The Center for Educational Outreach (CEO) continues to serve as the campuswide hub for K-12 outreach. CEO leads a coordinated university-level strategy for educational outreach and engagement and significantly increases both the capacity and effectiveness of U-M faculty, campus outreach professionals, and student groups by providing consulting, training, and programs to equip them to work with schools, youth and college-access organizations.
Year Four Progress
This past year, we continued to align the Center for Educational Outreach (CEO) mission and vision with our role as a hub that supports U-M’s commitment to educational outreach and academic excellence through collaborative programs that inform, engage and inspire a diverse community of scholars. As our primary focus, we prioritized the Center’s work and made significant progress in advancing four key areas: (1) supporting communities of practice, (2) developing infrastructure and tools to support outreach, (3) building capacity and consulting and (4) delivery of direct service to schools and students. This also includes responding to the COVID-19 needs of our community partners and cross-campus collaborations.
Fostering Communities of Practice
In Year Four, the Center for Educational Outreach (CEO) continued supporting practice communities through a strategic approach that enabled us to gain insight into optimal strategies for youth outreach and engagement across campus; share best practices and promising practices to increase student educational access and success; spotlight the work of U-M colleagues; and support collaboration and innovation. We directed our efforts to four specific programs:
- Founded more than a decade ago, the University Outreach Council (UOC) hosts an average of six annual events and serves over 240 members in 145 units. This past year, UOC helped strengthen campus units by connecting them with key resources ranging from Risk Management and the Center for Academic Innovation to Wolverine Pathways and the Center for Engineering Diversity & Outreach. Also through this venue, we hosted four webinars on K-12 virtual summer programming for UOC members.
- With over 560 faculty and staff members, the Faculty Forum on Outreach and Engagement creates a space for U-M faculty to network, build community, and share information. In year four, we partnered with the Office of Development and the U-M Library to host a virtual Faculty Workshop on sustainable funding, which was attended by 60+ faculty members. Due to COVID-19, two postponed Faculty Forums will be held virtually in the fall.
- In November 2019, CEO also hosted the 11th Annual Pre-College and Youth Outreach Conference (PCC). With over 3,600 members, PCC is the premier network of pre-college outreach professionals in Michigan. This year’s conference at U-M attracted more than 250 outreach professionals.
Developing Outreach Infrastructure
In year four, CEO partnered with Risk Management to support the Children on Campus (CoC) policy (SPG 601.34) and is now able to provide units with robust reports on their registered programs for minors. We also worked with CoC to streamline and standardize health information for minors university-wide, beginning with the CampDocs pilot program in Fall 2019.
In collaboration with the local software firm InfoReady, CEO continued to develop Youth Hub, a searchable marketplace of educational opportunities available to youth and their families. Currently, Youth Hub displays over 150 different K-12 programs and resources from 40 campus units and also provides a space for campus units to host coronavirus resources. In addition, we partnered with the Center for Academic Innovation to promote the Online Michigan platform with key classes and teach-outs for the K-12 community.
In 2018, CEO joined the Connecting Michigan initiative to develop a statewide database of U-M community partners and showcase the university’s K-12 impact. In Summer 2019, we launched a College Access LibGuide in partnership with the U-M Library and created a physical library space for college access plus an online catalog at ceo-library/librarika.com. This work sparked the creation of Outreach Toolkits, designed to help outreach professionals, high school counselors, and students enhance their college-going communities.
In year four, CEO was tasked with developing a report for the Provost on summer non-credit programs. This report not only highlighted the knowledge gap between K-12 summer programmers and Canvas, but also clarified the scope of COVID-19’s impact on our Children on Campus policy.
To expand our brand and improve user access to our resources and expertise, we also launched a new website, which will be formally introduced in early Fall.
Consulting/Capacity Building
The Center continued working with the DEI Leads Group to identify educational outreach resources in support of their strategic plans. Since 2017, CEO has hosted consultations with 17 schools and colleges and over 33 central units. Through Project Inspire, we have also supported 20 student organizations in their outreach efforts with a networking event and a K-12 Student Engagement Award, presented in collaboration with the Ginsberg Center and the School of Education.
To support and promote meaningful faculty outreach, CEO launched the Faculty Structured Outreach Support Fellowship (Faculty SOS) in 2018. Since then, the Center has awarded 13 grants and worked closely with 23 faculty fellows on U-M’s Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses.
Direct Service
In addition to its many intra-university initiatives, CEO extends the statewide reach of U-M through various programs:
- Michigan College Advising Corps (MCAC) places recent U-M graduates in 14 underserved high schools across the state to work as full-time college advisors, with the goal of increasing the number of low-income, first-generation, and otherwise underserved students entering and completing higher education. In year four, MCAC launched two new partnerships in Southwest Detroit and hosted virtual events for students and their families.
- Wolverine Express (WE) enables faculty, staff, and students to share their college-going stories at area high schools. Since 2015, the program has brought 319 faculty and staff to 24 schools, reaching 11,786 students. This past year, we sponsored presentations at three high schools before COVID-19 forced cancellations of all school visits.
- Campus Visits is a U-M campus visitation program for students from underserved schools which in a typical year hosts 60 visits from 2,500 middle and high school students.
- College Day is a state-supported program that offers two major pre-college programs for both middle school and high school students from 17 underserved schools in Detroit and surrounding communities, impacting over 1000 students. In year four, we hosted 10 campus visits for 589 students. Due to COVID-19, more than 20 additional campus visits were postponed and summer programming shifted to Zoom webinars.
- The Watson A. Young Scholarship enables Michigan middle and high school students whose families make less than $65K to participate in summer programs at UM-Ann Arbor. This year, we awarded six Watson Scholarships for the Michigan Math and Science Scholars Program, Biotechnology Camp, and the Computational Biology Camp.
Responsibility: Office of Educational Outreach