Author: kmf17

The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations, a nationally recognized program, serves as a resource to the development of nonprofit leadership and community development. The programs offered through the center provide a greater depth of understanding of a topic not only through substantive content grounded in the latest research, but also through application techniques and support that enables participants to apply their knowledge to make meaningful positive changes in their workplaces.

One of these signature initiatives is the Treu-Mart Youth Development Fellowship Program. Since its inception in 2004, more than 10,000 youths have benefited from the work of the fellows.

Treu-Mart Fellows are professionals who:

• See the strengths, resilience and gifts in young people
• Commit themselves to providing youths the support they need to thrive
• Work with middle-school students during out-of-school-time in the Greater Cleveland area
• Seek to continually learn and develop their own skills and talents

Renee Jones is one of almost 150 youth-service professionals who have benefited from the Treu-Mart Fellowship. Read her story:

Renee Jones, who founded a weekly empowerment program for homeless individuals in 1998, saw how meeting just one day a week made a powerful impact on people transitioning from public assistance into a mode of self sufficiency.

However, she wanted to do even more.

With the help of five partners and a group of dedicated volunteers, in 2002 that weekly program grew into the Renee Jones Empowerment Center, which continues to serve Greater Clevelanders in need.

With the empowerment center up and running, Jones focused on a new goal: the next generation. She created a young women’s conference to assist teens ages 14 to 19 in making better life choices. The conference included topics ranging from HIV and AIDS AIDS awareness to the importance of education, and human trafficking awareness and prevention to building healthy self-esteem. Fifty young women attended.

Jones is now working on a similar convention to help young men ages 14-22 strive for success.

“I have always been passionate about helping youths and working with their families to build a stronger family unit,” Jones explained.

Jones said the Treu-Mart Fellowship’s curriculum helped her “learn new techniques and programming ideas. The fellowship was inspirational to me because every session had a great facilitator, lots of information and resources that inspired me to strive even harder to make a positive, life-changing impact on the youths we serve.”

For more information contact Kimyette Finley, 216.368.0521.

Keeping pace with quickly changing demands in the information technology world usually results in a wild ride, akin to navigating a white-water river raft through a Class 6 set of rapids–and 2010 likely will set a prime example.

Lev Gonick, Case Western Reserve University’s vice president for Information Technology Services and chief information officer, says dramatic change is happening, even with campus finances generally tight across the United States. His view is that what seems normal one day rapidly is becoming the “new normal.”

About four years ago, Gonick decided that blogging a look back on each year’s tech developments didn’t set any agenda for change. So he decided to become a seer of the year ahead, a task much more challenging. He blogs about technology at Bytes From Lev in which he has posted “2010: The Year Ahead for IT in Higher Education.”

Indeed, his views have an online following, as evidenced by his Top 10 predictions for 2010 posted Thursday at Inside Higher Education‘s online site.

“The portfolio of managing requirements for operational excellence, customer service and even more selective innovation activity has never been more challenging,” Gonick writes in his blog. Happenings in IT lead him to “portend for a wild river ride ahead in 2010.”

Here are Gonick’s Top 10 developments, each explained in further detail in his blog:

1. Public Cloud Services Go Private
2. The President’s Climate Commitment Meets the Campus Data Center
3. Big Science meets Next Generation CyberInfrastructure
4. Time to Declare the PC Dead and Embrace the Mobile Platform
5. The E-Book Reader Grows up and Goes to Campus
6. Social Networking Finds its Niche at College
7. Course Management Platform Alternatives Make Major Inroads
8. Serious Gaming Gets Serious
9. Mobile Security Hits the College Campus
10. Open Content meets the Open University and the Vision of the Metaversity

Research campuses, such as CWRU, often lead the way to the new normal. To navigate of the developments, any IT wild river rafter had better also reach for a cloud.

Cloud services are a wide range of hosted services and solutions that migrate from a campus data center to hosting environments somewhere on the Internet. The “somewhere” is now thought of as the cloud, which holds much more than e-mail or calendar functions. Many kinds of content, including lectures, performances and student video postings, are now reliably served up in the cloud.

“In 2010, we will likely see the next frontier of these tools, and even turnkey solutions. Expect new private cloud services that allow the same economies of scale associated with public cloud services, yet are protected with a layer of privacy and regulatory ability,” Gonick said.

Billions of dollars in federal stimulus funding for important research at universities in 2010 may spark a national call and strategy for scientific renewal and advancement, leveraging the next generation cyberinfrastructure, Gonick said.

For those on a campus or elsewhere who still are endeared to a PC, the raging river seems headed in a different direction.

“In 2010, it will become more obvious than ever that the PC as we have known it for the past quarter of a century is obsolete,” Gonick said, pointing instead to a “clearly emergent” hardware platform for learning, the mobile smart pad, including smartphones, e-book readers, next generation iPods and “what will likely be a bevy of smart pad entrants in the market in the year ahead.”

For more information contact Marv Kropko, 216.368.6890.

The public is invited to a free dental exam, X-rays and teeth cleaning on Saturday, Jan. 30, during Prophy Day at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine, at Cornell Road and Emergency Drive (University Hospitals of Cleveland). No appointment is needed for the first-come, first-served exams from 9 a.m. to noon.

Walk-in patients must be 18 years or older, not a current patient or someone with full dentures.

The dental exam includes X-rays and cleanings during the volunteer service day organized by dental students from the school’s Student Council.

Patients, who need additional dental work, will receive a $20 voucher to be used for a future appointment at the school’s clinic. Also depending on the type of dental care needed, some patients may qualify for some free or extensively reduced services, said Stephanie Morgan, secretary of the Student Council.

Faculty will oversee the dental students as they perform the cleanings, x-rays and exams.

While patients wait for their exams, the dental school will provide indoor waiting areas with movies.

For information, call 216-368-3864 or 216-368-0450 between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. If the line is busy, the dental school asks that you call back instead of leaving a message. Also visit the dental school Web site for details.

For more information contact Susan Griffith, 216.368.1004.