On Thursday morning in the University Downtown Center (UDC), about 90 Binghamton University administrators, faculty, local businesspeople and community members from the Southern Tier met to discuss how BU and local businesses can collaborate to revitalize the region’s economy.
The talk, which was put on by the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships, is part of a monthly lecture series entitled the SUNY Business and Education Cooperative of the Southern Tier (SUNY BEST). Laura Bronstein, the dean of the College of Community and Public Affairs (CCPA), said the CCPA’s extensive community involvement includes over 38,000 hours of undergraduate and graduate work in community service opportunities and internships.
According to Bronstein, a major success for the department’s student community outreach was social work intervention in local health care systems. Students work with hospital patients in order to try to reduce readmissions. Bronstein said hospital readmissions are usually unnecessary, extremely expensive and put increased pressure on the local healthcare infrastructure.
“After just two hours of social work intervention over the course of 30 days, patients that worked with students had zero hospital readmissions.” Bronstein said.
Besides getting students involved in the local community, the CCPA sponsors and collaborates on projects to enhance educational opportunities and local economies. The CCPA works to distribute grants to provide resources for underfunded schools and to encourage sustainable community development. The focus of the department’s local outreach is collaborative development in which the communities’ concerns and suggestions are central to the decision-making process.
“We are talking with residents and working with people in the community,” Bronstein said. “Everything we’re doing is related and beneficial to the community.”
At the event, there were also representatives from the New York State Mentoring Program, a statewide initiative to connect at-risk fourth grade students with a mentor from local organizations like universities and corporations.
Melinda Sanderson, the upstate director for the program, said that they provide a stable and caring figure in the lives of the state’s impoverished children.
“It provides students with hope,” Sanderson said. “It reduces the school-to-prison pipeline and fosters workforce opportunities and community development.”
Joseph Abu, a 2015 BU alum, attended the forum to research potential master of public administration (MPA) programs to apply to.
“Seeing what the school does in the community through local outreach makes the MPA program here much more exciting,” Abu said.
Donna Fish, an independent consultant in the Southern Tier who looks for people to fill executive positions at universities, said she regularly attends SUNY BEST events. Fish said she enjoyed the event, because she believes improving the economy of the Southern Tier is a priority.
“It’s amazing in terms of the breadth of speakers who were brought in, as well as the community connections that are fostered here,” Fish said. “I’m really impressed.”