Blog Action Day: Community Colleges Can Help End Poverty

Today, the Community College of Vermont is participating in Blog Action Day 2008. This annual nonprofit event aims to unite people around the world on one issue on the same day. This year's topic is poverty. Messages from several members of the CCV community will be posted here throughout the day. The following post is submitted by Beth Kuhn, a Project Director at the United Way of Chittenden County.

Community colleges have not one but three unique and powerful roles to play in ending poverty:

• They can support low-income students by forging connections with local resources to enable students to stay on track – transportation, child care, housing, etc. They can enhance that support by bringing resources on-site, offering direct assistance either in partnership with local nonprofits or by adding advisors who specialize in addressing the typical non-academic barriers to staying in school.
  
• They can support low-income employees though innovative management practices to better meet their needs, such as emergency loan programs and worksite-based barrier support like that described above for students.
  
• They can assure that they provide visible leadership in the community on the importance of ending poverty. They can and should be at the table on community-wide efforts in all their roles – as educator and employer. And they can use the classroom to be sure that successful and effective individual and community strategies to end poverty and build prosperity are taught and shared with others.

Let’s all work to engage the community college system in the important goal of building prosperous individuals, businesses and communities!