• Greenforce helps community colleges grow “green” jobs training, campus sustainability
• Programs are designed to meet worker and industry needs, help communities attract businesses
• Engaging employers and local partners is key to program success

With health care in the U.S. a prime topic of discussion, an initiative in Flint, Michigan is expected to spark new ways of thinking about medical professionals and their relationships with patients, their profession and the communities where they live and work.

It was announced today that Flint will be home to the public health program of Michigan State University’s (MSU) College of Human Medicine. The program, launched in 2008 on MSU’s main campus in East Lansing, offers a master’s degree in public health, which students can pair with a doctorate in medicine. That dual degree — the first of its kind in the country — trains physicians to improve the overall well-being of communities by identifying, understanding and addressing the unique health care needs of local families.

Meeting the unique medical needs of local families will be a key goal of the MSU public health program in Flint.

The program has enrolled 350 students in just three years.

As the program is centered in Flint over the coming months, it is expected to increase — from 60 to 100 — the total number of third- and fourth-year MSU medical students working at any given time in Genesee County. It will also advance the field of public health — locally and nationally — by offering community-based research opportunities in disease prevention and control.

The Flint program’s development is funded, in part, by a $2.8-million grant to MSU from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. That grant reflects the Foundation’s significant ongoing investment in education and the well-being of its hometown.

MSU’s longstanding relationship with the greater Flint community makes the city an ideal home for the public health program, notes University President Lou Anna Simon. Genesee County’s health care system has provided MSU medical students with clinical training and internship opportunities since the 1970s.

“Reflecting its core priorities, Michigan State University is working with community partners across the state to train health care workers and to promote regional prosperity,” said Simon.

“The partnership with the Mott Foundation is an important example. Working in Flint and Genesee County, not only is MSU providing crucial services to residents, but it also is providing unique opportunities for students both in public health and medical education.”

Flint is one of two Michigan cities chosen by MSU to host its flagship medical school programs. The headquarters for the College of Human Medicine was moved to Grand Rapids in 2010.

The public health program is expected to be located in Flint’s downtown area, making it part of the city’s growing higher education community. Other institutions downtown are Kettering University, Mott Community College and the University of Michigan-Flint — all are Mott grantees.

While the master’s degree coursework is completed entirely online, medical students will be encouraged to take their required month-long practicum at a Flint area hospital, community agency or the Genesee County Health Department.

Marsha Rappley, dean of MSU’s medical school, says the program will bring up to seven federally funded researchers to Flint. Those staff will work on key health issues in Flint, with the findings helping to inform public health efforts around the country.

An MSU/Flint Community Research Advisory Committee will help guide and develop the public health program.

“With a group of excellent partners and a strong philanthropic community, our new advisory committee will establish a menu of public health research needs for Flint and enable us to recruit researchers to help find best practices to address these areas of need,” said Rappley.

Patrick Wardell, president and CEO of Hurley Medical Center in Flint, is excited that the program will grow a pipeline of physicians and researchers trained in a public health approach. Recent studies suggest a national shortage of primary care physicians by 2020, while the American Medical Association has called for more physicians among people of color, and more health care for underserved populations.

Hurley is among the local hospitals and other community partners, including the health department, that are represented on the advisory committee.

Wardell says the program’s unique educational and research opportunities will help make Flint an attractive choice for medical students across the country. Those students, along with program staff and researchers, will contribute to the local economy and may ultimately choose to stay in the community.

"Having the program in Flint will add to the intellectual atmosphere already present here and enhance Flint's growing reputation as a university town,” he said. “And the curriculum, with its strong emphasis on public health and patient care, will expose medical students to an outstanding academic and training experience.”

The Flint community is expected to play an active role in the public health program’s ongoing development. Representatives from the college and local health care system will work with area organizations, including from the public health and nonprofit sectors, to identify health-related trends and priorities.

That input will help guide the program’s curriculum, practice and research, and will ultimately support better decisions about public health policy and funding in the greater Flint area, says Mark Valacak, health officer at the Genesee County Health Department.

He also notes that bringing more health care practitioners and researchers to Flint could significantly impact the community’s overall well-being.

“Understanding and preventing disease helps to keep people healthier overall, which reduces the costs of health care and helps to create a more stable and productive community,” said Valacak.

“The MSU program will help us to make sure that all residents, including those who are most at risk of diseases and who might be otherwise underserved, get the care they need to be healthy and stay healthy.”

The emergence in the mid-1980s of microenterprise in the U.S. sparked new thinking in workforce and anti-poverty strategies: help people start their own businesses, work toward economic stability and, in some cases, create job opportunities for others.

With the field having since demonstrated its potential for supporting those goals, many of the country’s microenterprise development organizations continue on a path of innovation. Some, such as those participating in the Mott-funded Scale Academy, are modeling strategies to “scale-up” the sector’s capacity to help more microentrepreneurs enter and succeed in the nation’s marketplace.

Mott, a longtime funder in the area of microenterprise, has made grants totaling $14.5 million to Aspen for micro-related work since 1990. That support includes $1.7 million since 2006 for the Academy, a project of FIELD, and reflects the Foundation’s interest in issues of workforce development.

Innovations in microenterprise include electronic loan applications and other online resources.

Some of the innovations profiled in the report reflect incremental changes in existing processes. These include making it easier for loan applicants to navigate lending procedures or modifying the job duties of loan officers so they can focus more on building client connections.

For example, ACCION USA – a microfinance lender based in New York and a Mott grantee – has streamlined and strengthened its overall lending process by helping potential borrowers to better understand their credit scores and the loan amounts for which they are likely to qualify.

The lender is also: improving its online application tools; providing borrowers with more credit education resources; and building continuous improvement by tracking customer complaints and issue resolutions.

The result: higher-quality services available to greater numbers of microentrepreneuurs.

Innovation at the system level is also found at ACCION New Mexico-Arizona-Colorado, where loan officers are paid, in part, according to their ability to meet monthly lending targets and work with borrowers to keep their loans in good standing.

This incentive-based program, coupled with training, “has created a culture within the lending staff that focuses on sales and on maintaining client relationships,” notes the report author and FIELD Director, Elaine Edgcomb.

Other innovations highlighted in the report reflect the launch of new products or services, such as loans that help clients build a credit history or distance learning opportunities provided over the Internet.

That approach is evidenced by the microlending organization Justine PETERSEN, based in St. Louis.

Without a favorable credit history, the chances of a potential microentrepreneur qualifying for a loan are slim, notes Sheri Flanigan-Vasquez, the organization’s chief operating officer.

The staff at Justine PETERSEN responded to that “catch 22” by developing strategies to reach more clients through credit-building products and services, such as loans, secured credit cards and financial coaching.

The results, says Flanigan-Vasquez, have been impressive.

“For someone who has no credit score, we’ve seen them significantly increase their credit score over a very short period of time,” she notes.

These and other examples of innovative thinking outlined in the report reflect the diligence with which the microenterprise field is “increasing the number of clients the programs serve, which is the ultimate goal,” notes Edgcomb.

“The strategies represent a toolkit of ideas and recommendations that we hope people will think about and select the ones that are most appropriate to their kind of program, their market and what they’re trying to achieve,” she said.

Community college business incubators are strengthening local economies across the U.S.

A promising midwest model

For LCCC, the push to develop entrepreneurial services and coursework was a choice based on necessity: Heading into the 1980s, the Lorain/Elyria metro area, just west of Cleveland, found itself without a major employer.

“Without large companies or manufacturing plants, we had to ask ourselves how can a community best replenish its capacity to support the workforce it already has?” Shanahan said. “How does it position itself for growth? For us, the best approach to sustaining the local economy was to help our entrepreneurs commercialize good ideas.”

The college has come a long way since the mid-’80s. It now leads a nine-member consortium of higher education and economic development partners in northeast Ohio, serving entrepreneurs in 21 counties in collaboration with the federal Small Business Administration, local and state governments, and chambers of commerce. LCCC engages with local entrepreneurs through a “bricks and mortar” incubator, technology park and pre-seed-capital fund, as well as education and training services ranging from a two-day business “boot camp” to Ohio’s first associate degree in applied business-entrepreneurship.

The Entrepreneur Innovation Center at LCCC has a focus on building high-tech businesses.

LCCC’s Innovation Fund, which has awarded $4.3 million to 60 companies since it was launched in 2007, was recently recognized as a national model by the White House’s Startup America Initiative. That public/private effort pulls together some of the country’s most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, educational institutions and foundations to work with federal agencies to increase the number and success of America’s entrepreneurs.

LCCC will help community colleges nationwide replicate the fund as part of the Virtual Incubation Network. Not only does the model – dubbed Innovation Fund America – help current entrepreneurs, but it also inspires the next generation of students to become innovators by requiring companies that receive awards to provide internships in entrepreneurship for students.

Marcia Ballinger, LCCC’s vice president of strategic and institutional development, will lead the college’s role in this initiative.

“What’s exciting about this new demonstration is that it gives us the opportunity to see how we can better connect all the pieces developed to support the college’s education mission and our economic development mission,” she said.

“The virtual piece – using new technology tools to deliver services and share with other colleges – makes this project even more interesting.”

Expanding best practices through technology

Technology is fueling new ways of creating learning communities and networks, says AACC’s McKenney.

“These new tools are revolutionizing how ideas are shared,” he said. “With that in mind, our goal is to isolate what services entrepreneurs need to succeed and deliver them with more focus and less infrastructure.”

In addition to the 10-college network, AACC is working with its affiliate, the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE), which will provide technical assistance to each of the participating campuses and serve as a repository for best practices.

NACCE, founded in 2002, helps its 924-member colleges and institutions link their traditional role of workforce development with entrepreneurial development, according to Executive Director Heather Van Sickle.

The organization, headquartered at Massachusetts’ Springfield Technical Community College, grew out of an entrepreneurial institute that was experimenting with “the sweet spot” where classroom learning and experience merged to produce entrepreneurial know-how.

LCCC’s distance learning technology is expanding services for entrepreneurs.

“Initially, we concentrated on developing an entrepreneurial model that we hoped to sell to interested colleges,” Van Sickle said. “But very quickly, we discovered the culture of community colleges is to share, not buy, from one another.”

And community colleges have a lot to share, she says. They have been offering courses in entrepreneurship since the early 1970s, when the field first emerged.

By 2007, at least 66 percent of the nation’s 1,167 community colleges offered at least one course in the subject; 14 percent offered an associate degree; 19 percent offered certification and 20 percent hosted a small business development center on campus, according to a survey by the University of Illinois-Urbana.

Because community colleges respond to local needs, their mix of entrepreneurial classes and services varies, Van Sickle says.

“Our task is to tease out the best practices and commonalities among the programs at the 10 colleges – isolate what it takes to commercialize an idea and then, to sustain a business,” she said. “Phase two will be building that reality into a curriculum and figuring out where technology – the virtual piece – can connect more entrepreneurs over a wider area with the mentorship and support they need.”

Said LCCC’s Shanahan: “We serve entrepreneurs throughout northeast Ohio and don’t always have the time or resources to meet them face-to-face. We know that to succeed, our clients need a high level of engagement, especially in the early phases of the commercialization process.

“To keep these relationships meaningful, we need to understand when and how virtual communication tools can be used to conserve time and span distance.”

Despite some significant successes, community colleges are still trying to learn how entrepreneurial skills can best be transferred to students and commercial clients.

“We know that incubating a good idea into a business takes a combination of structured coursework, layered with work-based learning, technical advice, seed and venture capital and the guidance of an experienced mentor,” LCCC’s Ballinger said.

“We need to gain a better understanding of how we can deliver all this stuff to entrepreneurs working at every level.”

And community colleges are ideally positioned to demonstrate how this can be done, says AACC’s McKenney.

“Not only do they serve isolated regions and small communities, but as key providers of career and technical training, community colleges also partner with the nation’s one-stop career centers through the public workforce system and Small Business Development Centers,” he said.

“The Virtual Incubation Network demonstration will give us an opportunity to better align this and other partnerships - and maximize what’s out there to assist entrepreneurs who create the jobs that can reconstitute local economies.”
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* Rio Salado College, Phoenix, AZ; Long Beach Community College, Long Beach, CA; North Iowa Area Community College, Mason City, IA; Mott Community College, Flint, MI; Southeast Community College, Lincoln, NE; White Mountain Community College, Berlin, NH; Burlington County Community College, Burlington, NJ; Santa Fe Community College, Santa Fe, NM; Lorain County Community College, Elyria, OH; and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Green Bay, WI