Invitation letter

My LEEP Community Engagement class meets on campus on Friday, October 16. Your [group/organization/project/course] is an excellent example of community engagement. Would you be available to meet with 3-5 students, at 1:00-2:00 pm on that day?

I’d like the students to do a mini-field trip in which they visit a campus group engaged in some form of community work. They will ask some basic 5W questions such as:

• Who: What individuals, organization, and community groups are involved?
• What: How does this project/group engage with the communities? How is the community’s voice included?
• When: How long has this work been underway? How often does it work with the community?
• Where: Where is the work done?
• Why: What has been accomplished? What are plans for the future?

The class meets all day. I’m thinking now that a field trip after lunch, followed by discussion and reports back in our Illini Union meeting room would work best for us. Would you be available as a field trip site, to meet with 3-5 students? They would come with questions such as those above, plus their own, based on their own positions as librarians, museum educators, teachers, community workers, researchers, etc. They would also bring cameras to photograph the space, objects, and people, only with permission of course. These would be used in their report to the class. The primary activity may be simply talk, with you or your colleagues or students. But if you have any kind of brief, hands-on activity to demonstrate the work, that would be an excellent addition.

Please let me know by next Monday (October 5) if you’re willing and available to do this, or before then if you have any questions.

Best, Chip

Field trip sites

• Illinois State 4-H Office, 1902 Fox Drive, Suite A, Champaign, 333-0910
  • Lisa Bouillion Diaz
  • 4-H is a community of young people across America who are learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills
  • hands-on activities for youth
  • connect universities, schools, community
  • short drive/busCommunity Informatics Initiative
• Youth Community Informatics, 211 LIS
• Books to Prisoners, at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, in the historic downtown Urbana post office building at 202 S. Broadway Ave at Elm Street. The UC-IMC is a grassroots organization committed to using media production and distribution as tools for promoting social and economic justice in the Champaign County area. It fosters the creation and distribution of media, art, and narratives emphasizing underrepresented voices and perspectives and promote empowerment and expression through media and arts education.
• Orpheum Children’s Science Museum, 346 N Neil St. Champaign, 352-5895
• Community Informatics Initiative
  • Meet Sharon Irish at 350 LIS; walk to the Main Library and disassemble the bulletin board outside of the history library; the artist Bonnie Fortune will meet there at 1:30.
  • http://www.letsremake.info/
  • She will talk about the other related activities and items that we put up on the board.