Degrees of Impact

At Metro State, community engagement is both an old story and a new one. Opened in 1965 as a place for people to launch fresh dreams or polish tarnished ones, Metropolitan State College of Denver has by its very nature served the community by offering first—and second—chances to locals anxious to refashion their lives through education.

On the precipice of a 45th
anniversary—fall 2010 will mark
45 years since students first
trundled into the Forum
Building at 14th and Cherokee—
Metro State numbers more
than 64,000 in its alumni rosters,
almost 80 percent of whom have
stayed in and made contributions
to Colorado’s economy as
teachers, nurses, police
detectives, journalists,
artists, pilots, nonprofit
administrators,
hoteliers, and
in countless
other professions.

Metro State, too, has
through outreach,
word-of-mouth and its
urban location
attracted more than
its share of the
underserved from
veterans to students
of color. Every year Metro State welcomes more than 5,300 undergraduates of color (about 25 percent of total enrollment) to Auraria.

High-touch scholarship programs such as the College Assistance Migrant Program for seasonal agricultural workers and their families, Metro State’s Summer Bridge initiative, and the Metro State Scholars Program targeted primarily to first-generation college students have helped hundreds of people earn baccalaureate degrees and develop professional careers that they may not otherwise been able to attain.

Preparing professional community leaders
Academically Metro State has taken a leadership role in community involvement by launching the Rocky Mountain region’s first—and largest—academic program to prepare people for managerial and executive roles in the nonprofit arena. Established in 1974, the Center for Nonprofit Organization Administration has poured more than 1,000 graduates into the workforce, people who have gone on to establish nonprofits, direct organizations and become foundation execs.

“We are the leader in undergraduate nonprofit education,” says Kelly Felice, the director of nonprofit studies, assistant professor of human services and program graduate. “When students leave us with a bachelor’s degree they are well prepared to enter the nonprofit workforce at the mid-management level or higher.”

Other programs such as High Risk Youth Studies (developed collaboratively with the Denver Juvenile Court and the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division), Addiction Studies, Domestic Violence Counseling and even Criminal Justice have flooded the marketplace with people who are specially trained to give back.

An urban land grant institution
In spite of the above street cred, Metro State is looking to be more intentional—as higher education professionals are wont to say—about its community engagement.

When Metro State President Stephen Jordan took the reins of office in 2005, he outlined a vision of the College as an “urban land grant institution,” a post-modern incarnation of the agricultural land-grant schools established by the Morrill Act of 1862. But instead of offering applied “agricultural” training, Metro State would deliver an urban, 21st-century education, helping students prepare for engaged citizenry and jobs relevant in the new millennium; Denver and the metroplex would function as a living learning laboratory, a place where students could experience both the business and social problems they would encounter post-college.

Moreover, the College itself would work even harder to cross Speer Boulevard, embedding its expertise, students and resources more deeply in the community than it already has.

“We can build shared mission elements,” Jordan said, “so that our teaching mission simultaneously promotes economic development, fosters social cohesion with individuals and groups and provides a locus for cultural vitality.”

Suddenly the word “metropolitan” in the College’s name resonated more broadly.

Today, this vision is becoming a reality. In June, Metro State established a Center for Urban Connections, a clearinghouse where students, faculty and staff can access volunteer opportunities, find service-related internships and develop service-learning experiences. The center has two directors, Matthew D’Agostino, who will handle the functional operations of the office and work with students, and Randi Smith, a psychology professor who will work more closely with faculty on developing community-based learning courses that involve both nonprofit and commercial enterprises.

Sitting at the table in the center’s conference room in the Tivoli, the newly minted Urban Connections directors know that their most profound initial challenge will be to uncover and document the ad hoc relationships and projects that already exist between faculty, staff, students and the businesses, government entities and nonprofits in the Mile High City.

“Metro State’s faculty, students and staff are already involved,” D’Agostino says. “We’re trying to find out who’s doing what with whom and why, so we know where our strengths are and where we need to build.”

“We want to see community engagement infused more widely across campus,” Smith adds, “not requiring it necessarily, but building on relationships we have and assisting faculty and staff in creating new ones.”

This fall, the College debuted a new advertising campaign, variations on the theme—“Degrees of Impact.” The idea being that a degree from Metro State profoundly affects a student’s life but also reverberates throughout the larger community as students begin contributing economically, socially and culturally. The campaign, too, has a self-referential component, evoking the effect professors and Metro State staff have community-wide as volunteers, experts and experiential educators.

The stories below represent only a smattering of the deep personal and institutional relationships fostered by some of the people who have helped build this populist urban college. These are the kinds of degrees of impact, which are finally being counted.

The Professor

AnnJanette Alejano-Steele is bringing the scourge of human trafficking out of the shadows through education and volunteerism with the Polaris Project. On a temperate afternoon in August, 20-some students trickle into a classroom in the Plaza Building on the Auraria Campus. It’s late in the day and some look tired under the fluorescent lights. A student assistant in blue ballet flats writes these words on the chalkboard:

“Child Soldiers. Organ Trafficking. Domestic Servitude.”

While she does this, students reflexively check their cell phones or send a quick text messages. Two young women share a syllabus across a row of desks.


Listen as AnnJanette Alejano-Steele, professor of women's studies and psychology, speaks about human trafficking in Colorado. The class is Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery. Taught by AnnJanette Alejano-Steele, professor of women’s studies and psychology, the course is Steele’s brainchild and a product of her ongoing passion to shed light on this little-known issue.

Alejano-Steele began discussing human trafficking years ago, but got more involved personally as she looked to fulfill her faculty service commitment to the community. To learn more about human trafficking on a local level, she turned to the Colorado chapter of the anti-trafficking organization, the Polaris Project.

As she dug more deeply into it, Alejano-Steele saw how differently her life might have unfolded had her family been less privileged. When her parents immigrated to the United States from the Philippines, they did so as educated people; Alejano- Steele’s father was a doctor who trained in New York. Growing up in Philippine villages, however, they knew the sex trade existed, that young girls pressed into work as maids to help their families could end up as prostitutes in the cities.

“Had they not had the opportunities they were afforded,” Alejano-Steele says, “who knows where I would be? It’s sobering. The issue called me. As a professor I had the skills and the experiences where I could help talk about the issue within this local movement.”

Alejano-Steele learned too, that human trafficking isn’t just about the import and export of sex slaves across borders. Local runaways, disaffected and abused teens are vulnerable to pimps who know how to brainwash children and youth into becoming sex workers.

Because the laws are so young— Colorado passed its anti-trafficking law in 2006—the police, first responders, victims’ advocates, indeed, the vast spectrum of human service providers, educators and law enforcement professionals need training on the differences between prostitution, human trafficking, smuggling and immigration violations.

Alejano-Steele has made the study and dissemination of information about human trafficking her “heart work” and she estimates that she spends as much as 20 hours each week on volunteer efforts related to it. In addition to educating students in her classes, Alejano-Steele trains law enforcement officials and victims’ service providers how to recognize the crime and help survivors begin to heal.

She’s chaired the victims’ services committee for the Colorado Network to End Human Trafficking (CO NEHT), worked CO NEHT’s hotline, helped Metro State students who are trafficking survivors, and through Polaris Project Colorado, done countless trainings in police and sheriff’s departments, school groups, women’s organizations and residential treatment centers. Colorado’s Polaris chapter, she says, has trained more than 7,000 people.

“It is happening here to kids born in the U.S.,” she says. “We live in a culture that demands cheap labor and cheap sex. Until that demand goes away, this will happen.”

The Student
Metro State senior Lavanda Conner is a woman with a mission—and a mission statement. As the founder of 180 House, a nonprofit transitional housing and support program for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, she wants to help struggling veterans successfully reenter society.


Lavanda Conner’s 180 House is named for her goal of helping troubled veterans turn their lives around 180 degrees. Conner’s interest in veterans began when her brother Sgt. Robert H. Conner was deployed to Iraq not long after 9/11. His stories about soldiers who never received care packages moved her to begin organizing students in her Metro State classes to donate goods and ship packages to her brother’s outfit in Iraq. Armed with insider knowledge from her brother about must-have items in the desert, Conner and her classmates collected Oreos (“They were like gold over there,” she says. “The soldiers would gamble with Oreos!”), eye drops, wet wipes, trail mix and plastic bags.

Every month Conner and her fellow students shipped huge boxes to Iraq, which her brother then broke down and sent to soldiers he knew weren’t receiving anything.

But Conner wanted to do more. “I always knew I wanted to have my own business,” she says. Instead of a commercial business, however, Conner investigated ways she could help troubled veterans turn their lives around 180 degrees.

When her advisor mentioned AmeriCorps UCAN Serve program, which offers students scholarships ranging from $1,000 to $2,362 for community-based volunteer work or internships, Conner jumped at the chance. In its third year at Metro State, UCAN Serve now has 387 students working as student teachers in high-needs areas, doing nursing clinicals in urban hospitals, counseling drug and alcohol clients, helping arts organizations and assisting underprivileged people with their taxes. Conner signed on for 300 hours with a small organization, Second Chance Home, which provides transitional housing and support for women leaving prison.

The relationship ended up being a win-win for both. While Second Chance Home had its operational “house” in order, it needed administrative assistance, which Conner provided by helping revamp the group’s business plan, writing policies and procedures and shepherding them through the 501(c) 3 nonprofit tax-exempt application process.

Conner’s UCAN Serve placement in turn gave Conner a model for 180 House and seed money for her M.B.A., which she hopes to earn at Metro State if the College, which recently received authorization to offer master’s degrees, develops an M.B.A. program soon. “The things I’m initiating here (at 180 House),” she says, “are based on having helped these women reintegrate back into the family, find jobs and follow the rules. It’s the same thing everyone faces when homeless.”

The 180 House in fact is actually three restored Victorians at 18th and High Streets. When it opens in late fall, one home will house women, one men, the third will provide office space, serving 30 people.

Conner graduates in December. She says, “That’s when the real work will begin.”

The Class

“Something of consequence” is how Howard Flomberg describes his students’ work to fund a well for the Kenyan village of Kambiri. Five years ago when veteran Metro State affiliate professor Howard Flomberg (’74) started teaching the 4000-level Management Decision Analysis course, he wanted to do more than lecture about business theory.

“By the time management majors take this class, they’ve had three years of theory,” Flomberg says. “I wanted to get them out to solve problems in the real world, in settings where they could fail and recover and deal with that in a safe haven environment. I didn’t know it was service learning.”

Since then, students from Flomberg’s classes have worked on projects for Metro State, Denver Public Schools, National Jewish Hospital, Service Corps of Retired Executives, Jewish Family Services, the Equinox Theater Company and Support Africa Empowerment International (SAFI), among others.

Running the class like a consulting company, Flomberg divides students into teams of four. Each team receives a problem, which they are asked to dissect and solve. On Mondays, the class meets to discuss new topics; on Wednesdays they give status reports.

“Within two class sessions,” he says, “they are feeding each other ideas.”

The class culminates with student presentations to their clients.

Projects have run the gamut from untangling untenable business processes to developing a fundraising plan—and then enacting it—to pay for a well in the small Kenyan village of Kambiri for SAFI.

Barbara Novick, (’01), who chairs SAFI, served as the de facto “client” on this project. Founded by Kenyan native and Metro State Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies Lucas Nandih Shamala, the volunteer organization, which seeks to empower disadvantaged rural Africans, needed fundraising assistance for the immediate goal of funding a well. Novick asked Flomberg’s class to use their expertise to help.

Two teams went to work. One team planned and mounted a concert and silent auction; the other group organized a cocktail party benefit. Together they raised about $3,000, enough to help the Kambiri villagers build their well.

Novick, who continues to “hire” Flomberg’s Management Decision Analysis “consultants” each semester, says the collaboration is a “win-win.” “If the people can’t have clean water,” she says, “they have nothing. With clean water, the village can have good health and the women can cook good food. And Dr. Flomberg’s students can put what they’ve learned to work.”

“This is something of consequence,” Flomberg says, of the well’s construction. “These women now have hours every day, which they can use to do something for their families. The students’ involvement has been massively effective. They see the good of what they are doing and they dive into it.”

Full Circle
Six years ago, Justin Merow lay in a coma at Aurora’s Spalding Rehabilitation Hospital. In the aftermath of a devastating car accident—Merow had been drinking and driving when he slammed into a light post that crushed the roof of his car—doctors told his mother to expect anything.

Justin Merow: “I want to create a culture where helping each other is normal…” Two-and-a-half-weeks later, though, Merow came to, paralyzed on his left side with a tracheotomy in his neck and feeding tube in his stomach. As he recuperated, the 19-year-old Merow decided to embrace the positive lessons he learned as a boy living at Boys Hope, a residential program through which he attended Regis Jesuit High School.

“Not everybody survives that kind of thing,” he says of his accident. “I realized there has to be something more for me.”

Today, Merow is a senior at Metro State on pace to complete two bachelor of science degrees in May, one in marketing, the other in management. He is the founder of an on-campus organization, the Mile High Divine Club, dedicated to promoting Auraria’s service groups, arts organizations and spiritual clubs, and has incorporated a business, Divine, LLC, to promote artists and organizations with positive messages. He raps under the name JSmiley, serves as the president of the College’s Black Student Alliance, volunteers regularly for Boys Hope and is doing a UCAN Serve stint at PlatteForum, a youth arts organization.

“I come from a culture that doesn’t recognize going to school as a way to succeed,” he says. “Boys Hope allowed me to escape that mentality and get another perspective.”

Now Merow wants to spread positivity society-wide. “I want to create a culture where helping each other is normal, where you don’t need to have a Boys Hope to succeed.”

Like Merow, first-year English major Eddie Orozco, a PlatteForum alum, looks to give back. As a sophomore at North High School, Orozco became a PlatteForum ArtLab intern, mounting original plays and creating public art under the guidance of visiting artists. This summer prior to starting classes at Metro State, Orozco and other ArtLab youth worked alongside Metro State communication design students to create an exhibition of billboards on the theme of tolerance, called “Create! Don’t Hate.” Visitors to the exhibit voted on their favorite billboard, which and the women can cook good food. And Dr. Flomberg’s students can put what they’ve learned to work.”

Working with the student designers from Metro State “was cool,” Orozco says. “They were open; they knew what they were talking about with Photoshop and Illustrator. They knew their stuff and were really cool” about sharing information.

Attending Metro State on a full scholarship, Orozco has been invited to serve on the PlatteForum board. “Since I’m in college now,” he says, “I wanted to give up my spot (at ArtLab) for someone else. Being on the board gives me an opportunity to be a part of it and give something back, instead of being a beneficiary.”

And, it’s that dynamic between receiving and giving, that engaged citizenry is all about.