Green Mosaic of Opportunity
t’s easy to become a bit myopic when filled with vast amounts of information and charged, as faculty are, with providing it in a form and style that can be both digested and retained in just 15 weeks. For these employees, however, the university setting is often not just an educational venue but also the residential community they call home.
The benefits of living in a university town are reflected in neighborhoods that suggest slightly higher than average standards of living, the viability of specialty venues like The Flying Monkey theatre, and many boutique shops and restaurants. Take a closer look at the off-work, off-campus activity in town and you’ll also see the effects of a small but energetic cohort of PSU employees who take that extra step into the community, offering not just dollars from their pockets but also that intellectual capital familiar to the students.
Education-sharing that doesn’t stop at the edge of campus can meet the needs of lifelong learners and organizations within the community, but that often depends on busy faculty who frequently have families and needs of their own. For those who find the time and opportunity, this outreach falls into the category of informal education. It occurs within community-run lecture series, such as those offered to the public through organizations like the Quincy Bog nature center, the Squam Lake Science Café, or town historical societies. Other venues include museums, town clubs like Rotary, and gathering sites like churches and town libraries.
It took several years for that residential community to find me. I was a transplant, as many faculty are, from places far from the slumbering forests and fields of New England. My prior residence was Istanbul, Turkey, and before that it was Colorado and Arizona. So I introduced myself to the New Hampshire community by joining the volunteer groups, like the conservation commission and the Rotary Club, and purposefully did some of my scholarship at the local level.
My field is environmental science, specifically lakes and climate. By contacting the local volunteer lake organizations and finding out what they wanted to know about their lakes, I found a community toehold. Time and a lot of consistent volunteering on my part created a word-of-mouth network that has enabled me to engage in informal education several times a year. Because of my background and my experience with students of all levels, I’ve learned how to switch conference-level language into public speaking, conveying the same information but with terms and formats geared to general audiences.
This outreach is enormously satisfying to me on a personal level. It helps build a community network that includes what I have to offer both intellectually and as a fellow resident. This has gone a long way toward making New Hampshire and Plymouth feel like a permanent home, a place to invest not just my income but also my hopes for the future, including the sustainability of this community. ■ Lisa Doner, PhD, associate professor in environmental science and policy and program coordinator of PSU’s Center for the Environment.
“I personally think it’s important to do this kind of outreach work,” says Professor Eric Hoffman of the meteorology program. “We do a fair bit of it and encourage our faculty to do it.”
In recent months, Hoffman, his colleagues, and PSU students have engaged in numerous regional outreach activities, attending aerospace events in Concord and Laconia, NH; providing library talks in Bristol and North Hampton, NH; and presenting at the Campton Historical Society, the Taylor Community, the New England Fall Astronomy Festival, and Plymouth’s Starr King Fellowship, among others.
Hoffman sees many benefits from these efforts. “They leave positive impressions in local communities regarding our expertise and enthusiasm for the kinds of things we’re studying. It’s also recruitment for PSU and science in general.”