Medaille College has announced that The John R. Oishei Foundation will provide $400,000 in grant funding over three years to support Project EQUIP, a comprehensive program focused on community-based learning for undergraduate students at Medaille’s Buffalo Campus.
In the 2006–07 academic year, Medaille implemented a pilot learning community program for provisionally admitted students, who make up 35% of incoming classes on average. Within just two years of implementation, the freshman-to-sophomore retention rate of this group increased from 56% to 69%, with measured levels of academic engagement rising to surpass selected peer institutions, based on the National Survey of Student Engagement.
“One of the major purposes of the learning communities is to offer students an opportunity to interact with the Western New York community,” says Alan Bigelow, Ph.D., professor of humanities. “In my classes, students wrote a series of research papers on topics including Attica prison, Love Canal, Wegmans, the Zebra mussel problem in Lake Erie, the Buffalo Zoo, the Mayoral race, and the Science Museum. They are venturing out into the community, a community which some of them were born in, and others are seeing for the first time.”
On the strength of these early results and with the support of the undergraduate faculty, Medaille expanded and improved the learning community program to include all incoming undergraduate students in September 2009. By the end of the fall semester, over 300 first-year students had completed collaborative, community-based projects that ranged from documenting narratives of senior citizens at the Northwest Buffalo Community Center, to working with the Niagara/Buffalo Riverkeepers to examine the long-term consequences of Buffalo’s industrial heritage.
“As students connect to the story and the institutions of Buffalo, their creative energies and talents, as well as those of their teachers, are brought to bear on important local issues,” explains Brad Hollingshead, Ph.D., associate dean for foundational learning and assessment. “The first-year learning communities—with our unique twist of using them to integrate academic and civic learning—not only help students persist and succeed academically; they also lay a foundation for the kinds of collaborative, interdisciplinary work that our students will need to be able to do once they graduate.”
“The John R. Oishei Foundation is pleased to be a partner with Medaille College as it launches Project EQUIP. Medaille is to be commended for its work to build partnerships and engage students in problem solving that will benefit them and the wider community. Civic engagement will not only enhance their learning experience at Medaille, but will build the leaders of tomorrow for the Western New York region,” states Robert D. Gioia, president of The John R. Oishei Foundation.
Expansion of this program, under the title Project EQUIP, will combine co-curricular activities, academic courses, internships and senior capstones that challenge students to explore their community, to question their roles within the community, to understand their academic discipline in the context of community needs, to involve themselves, and to produce new knowledge, while completing a four-year degree.
With The Oishei Foundation’s generous funding, Medaille’s Project EQUIP connects college students to the city of Buffalo and helps to serve common goals between Medaille and The Oishei Foundation by enhancing the capacity of higher education to contribute to economic and social renewal in Buffalo and Western New York.
About The John R. Oishei Foundation
The John R. Oishei Foundation strives to be a catalyst for change to enhance economic vitality and the quality of life for the Buffalo Niagara region. The Foundation was established in 1940 by John R. Oishei, founder of Trico Products Corporation.
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