the screen] And when we talk about the Rising Scholars Program where we talk about
finding students in middle school and helping, helping them through mentoring them through high school, and to Moorpark,
we need to think of these faces, to [a picture of faculty members shows on the screen] help them find a four year degree when we talk, talk, start talking about a Basic Needs Center
helping you to feed students, helping to find hope housing for students who don't have a place to live, helping students with basic needs like fixing their car, just being able to get to school,
the only people who are going to make this happen are these faces. [two pictures of faculty and students show up on the screen] and the reality is October 3 when we start this new campaign,
I will be getting behind that rock and I will be helping to push as hard as I can and I hope that all of you will join us. So the Foundation's been doing a lot of great work and
I hope that we can start to see the Foundation in a different way and realize that the Foundation is not this outside entity, the Foundation is our faculty, our staff,
our administrators, and our students and we can all make a difference. So thank you again for the opportunity to speak today. I've loved working in this position, and I can't wait to start this campaign on October 3.
If you have any questions, there's going to be links, they should all be in the chat room for the different stakeholders and thank you very much.
Mary: Thank you John very much for that. I think we're having a little trouble with copying from the chat room. So what we'll do is we will get that
figure that out for the future, but we will have those links in the transcript that will be posted. We will also can send out an email, which would have some of these links in it that we've been talking about in today's
update. So we will get you the links because I can see several people are looking for the links on how to sign up. So we will
email you those information out and we'll get figure out how to make it so we can copy from, from the chat and get that information out to people. So thank you John. Julius have anything else for us this morning, or this afternoon?
Julius: Yes, I just want to thank John again for such a
in depth and meaningful call to action. Our foundation helps to sustain the institution, and particularly helps to sustain our students,
and it has really kind of always been the little engine that could but hasn't really gotten that umph to get itself to the next level.
You know, in comparison, Ventura College and Oxnard College's foundations are, you know, they are sustained institution with sizable donations and sizable
resource packages, and yes, they do have, you know, swap meets and and other kinds of activities,
but we can also do this and we can have a swap meet because of where we live and where we're located our community does not support that kind of activity, but we can do other things, and part of that is you and I and every single one of us
investing in our foundation.
No one can now see that they have not heard about how they can support the Foundation. So I ask of you to please
give. Please connect folks to our foundation, please refer folks to our foundation so they can support us, if you can't, but we really do
want you to support our foundation every little bit counts, every piece helps to make sure that a student continues through the institution. I appreciate the work that you're each doing. I hope you have a great rest of the week.
Mary: I think Julius is frozen. So you all have a great afternoon and we will look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you.