On March 28, Fond du Lac and Tri- County Boys and Girls Club teens in grades 5-11 were excited to meet and learn with Moraine Park Criminal Justice students!

Tri-County Boys and Girls Club Teen Futures Coordinator Carrie Govek said, “Our teens were given this great opportunity to participate in an interactive presentation done by the Criminal Justice students and their instructors at Moraine Park. They learned about criminal justice careers and professionalism.  They even got to try handcuffs, fingerprinting, and searching for contraband in a jail cell! What a fun learning experience for all those who participated!  A big thank you to the Moraine Park Criminal Justice students and their Instructors Joan Barfield and Jeff Gruss for providing our teens with a chance to learn about this important career.”

The Dream Big project started last year with Boys and Girls Club of Fond du Lac teens learning more about the over 100 careers available through MPTC.  This year, Dream Big is expanding throughout the MPTC district to include Boys and Girls Club of the Tri-County Area (Berlin, Green Lake County) and Boys and Girls Club of Washington County (West Bend).  This is a great community partnership opportunity for Moraine Park students to showcase their careers and practice service learning  and for Boys and Girls Club members to get excited about career choices!

Congratulations to Moraine Park students and staff on a huge accomplishment!

As of today, a total of 4,000 community impact hours have been logged by Moraine Park students and employees. This amounts to approximately $97,000 in economic impact throughout the MPTC District and surrounding areas. Needless to say, Moraine Park is giving back, in big ways!

For more information on service learning, or how you can become involved, visit morainepark.edu/service-learning.

Nursing students in Instructor Michele Mengert’s Mental Health and Community Concepts course recently completed their community advocacy projects as part of our fall, 2018 service learning opportunities. Michele said, “students are purposefully working to learn community oriented nursing. We want to target prevention as a priority. Nurses need to understand how to advocate for specific populations of people and have knowledge of the resource programs in your community that you can partner with to help your patients.”

This semester 20 students spent over 100 hours researching and collaborating with community partners on projects such as drug free communities, family resource centers, Alzheimer’s, poverty, mental health, breast cancer, obesity, domestic violence, sexual assault, and more. Students formulated detailed advocacy plans to address how a nurse could help a community identify and address these issues, providing education, awareness, advocacy and resources. Students gathered data to help determine strength and weaknesses in their own communities. Project presentations were held on December 21. Congratulations on all of this great work on important community issues!

For more information on Moraine Park, visit morainepark.edu.