Capstone courses help community

The goal of Portland State’s capstone courses, required for all undergraduates, is to integrate learning with local community involvement. Bringing students out into the community is the foundation of PSU’s motto: “Let knowledge serve the city.”

Two of this winter term’s capstone classes are doing just that. The courses Marketing for Non-Profits and Inside Out Prison Exchange are taking students beyond the walls of the classroom to create opportunities and effect change.

Led by professor JoAnn Siebe, this term’s Marketing for Non-profits class is working directly with Portland Global Initiatives, a local nonprofit that, according to its website, focuses on increasing awareness of global water issues. PGI has worked with impoverished countries to sink wells that provide villages with much needed access to water.

The focus of this term’s class is to help market and promote PGI’s annual Walk for Water event on March 28. The walk and 5k run will simulate what more than one billion people in the world are required to do to access water–walk more than three miles.

Students have been working on a number of projects for the event: creating social media awareness, outreach for water conservation in local schools and putting together educational kiosks to be featured at the finish line at OMSI’s Eastbank Esplanade. They have gone everywhere from grocery stores to local gyms to educate people on water conservation and register participants for the event.

Andy Davis, a marketing associate for PGI, works to help African communities sink wells, which eliminates the long journey to access water. “That journey typically falls to women and children, which means that they cannot access employment or education,” Davis said. “We take that for granted. This gives people an opportunity to walk in their shoes—it’s a visceral way for people to understand and empathize.”

Jacqueleen Rae Bower, a senior communication major, works on the social media team. She said that the collaboration between PGI and PSU is a “win-win” situation: PGI gets help in promoting its cause, and PSU students get invaluable experience. Bower said that if she were to build a nonprofit, she would follow this collaborative model. “I would absolutely do the same,” she said. “I would go to the university where students go out into the real world to work. It is so intelligent.”

The Inside Out Prison Exchange capstone, led by professor Amy Spring, works to change how the prison system structure has separated women and their children. This term’s class is hosting a Toy Drive, which ends on March 11, to benefit the Coffee Creek Women’s Prison in Wilsonville, the only women’s prison in Oregon.

“The goal of the program is to facilitate sustained and healthy interaction between women and their children through the period of the mother’s incarceration,” Spring said. Maintaining the mother-child bond has been shown to help women from returning to prison upon release.” Spring added that the bond also helps “the children avoid future jail time.”

Spring, who has taught the capstone course for the last five years, said, “We try to shepherd forth a program or activity that will improve the living experience of the women living at Coffee Creek.”

Senior English major Nathan Robnett-Conover is a student in the class and said that the current prison system and laws give little room for women who have been incarcerated: “The Adoption and Safe Families Act was signed in 1997. It requires, among other things, that the state is required to move to terminate parental rights if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. Meanwhile, Measure 11, a law enacted by Oregon voters in 1995, dispenses minimum sentencing usually above 15 months, for many violent crimes,” Robnett-Conover wrote in an email.

This term’s Inside Out Prison Exchange Capstone students face tough challenges, but while Robnett-Conover acknowledges that the bureaucracy has been difficult to maneuver the officials have been largely helpful. Some of the student projects have even been inside the prison.

“We are updating resource manuals in the prison ‘resource room’ so that inmates have some knowledge about resources that are available to them in regards to their children. Because of a new law, women risk losing their parental rights after around 14 months,” Robnett-Conover said. Additionally, he said that students have been “painting a mural on the visiting room wall to make it friendlier to children,” and “getting toys and board games for the visiting room.”

Students of both capstone courses will be able to see the culmination of their hard work in the form of both the Walk for Water fundraiser and the Toy Drive helping the Women’s Prison, which both finish prior to the end of Winter term.

PSU faculty, students and staff can register for the Walk for Water event at worldwaterdaypdx.com and can donate toys for the Inside Out Prison Exchange in a bin near the information desk on the first floor of Smith Memorial Student Union.