Missouri’s Ozarks Technical Community College (OTC) has received a $500,000 donation from Emerson, a global technology and engineering company based in St. Louis. The gift is the first of what the OTC Foundation hopes will be $10 million in private donations for the $40 million Center for Advanced Manufacturing.
The center will provide training and education in robotics, mechatronics and automation, along with other modern manufacturing methods. Additionally, it will feature space for companies like Emerson to conduct research and develop new processes and equipment.
The center also will be home to the Emerson Innovation Discovery Lab, which will provide an introduction to advanced manufacturing practices.
Florida
Northwest Florida State College (NWFSC) has announced that the Triumph Gulf Coast Board unanimously voted to approve a grant of $7.1 million to the college to fund the Aviation Center of Excellence (ACE) project. The grant will cover nearly half of the total project costs.
The center will serve as a catalyst for workforce training to support the growing aerospace community in its region. Over the next 10 years, the project anticipates at least 307 students will earn 1,255 Federal Aviation Administration industry-recognized certificates, with 184 to be certified in airframe and powerplant mechanics and 123 to gain professional pilot certificates.
Kansas
Seward County Community College (SCCC) has received a $50,000 donation from the National Beef Packing Company to help with expenses incurred by the coronavirus pandemic. The expenses included the purchases of facemasks, improvements to computer infrastructure and plexiglass partitions.
This is not the first time that SCCC and National Beef have worked together during the pandemic. Just as the outbreak was taking hold, National Beef reached out to the college to help with the cutting of plexiglass into partitions so social distancing could be implemented at the plant’s facilities.
“We were one of the first large beef packing plants to have (the partitions) up and only with the college’s help were we able to do that,” said Dennis Boyles, general manager of the plant in Liberal, Kansas. “We felt the college made a difference for us and we hope we can make a difference for them.”
Massachusetts
Holyoke Community College’s (HCC) student emergency fund got a boost with a $35,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. The funds will help students facing unanticipated financial burdens due to COVID-19.
For the 2019-2020 academic year, 93 percent of student requests to the President’s Student Emergency Fund have come since mid-March. As HCC transitioned to remote learning, nearly $25,000 has been distributed to help students facing income loss and struggling to pay their bills in the midst of the pandemic.
With the Community Foundation grant, the HCC Foundation has now raised $72,480 for the fund since late March when it launched the “TogetherHCC” fundraising campaign in response to the pandemic.
Nebraska
Southeast Community College (SCC) has established a George Floyd Scholarship with the help of a $10,000 donation. The scholarship will assist minority students.
During the recent memorial service for George Floyd, who was killed by police, the president of North Central University in Minneapolis called upon all colleges to start a scholarship in his name.
“It is a call to action. When marches are over and the outrage subsides, there is still work to do. Now is the time,” said Amanda Baron, associate dean of SCC’s arts and sciences division and contact person for the scholarship.
The donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a longtime SCC instructor.
“I think that the Black Lives Matter movement might be the most significant social justice movement since the civil rights movement of the ’60s, and I didn’t want to stand on the sidelines,” he said.
North Carolina
Forsyth Technical Community College will use a $440,000 donation from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust to improve student completion and retention.
“Our student population, in normal times and more so now, faces numerous challenges that are not academic-related, that are barriers to their academic success in the classroom as well as their daily lives,” said Forsyth Tech President Janet Spriggs. “We want our students to be successful and we realize helping students succeed means caring for the whole person and supporting their needs both inside and outside the classroom.”
The funding will allow Forsyth Tech, through its Forsyth Tech Cares program, to provide students with a web of services that includes support both on and off campus through better connections with community resources.
