Since late spring semester when CoA received its first shipment of Chromebooks, the library staff and faculty have been working with the administration to check out computers for student use. At the start of the fall semester CoA’s library was the first in the district to roll out curbside distribution of library resources. Staff are coming in 3 days a week and have checked out nearly 100 Chromebooks to students so far.
The summer of 2020 brought renewed attention to the violence continually perpetrated against the BIPOC communities in the United States. In response to the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Aubrey, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, the California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley challenged every college in the system to take action against structural racism through his detailed Call to Action. And the Peralta Community College District has taken this call seriously.
Laney College, as a member of the third statewide cohort of the Program Mapper Project —a partnership between software developer Concentric Sky, the California Community College Chancellors Office and Laney College – completed its commitment this summer to create and publish program maps on its website.
College of Alameda Vice President of Student Services Dr. Tina Vasconcellos will receive a commendation letter and presentation for the partnership she secured with World Central Kitchen and Eat.Learn.Play. on behalf of College of Alameda and our students. To date the program at College of Alameda has distributed 67,200 hot meals, 4,680 produce boxes and raised $722,800 for members of our community.
Over 100 BCC faculty, staff, and administrators came together for a day of professional learning centered around “Building Community and Advancing Equity and Racial Justice.” The event took place on August 21, 2020 and began with community-building activities first thing in the morning, followed by a greeting from the shared governance leads. Lasana Hotep, anti-racist educator and Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging at the University of California, Berkeley, delivered a rousing and informative keynote presentation on the subject, “Antiracism is a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Core Competencies for Equity Advancing Educators.”
In an effort to have greater outreach to our student community and expand its bandwidth, the Laney Student Employment Services Center has partnered with several Community Based organizations and the City of Oakland to provide employment and career readiness services. Specifically, in partnership with the Oakland Housing Authority, the Employment Services Center is hosting a weekly hiring event spotlighting a different employer each week. As a result, approximately 17 participants have received employment! Additionally, as part of the Oakland Workforce Collaborative led by the City of Oakland, the Employment Services Center hosts a monthly hiring event for students and other Oakland residents. The first hiring event focused on Essential Worker jobs, and had 80 job seekers registered, with approximately 13 Laney Students, and 15 employers presenting their open positions.
College of Alameda has a capable new group of mental health counselors that are available and eager to provide support for CoA students. Join us in welcoming this talented new team.
Laney student Leah Vass wrote an excellent story about how she managed to combine her curiosity about what she could do in the Laney FabLab and a course in the Culinary Arts Department about confections into a new career. These, combined with training in the Graphic Arts Department led her to start a company making chocolates for social and corporate events.
We are all using Zoom and other services to video conference with coworkers and students these days. Seminars, lectures, board meetings - basically every situation in which a group of people get together in person before COVID-19 - are all finding their way into a virtual format. But with this convenience, there come some risks as the relative anonymity of participants can allow for misuse of the platform. And the switch to this sort of less-formal meeting can give rise to less than professional behaviors.
Here are some best practices for virtual meetings.
