The CCSF-San Francisco Connection

Today's outreach at Sunday Streets on Valencia (between 15th and 16th Streets), was awesome, but we really need an awning!

(Here awesome counselor Donna Hayes, sans awning, gives information to a passerby.)

This is not the first time we've asked for an awning, and we've heard arguments against having one, but today we were all melting in the sun--and even the apples used for weights melted.  Almost every group had an awning except ours, which made it hard to find our group when I left to get a coconut down the street.  I walked right past our spot and only realized I'd passed it when I saw the Golden Warriors awning. I've also been told that people couldn't find us when they were really looking.

So for comfort and for visibility, we need an awning, and Elgy Gillespie has volunteered to provide one. 

This morning other volunteers and staff provided some other good suggestions too.

We can avoid too much clutter--one set of flyers burying others--if we have flyers organized into accordion files.  Denise Selleck volunteered to spend an hour helping me get this started.

Denise also suggested that we have a couple of bulletin boards set up like a poster session at conferences so that people could see at a glance some of what CCSF has to offer.

These posters could possibly be attached to the proverbial awning or put on easels.

Student ambassadors suggested having departments color code their flyers so we can spot them more easily, distinguishing one from another.  Because colors are limited but flyers seem not to be, we may be able to achieve the same result if we file our flyers and have that bulletin boards!

Another suggestion from our student ambassadors was to rotate what we focus on each time. For example, today we wanted to be sure that Free City was prominent.  At the same time we became familiar with where to locate flyers for the specific interests expressed by the passers by.

We should have a flyer giving the dates, times, and locations  that the placement tests will be given.  I think Leslie Milloy said they'd been giving them daily (or was it weekly?) on the Ocean Campus. 

We did have the flyer giving information on the one-day testing and matriculation process of native English speakers. 

We need to make the application process simpler and more user-friendly.  Someone from UC Santa Cruz said theirs was a lot easier to use than City College's. 

CCSF also needs to remove the stumbling block of insisting that students declare a major.  Other colleges make it possible to say "Undecided," but students applying for CCSF can't choose that response.

Donna Hayes also said that some colleges indicate after each major  for which ones students can get financial aid.  Our students need that information too. 

The courses and departments students asked about were almost as diverse as our college itself and included

A public speaking class for people in business who need help with their English pronunciation

Environmental Science

Drawing and painting

Ceramics

Child Development

physical fitness

Advanced Japanese

Beginning Spanish

Diagnostic Imaging

Social Justice

College credit courses for high school students at Sacred Heart and Wallenberg

As usual the police, including one who's taking Administrative Justice at CCSF, came by. 

It's NOT usual for the CCSF chancellor to come by, so  Mark Rocha's doing that was very much appreciated.  I had the chance to talk to him about both about decisions he'd made at Pasadena Community College and his degrees in engineering (relating to his work after  Hurricane Sandy) and in literature.

For several outreach events, Board of Trustees President Thea Selby has been an active participant, which provides both inspiration and a model to follow.  Today, for example, she took several Free City postcards and approached people.  When one would-be student said she had had trouble applying and had, therefore, given up, Thea found a student ambassador to help her with the process.

I'd heard good things about Leslie Milloy, so I was glad that she showed up and helped out, giving me the chance to let her know the good things being said behind her back!

I got a coconut and then a refill, found out what all the white tents on campus were one week, saw Mission Dolores friends of a CCSF instructor who became a priest, and got to see Kathe Burke in an improvided soccer game with a toddler.  I even got to tell student ambassadors about "The Big Sick" and "Kedi" but very briefly because we were BUSY!!!