Giving Circle Grants Near $70,000

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Jane Shipley (right) presents a $23,000 Women’s Giving Circle grant to the School of Architecture

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas Women's Giving Circle voted to award $69,575 in grants to support five new initiatives that will focus on important issues on and off campus. The awards were presented April 13.

The projects that received funding this year are as follows.

The School of Architecture was awarded $23,000 for the project titled “From Infill Houses to Inclusive 'Green’ Neighborhoods: Housing Arkansas Families in Need.” Habitat for Humanity has partnered with the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, which is an outreach education, research and design center for the School of Architecture. Together, the groups will plan and build a 30-unit “green” neighborhood in Fayetteville. The project, led by Aaron Gabriel, adjunct assistant professor of architecture and assistant director of the UACDC, will be a combination of watershed planning, neighborhood development and conservation development that merges new methods for achieving affordability with exemplary neighborhood design. The Women’s Giving Circle grant will not only enable the stability of 30 Habitat for Humanity families, but it will also establish a model neighborhood for families in need across Arkansas.

“This is How We Do It: Women Empowering Women” is a program developed by the university’s Career Development Center in the Division of Student Affairs, led by Angela Williams. With a grant of $13,500, a new workshop will be added to the series of programs currently offered by the center. The goal of the new workshop is to prepare female college students for the world of work by providing information and success strategies to overcome barriers faced by women in the workplace, and by providing them the mentorship of successful women from various occupations. The program will include one annual networking event with a panel of successful women and four professional development seminars with executive women as speakers each academic year. The seminars will focus on balancing work and family, breaking the glass ceiling, implementing success strategies and overcoming barriers to success.

Third, the department of electrical engineering received $11,575 to establish the Engineering and Math Summer Day Camp for Girls, an engineering recruitment and diversity initiative focused on creating interest in science and engineering in the female population. Targeting female students in Springdale’s middle and junior high schools, the program is designed to increase the number of female students in the Springdale High School pre-engineering program. This program intends to form a pipeline of students that will major in engineering and science disciplines at the University of Arkansas and eventually graduate from the university. It is the goal of the summer camp to reflect the diversity in the Springdale school system with the summer camp attendees. The cornerstones of the summer camp involve hands-on engineering and math educational activities, field trips and mentoring. Susan Burkett, associate professor of electrical engineering, is the lead faculty member for this program.

The department of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences received $11,000. In collaboration with the Woodruff County Literacy Council, “Family Literacy in Woodruff County: Teaching Reading and Computer Literacy to Parents and Their Children” will engage 20 parents - young mothers - who have low reading ability and no computer-literacy skills to develop their own reading, writing and technological proficiencies while they are learning to engage their children in literacy-rich activities and while the children are also learning computer-literacy skills. Families will be given the tools to begin a home-reading program that will prepare the children for success in school and it will help the parents work toward securing G.E.D. certificates and become more employable. This program will be one of the basic elements of two Community Literacy Advocacy offices that will be created in Augusta, Ark., and Pine Bluff, Ark. The project is led by David Jolliffe who holds the Brown Chair in English Literacy.

The final program supported by this year’s Women’s Giving Circle grants is “Meeting the Health Needs of Family Caregivers,” a proposal from Ro DiBrezzo and Barbara Shadden in the Office for Studies on Aging in the College of Education & Health Professions. The money will fund a workshop series for caregivers aimed at improving their physical and emotional health and reducing stress associated with giving care. The series will provide access to and information about a wide variety of local, regional and national resources. Also, caregivers will receive valuable information about coping strategies and improving personal health. Participants will be invited to take part in pre-workshop interviews that will help to guide topic selection for the workshops.

The Women's Giving Circle was created in 2002 by the founding members of the Women and Philanthropy Committee of the Campaign for the Twenty-First Century. Members of the circle consider funding proposals for campus projects on an annual basis and every member of the circle votes on which project or projects will receive funding for the current year.