Community Building

Community Building

Community Development Plan                 

Every hall director team is responsible for developing a Community Development Plan (CDP) for her/his area. The CDP will be submitted to the area’s senior coordinator for review, and utilized as an ongoing measure to ensure that intentional and constant attention is being given to the overall development of students and their residential experience. The CDP will provide direction and focus to the hall and will be a living document that can be evolved as needed over the course of each semester. In many ways the CDP is the map of what the hall plans to accomplish. Through effective leadership from hall directors to RA staff and hall council leaders, the activities and initiatives planned for the CDP should be attainable and measurable.

One component of the CDP involves hall directors developing a plan for their hall that includes intentional hall programmatic efforts in six focus areas: 1) Academic, 2) Diversity, 3) Leadership, 4) Service, 5) Wellness, and 6) BGSU Spirit. Hall directors will be provided with learning outcomes for each of these areas, and required to develop a curriculum for the semester that shows how they will work with RA staff, hall councils, and students to meet the outcomes. In essence, activities will be planned and facilitated by staff and hall council under the direction of hall directors, assessment will be completed to gauge the participants’ involvement and learning, and results reported. Some required activities will be included for each focus area, and hall directors will also have discretion regarding other activities that they wish to see facilitated in their hall and that will meet the needs of students in the area. RAs will be divided into teams by hall directors to work collaboratively on the focus areas, and be the facilitators of these building-wide initiatives under the supervision of hall directors.  The focus area of Diversity is display below.

Diversity (from CDP)         

Required:

• Celebrate at least two diverse holidays
• Bring the Diversity Peer Educators (DPEs) in to the hall for programming
• Support events both internal and external to the residence halls and in the community (Black Issues Conference, Tunnel of Oppression, Taste of February, OMA events, etc.)

Learning Outcomes: 

Residential students who participate in ________________will be able to identify different forms of diversity as it relates to a range of social and cultural characteristics as demonstrated by program evaluation.

Residential students who participate in ________________will be able to define and describe social justice and provide 2 examples of injustice in a local and global context as demonstrated by program evaluation.

Residential students who complete/attend  _______________________ will be exposed to one cultural “experience” different from their own through various forms of reflection.