RWU connecting students with community needs

Literacy Volunteers of Washington County is a small nonprofit in Westerly with two big problems: lack of brand identity and a website with limited capacity to upload updates and photographs.
Enter, faculty and students at Roger Williams University in Bristol who will create a logo for the nonprofit and modernize the outdated website. With limited resources, it hasn’t been possible for staff to do these things, said Ruth Tureckova, Literacy Volunteers’ executive director.
“It is phenomenal for a small nonprofit to have this sort of expertise available to us,” Tureckova said. “For 31 years we’ve had no logo, you can just never get to it. Now we can get to it.”
The project is one of 27 to be started this academic year through RWU’s Community Partnerships Center. The center provides help with projects to nonprofit organizations, municipalities, government agencies and low- and moderate-income communities in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts.
Students, meanwhile, gain real-world experience within the disciplines they are studying, said CPC Director Arnold Robinson.
With more than 50 projects completed to date, the work can involve everything from market research or environmental-sustainability planning to such current projects as revitalizing a roof garden at Sophia Academy in Providence, a school for girls at risk for repeating a family cycle of poverty.
In its third year, the CPC had 90 applications from groups, communities and nonprofits, for the fall semester, said Robinson. He and Project Coordinator Stephany Hessler selected 27 projects to pursue.
Tureckova applied in April and was notified in May that her two projects have been approved. She met recently with a class of 25 students who will work on the website and five other students who will work on the logo branding and design, she said.
This year’s crop of projects broadens the CPC’s scope of work to more than 30 disciplines and expands its presence regionally with new nonprofit partners in Massachusetts and Cape Cod. One such project is a feasibility study for possible rehabilitation of a farmhouse into an office and education center at the Barnstable Land Trust in Marstons Mills, Mass., said Jaci Barton, the private nonprofit’s executive director and land-protection specialist. The trust bought Fuller Farm, a 23-acre property with a farmhouse, last November, she said.
The information that the graduate students and their professor develop this fall will be used to determine whether to proceed with the project, a million dollar proposition that would require fundraising, Barton said.
In its first two years, the CPC led 50 community projects with 35 partner organizations, allowing more than 500 RWU students to gain real-world experience and job-ready skills.
Since then, the CPC has enabled project participants to use students’ accomplishments as springboards to launch new strategic plans, attract donors, increase funding or apply for grants to support new initiatives.
Last spring, for example, business students at Roger Williams helped the town of Bristol determine if transforming its historic Naval Armory building into a maritime welcome center for boaters was financially feasible and economically beneficial. The students found the project sound. The town recently landed an $860,000 boating infrastructure grant to fund the creation of the maritime center, Robinson said.
This year, six students will also study historic documents accumulated at the Mount Hope Farm in Bristol, identify, organize and archive them. The documents pertain to the purchase and organization of the Mount Hope lands owned by the Haffenreffer family, said Mount Hope Executive Director Jennifer Bristol.
“I’m excited,” Bristol said. “We’re a very small team and a nonprofit. It’s a national historic site. … I’m glad we can engage Roger Williams [University] students in that effort.” •

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