 I'm absolutely delighted to have Catherine Paulendahl. It's a little bit of background. Here on the forum for years we've been looking at issues of student support and also at issues of gender. And one of the interesting challenges that's been occurring across colleges and universities that hasn't gotten a lot of support or attention is the fact that a number of students show up who already have children. And in fact some of them are single mothers. So this becomes an interesting challenge. How do you support such students on a campus if they're going to a physical, face-to-face campus, either residential or commuter? Now Catherine runs a program at Miserecordia University in Pennsylvania, which is almost unique. There are very few like it. And what she does is she supports students with children. So the Ruth Matthews Bourget Women with Children program is a fascinating one. And also I want to show it because in the wake of the Supreme Court's summer dobs decision we might see more women with children coming onto campus. So how do we do that? What can we learn from this practical success? Well, in order to explore that, let me bring up on stage our wonderful guest. Here she is. Welcome Director Poladol. Hello. Thank you so much for having me here today. Oh, it's so great to see you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for making the time, especially as the fall semester is hurtling closer to us every day. I have one question for you to introduce yourself. I've been raving about you and your record, but I want to turn around and point in the future. What are you going to be working on for the next year? I mean, in your role as director, what are some of the tasks, functions, programs you get to do or support? And what are some of the big ideas that are going to be top of your mind? Well, I think that at this point, because we're sort of stepping back into another academic year where COVID is still sort of here, but we're still trying to operate and move forward, we'll be doing two major things at the institution. The one is with our Women with Children program. We're actually going to be expanding and launching a fourth home. And I can explain a little bit more detail around our program, but we are expanding. And so as of this fall, we will be able to support up to 20 single mother families within our program, which will make us the largest and only single mother residential program in higher education in the state of Pennsylvania. That's one big piece. And then another big initiative that we are bleeding is also a new program that we're helping to establish here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. It's going to be called the Parent Pathways of Northeastern Pennsylvania. And it's actually a part of a pilot program that has been funded through the Robin Hood Foundation in New York City. And our efforts are to help single parents who are living at or near the poverty line access for your degrees, associate's degrees and high skill trades, as well as technical college. So we're building a system to do that for five 20 footprint. And we'll be hoping to launch that later this month as well. So we're pretty busy. Very busy, very busy. And I have all kinds of questions. And friends, I'm just going to ask a couple of them. And then I want to get out of the way and make room for all of you. Just you teased us with one question right away. What do you mean by homes? So I can kind of give a little overview of the program and what it looks like. So the Burger Women with Children program is a program that's designed for single mothers who are living at or near the poverty level where they would like to come to school and access a four-year degree. We're able to do that by providing free housing for up to four years for all of our families that are participating in the program. And along with that, we have incorporated and built what we call a strong two-generational model that helps both the mother and the child while they're with us. And so in doing that, what we're able to do is enable moms who would not maybe even consider a four-year degree to come to this university, be full-time students, so at least 12 credits or more a semester, while continuing to raise their child or their children. We do accept moms from all over the United States with priority placement to women in the tri-state area of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Moms can be of any age, and children can be between ages two through eight years of age upon admission and then no older than 12 upon mom's graduation. So we have that whole sort of age trajectory for the children. And so then we just offer a lot of different types of family enrichment services for both the mom and the child for those four continuous years. We never close, so once a family's moved in and with us, they can remain with us through summers, through breaks. There's no interruption of services at all. And so we're sort of unique in that sense, too. We don't close after a semester or into the summer. And just to kind of give you a sense, along with the free housing, we offer a number of different types of amenities. We completely outfit all of our homes. We provide food pantries inside all of our homes and toiletry pantries inside our homes. Everything's furnished and it's fully equipped, because in fact we do recruit in very non-traditional spaces, I would say, in terms of if you're looking through the lens of higher ed, we'll recruit homeless shelters, domestic violence centers, service centers, things like that, and bring moms from all over the place into our program where they reside with us. So, you know, and again, I think the other piece that I think is extremely important that we talk a lot about is sort of the marriage between higher education and then all the other types of provisions of services we can provide for a family, both in the community, as well as with subsidies. So we do work with all of our moms to be compliant and to be on subsidies like SNAP, childcare, we utilize the ELRC program here within our county, WIC, as well as any other services that they might need in order to best enable them to be successful, whether it's community counseling and support services, family counseling, and then we do a whole bunch of different types of services within our own institution too. So, I basically say the best thing to do is mine, all of the assets of your own institution and utilize them in order to support these families and that's exactly what we do here at University too. So. Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, thank you for delivering that rich and concise description of what you do. That's a lot. How is this funded? Is this funded by a charitable gift from a family? It's a confluence of different funding streams that make this whole thing possible. There's a lot of moving parts and so we have to constantly pay attention to what the needs are of our families. I always say what we're sort of in combat all the time with poverty. So anytime there's a barrier, we mitigate that barrier and a lot of times what we have to do is pursue, actively pursue funding in order to make that possible. So we have funders that are private donors. We, I'm a grant writer as well as the director of the program. I write numerous grants every year in order to fund different initiatives that we run. We also have private individual donors that will give us specific funding for specific purposes, whether it's scholarship dollars for certain academics or students, as well as then with the state as well. We have some funding through the state too to help support our housing component. All of our moms are zero EFCs. So they have no estimated family contribution. So we do everything we can possibly do to create a robust financial aid package that then includes women with children, scholarship dollars every single semester because our goal is to keep our women's tuition debt load as low as possible because they do pay for their tuition, their stakeholders and their education too. But our goal is to keep that, that debt load as low as possible so that once they graduate, it's an affordable debt that they can then pay down along with gaining their professional careers once they graduate and go on to successful futures. So that's just kind of give you a sense. That's the funding and the funding is constant. It's something that we have to pursue all the time along with the subsidies that help to sort of keep this whole process buoyant. I imagine that's a big chunk of your time. Well, and this is the kind of thing that I think any sane campus should fund and fund well. Let me ask a second question and this is kind of a big picture question which is do you see other programs that you draw inspiration from that do this or are you consulting with other universities to show them how to do what you've already done? Well, I would, I will say that at this point what I'm seeing or experiencing, I've been with this program for almost 10 years now and we're really at a position where we have a lot of other institutions and including the state of Pennsylvania asking us for direction and asking us for help to create more of this type of model in other respective universities and colleges in the state of Pennsylvania. But I'm in the recipient of calls from all over the United States to just people inquiring and asking how we're doing this and what we've done and what we've learned from it. So I would say that we're in that kind of position right now only because we've been around since 2000. And so because of our longevity in higher education already, I think we're sort of in the position of being an example. But yeah, which is good news because I think the more communication we have and the more inquiries we receive, the more interest there is in institutions creating more services or provision of services for families on their campuses. Sure, sure. How long have you been with the program? Yeah, for me, I've been here almost 10 years now, nine and a half years, but the program has been around since 2000. And it actually started, there was a sister of Mercy at Ms. Recording University. Our university was founded by the Sisters of Mercy and one of their big charisms or initiatives is to help women and children out of poverty. And so at that time, it was decided that they would take a closer look at what's going on. They had a lot of women were applying to our university but not coming. And they kind of went back and looked and did some surveys and found out that there was a common denominator among them, which is that they were all single mothers. And it was the burden of rent that was making going to school cost prohibitive. So the idea was provide free housing. They actually, the sisters don't need a convent. Our original house is a former convent with six spaces for six families back in 2000. And the idea was to bring these moms to campus with their children, where they could go to school full time and not pay for the rent or the cost of housing. So we've really evolved since then, we've expanded three times because there's just been this ongoing demand for services and programs like us. So yeah, that's sort of the trajectory of the program. Wow, well, that's great. And congratulations in advance on your upcoming 10 year anniversary there. Thank you. We have some questions and comments that have come in through the chat. I just wanted to share, John Hollenbeck mentions a couple of schools, San Francisco State, he says used to have a great childcare center. He also mentions University of Phoenix used to do this. Lisa Durf mentions someone, quote, someone in my class had a kid and we all supported her even to changing diapers in the middle of the night, unquote, which is great. And then Roxanne Riskin offers kudos to Sisters of Mercy and to the former position I had was founded by the Sisters of Mercy in Milford, Connecticut. So friends, this is the time for your questions and your comments. So please just click the raise hand button if you want to join us on stage, you can tell we're all friendly or just click the Q and A button and type in your cue or your comment. I'm gonna grab one question for you right now, Catherine and I'll turn the comment into a question. Tom Haynes mentions that Houston Community College, they were interested in this, but quote, one of the things we always ran up against was liability, unquote. How do you handle the insurance angle on this? Yeah, I think it's a big issue for a lot of institutions and especially administration, looking at through the lens of liability, how do you manage this? And I would say that to me, the fastest solution to that is creating a partnership with a group or agency that would assume that component of liability if you're looking at bringing state minors to campus if that's your concern. One of the, I think one of the best recommendations that I could make right away that I have seen work very effectively is to start to collaborate with Head Start. There are a lot of community colleges that are working with two types of programs. The one is Head Start parents and then engaging them and incorporating them into the institution while their child is being cared for through Head Start. So that's a core collaboration that could be really cost effective and they would take the liability component away from the institution. The other piece is to consider what other services or provision of services can be offered through other types of community programs like parents and teachers programs, for example. Oftentimes they have more of a sort of a two generation focus. And so if you crop with them or collaborate with them, you might have an opportunity if it's not on your campus, it might be nearby. And so if you're able to do that and maybe even work with them on transportation, you might be able to solve or resolve that type of barrier going forward as well. And definitely getting buy-in from your institution and your leadership is going to be certainly important. So I think offering these types of options and inviting leadership from these types of programs in to have these conversations is also quite effective. So we've actually brought in the head of our County Head Start to meet with our president at the university a few years ago, just even have that discussion to see how we could work together and collaborate. Wow, those are great answers. And I can tell this is something you thought through very, very carefully. You mentioned two generations. Here's a straight question from me, which is how many of the kids, you said that they were all minor, I'm sorry, they're all preteens, 12 and younger. How many of them have enrolled as adults at Misericordia? Well, at this point, we don't have children who've been actual students here yet. I'm hoping that that's going to be a goal. Certainly we have a lot of kids right now who are still quite young and middle school or maybe even in high school, but I will tell you that the earliest graduates of our program do have children that have graduated from college and have gone on to extremely successful years as well. So not at Misericordia, but different other institutions throughout the country because a lot of our moms do relocate after they're completed with their degree and maybe even pursuing graduate school and or a particular jobs. So we've been tracking them. And what we're finding is that we are breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Our children, if you look at even from just the collegiate level all the way down, we see that these children are all performing very well. Academically, a lot of them are involved in other extracurricular activities too. And that their overall health and wellbeing has substantially improved since they've been through our program and then proceed on with their moms once they graduate. So we know that a deep investment like this is certainly worthy cause and we also see that the overall wellbeing of the family is intact and or improved as they go forward and especially when mom, they actually say that the most important factor for the degree of which a child will thrive in their own lifetime is the degree of execution of the mother. So if you look at that, it's directly tied to a lot of different types of components of development for a child and the success that they arrive at later on in their own lives. Wow, that's terrific. What a grand picture. What a decisive positive influence. We have questions coming in. So I'm gonna stop talking. Here's a quick question for Dr. Lisa Durf who asks what majors do most of the women in the program choose? Well, the women have the freedom to select whatever major they want. There is no parameter whatsoever on that. So they select from a medley of different types of majors here. I would say that we have a number of programs that are sort of standout programs at Ms. Rekordia that also attracts students to us. Like for example, speech language pathology is a great example. A number of our students were nursing majors. A lot of them have been everything from education to social work, to business, marketing and communications. So there isn't one sort of dominant major here. It's just the medley. But I will say that 100% of our women who graduate through our program go directly on into a professional career and or graduate school. So if you get through our program, it's met with a lot of success once you are finished with your undergraduate work here. Wow, great. Lisa, good question. And that's just, would a great window into this. Thank you, Catherine. We have your question from Jeanette Mulhern or Mulhern. I'm gonna try not to mangle her name too badly. He says, we are just starting a family resource center at our campus, Cosumnes River Community College, a physical space along with online support. What would you recommend prioritizing? Sure, that's a great question. I would say that, if you're looking at, if you're doing this, you're obviously paying attention to who your student parents are and perhaps what their biggest needs are going to be. But for us, the big ones are childcare and childcare access, transportation and how you might be able to support that and also food insecurity. Those are like the big three, oftentimes that you wanna take a look at and make high priority. I also think that if you can position a person to be in that center that can serve as a case manager for those parents, you're going to find that not only will that be very effective in helping them feel that they are part of the institution and getting support, but it could also activate not only their ability to then access other additional services they may need, but also have a positive impact on their retention rate. So I think that, those are the big quick priorities that I would identify very quickly for something like that. And that I know that for myself even, I learned very quickly that all of our houses needed to be equipped with all of the basic needs of the family. So anything that you can do in your center that highlights that and helps them fulfill that is going to be really effective. I'm sorry, just a quick question. You mentioned you had three priorities and the third was food security or food insecurity. What were the first two before that? I started running it down. I don't wanna lose it. Childcare and transportation. Transportation, that was it. Thank you. Thank you. I was just reading an interesting article about rural Tennessee this morning and higher education where they said that they couldn't get broadband in some areas. So the campus started giving up gas vouchers and gas cards so people could drive to that. That's a great question, Jeanette. Oh, well, Jeanette also just followed up with a follow-up question which builds on this. Do you work with community college and if so, how have you partnered transitioning students who transfer? Yes, another great question and we do. We actually, we're partnering with the community colleges and particularly in our county right here in our area with the parent pathways initiative that I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation. But we also have, we work very closely with community colleges, particularly in our region with a number of different intents. The first is to provide information on our program and certainly collaborative services to help them transition. We do have articulation agreements with our community college, which I also think is certainly beneficial if you have that and can establish that. But also to, there are in the state of Pennsylvania, there's a specific program called the keys program. It's kind of like a junior version of our program because it's designed for community college students. And it's basically for any student that's SNAP eligible, they can receive additional resources and support at their community college through the state run program. And so we collaborate closely with the keys program at our local community college. So I think it's important to sort of take a look at other types of programs that might be out there. That would be a good match and a good fit to connect to if you're looking to serve student parents as well. So you can also go deeper and you can also think about that from the high school level too, because there's also what they call the elect program for students who are high school students who are parents too. So anywhere you can create pathways that help students kind of migrate from high school to community college to say a four year. We accept moms as two year transfer students all the time. So you don't have to be just a four year traditional undergraduate student. You can certainly transfer in and complete a four year degree by sort of that hybrid approach as well. We certainly encourage it, especially if it's a cost effective, affordable way to go for a parent. Well, this is great. And Jeanette, thanks you in the chat saying this is very helpful. And it is, this is great. People can really learn from that. Friends, those are examples of text questions. I'm gonna throw up a few more of them as they come in. Our friend, John Hollenbeck, who always likes to see the big picture and a lot of history, he asks this question. This reminds me of Jane Adams' whole house in that it's a first step towards considering the family first in learning. Maybe an ultimate goal would be a multi-generational higher learning institute. Well, John, you're kind of speaking my language right there. That's exactly what we would hope for. I think that, you know, I kind of make bold remarks sometimes and I'll make one right now, which is I really think we need to change the landscape of higher education in the United States. And I think if we're gonna do this, we're gonna have to pay close attention to who are the modern learners in today's country, our country, in terms of access to higher education. I think when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, those are all huge priorities and we need to pay attention to them. But I think there's a word that's always missing and that word for me is access. And so if we can make higher education accessible to more people in our country, you're going to see that it's gonna entail a family. You know, it's gonna involve more than one generation coming to our institution at one time. And I think the more that we can take a two-generational approach where we can collaborate and cross collaborate and really start to think of ourselves in a way where we're key stakeholders in a multi-sector approach, we're going to do a lot more effective work for communities and people in our communities if we can create that true access point. Well, great thought, John. And I put a link to the official whole house website. If you don't know it, it's a great part of 20th century American history. Thank you, Catherine. There's a big theme here and I think that matters a lot. I have more thoughts, but there are more questions just piling in. This is great. And there's two questions coming in from a former student of mine who is a brilliant guy. Jordan Davis says, how difficult or easy it is for the single parents to find community in a sense of belonging on campus? Is there programming to encourage that? That's a great question, Jordan. And I think a very important one. I think for us in terms of our program with women with children, because it's a residential program in four different homes, we have a community that is established because of those connections. Our women live together, they work together, they study together, they raise their children together. And because of that, the cohesion in that just results, the byproduct of that is a community. And I think it's one of our biggest assets. So I think anything that can establish that kind of culture of support in your institution is extremely important and you may be able to do it in different types of ways. For us, of course, it's the residential aspect and then all the programming that we wrap around our families all year long. But in any type of institution, you can create that or you can certainly build it in a way that people are gonna see, okay, I'm a part of this too. And I will say, and I will emphasize this that it comes down to practicality. Are you really thinking about how your spaces are outfitted for families and student parents? Are you looking at even the visibility of that? If a student parent doesn't see themselves anywhere on your campus, then you're already sort of disenfranchising them from the community. We need to create the visibility and we also need to incorporate that into leadership. So for example, a quick example would be like, we have one of our moms that serves on our SGA. That there's presence of leadership, there's presence in a voice and we certainly encourage that. But I think that it takes a lot of investment and it takes some leadership to also encourage it and to foster it. So anywhere you can do that. And then also, I think the other step to that would be to create that in the larger community too. And how do you kind of create a semblance of, we're creating a presence for student parents on our college campuses, but they're also stakeholders in our communities. And we have a lot of community members that come in and really work with our program. We have an advisory board that works with our program where we have people who are serving as mentors, serving as advisors to our students in terms of even just considering what types of career paths they may choose and even just being a source of emotional support. So it's not just located in the campus, but also embedded in the community too. So I think there's a lot of cross collaboration that can happen, but how you establish that is something that I think creates a lot of thoughtfulness. And then I think when you start to look forward on a campus, you're gonna notice where the gaps are too, where it's missing. So how do you incorporate and add that value in as you go forward too? Wow. Well, again, that's a great question, Jordan. You really hit a very, very important theme. And Catherine, I'm so glad that you guys had thought and planned so deeply into this. Jordan follows up with a question and Lisa Durf echoes this. So let me just, this is a good key question. Are there any single fathers who've enrolled in this program? I get this question a lot. Right now we don't have single fathers because we've just served single mothers historically, but I believe that that's where we're changing things now. So with the parent pathways of Northeastern Pennsylvania, it's for all student parents. So if you're a single father, if you're a single mother, even if you're not single, but your parents who are struggling perhaps, you're in poverty, you wanna get out and you need a higher education and access, we're gonna create this onboarding process to help. So I think we're paying close attention to that as well. We know, I mean, the reality is our demographics speak volumes in terms of it is sharply skewed towards single mothers and mothers as student parents in higher education in the United States. They also represent the largest demographic living in poverty in the United States, including in our area, in our region, single mother households live at the poverty level more than any other type of family household. So we do know that our numbers are skewed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be paying attention to other single parents needs as well, including single fathers. So that's our next. I think our next driver, which is something we're about to establish. So hopefully we're effective with it. Lisa and Jordan, great future-oriented question. Catherine, thank you. I just see this keep growing and growing. I think we're gonna be able to say, yes, we knew Catherine when, before she picked over all of higher education. Shin Lee Wong shares this personal experience, quote, I've been trying to take sign language courses in local colleges, but the classes are offered either in the late evenings or whole day on the weekend. It's impossible when I have a little human to take care of. And then she goes on to say, I can only imagine how hard it must be for our students who are also parents. Great example. Good for you, Shin Lee. It's definitely an issue. The other part of it too, is just what they call like time poverty. Like just, you're so busy and you're trying to raise children and trying to manage everything else too, that you just have less hours of time to commit even to your own education. So it's, there's a lot to contend with. And I think that's one of the most important aspects of our program, because we leave really the burden of other financial aspects of their lives for a period of time. They're able to actually spend more quality time with their children. And I think that's also a very important aspect of our programming and why we pay attention to family enrichment so much. Excellent. Go, Shin Lee. You're awesome. Now, all of these have been text questions or questions that I've hoisted up from the chat. Let me now bring one of our community on stage. This is John Hollenbeck, who has at least one question. Possibly. I always have it up. Forgive me, I was doing gardening. I didn't expect to be involved in this conversation. I'm sorry, but this just reminds me of a project when I, in like the 90s, when I was working in a college where there was a school district in a Hispanic neighborhood. I think it was 70% transient population. But what they did is open the model up to the children who were there in the day. The adults came in at night and it became a true interweaving of generations and learning. And there was actually coaching and all this kind of stuff. And I just bring that up, because you already talked about Hall House and all that other kind of stuff, but I was very excited to hear you say, yeah, we need to start thinking beyond the model towards the need. And that just gets into my theme right now, which is imagine you were designing a learning institution with today's tools right at this minute from scratch, what it would look like. But certainly what you're talking about, and I think just not just mother, but grandparents, younger children, everybody. Right, and depending on your capacity, I think the other part of this that I sometimes encourage people to think about is how do you rethink spaces in your own institutions? I think one of the big themes that we've talked about in higher education recently is the stagging enrollment numbers and having a lot of open spaces. And can we look at some of these spaces and reconsider how we conduct housing and how do we support families? Are there innovative ways we can do that? I mean, we've done everything from outfit spaces to make sure we have playgrounds, children's gardens, children's libraries, play areas that historically we're just maybe for a traditional college student to utilize and now we have children between ages two and 10 using those spaces. So I think it's a unique and an interesting time for higher education to maybe reconsider how we could be outfitting our space, looking at our infrastructure and frankly looking at how we can create affordable ways to do this. Because we all know that those are some of the biggest barriers, there's just the financing of these types of endeavors. Yeah, one of the last students I had before retiring was a woman who left an abusive marriage, had two young children, was living on whatever she could, she was living in a car for a while and she was trying to get through college in a traditional way and it was just her, just brute force. And I think the other part of this that was really important that we haven't, I hadn't heard in the discussion is how much the curriculum needs to be flexible for somebody who has major priorities outside of your class. And so much of what we do with her, everything was a semester and a half with her because that's just the time it took. So again, the institution needing to become folded for the need. That's right, that's right. And recognizing that there are compatible ways to do that and certainly there are students out there that need that. So I think maybe that's one of the silver linings of COVID-19 has been the sort of virtual platforms that we now exist on and some of the work that we could be doing. We mitigate transportation issues with that, obviously some of the expense with that. And if it's a way for us to continue to connect with students then I think it should be a part of what we're doing. Doesn't have to be the only thing we're doing but certainly a part of it. And I think that makes good sense. Yeah. I think the last comment I would make is there does seem to be a tendency to let distance education be the answer to this problem. And I think that is distance education is the lousiest way to teach somebody who is new in college especially with young children around. And yet everybody says, well, we have distance learning so they can learn that way. And that was kind of what we did here in Wisconsin. Yeah. Well, and I totally agree because I think that you don't want just one default button that would be a little bit, that's kind of like the easy way out perhaps, but I think the other component is what Jordan was asking earlier, which is how does that encourage community? I think that that's where you see a lot of those challenges and I think it creates a more of a remoteness, a lot of times for people who have been sort of historically marginalized in the first place. So I think we have to find a balance in it and I think you can, but I think we have to pay attention to it. Thank you so much for what you're doing. This is fabulous. Thanks, Brian. Well, thank you, John. And good gardening. That's a great thing to do today. Enjoy. Enjoy. Speaking of spaces, we have one of our favorite members of the community. Tom Haynes has done professional work on spaces both in terms of design and writing. I just wanted to bring him up to see what he has to add. And in fact, in honor of that, I'm going to give you all the really funky, nice layout just to emphasize how exciting Tom is. I'm not in the blue room today. It's still kind of blue. You got a blue chair, you got a blue wall. It looks pretty blue. That's true. So, I've been doing a lot of work lately on thinking about fluid spaces and building that around fluid environments. And I'm thankful for your presentation because actually, that really made me think. One of the problems with commuter schools, and I teach at a community college, is the students not staying on campus and the students losing that learning community and they visit school, right? Instead of being part of that environment. And that's something I think that small liberal arts colleges or boarding schools, the Phillips Exeter, that's where they have their huge advantages because people exist in that space for extended periods of time. And so the idea of having, one thing we do need to do is, I agree with John that we need to get rid of Distance Ed, but we need, not the technology. We need to create environments that span all modalities. So we're not just talking, we shouldn't have Distance Ed in normal classes anymore. There should be classes that have remote aspects, they have classes at the same class that has in-person aspects and so on and so forth. And the students need to float between those depending on what the needs of the learning are at the time. Sometimes it makes sense to do things off campus, sometimes it makes things to do on campus. But the idea of coupling that with childcare to where you've got a place where people can be watching the kids. So the students themselves are not watching the kids when they're doing homework, when they're working with the study groups and other students, that would be really powerful, especially for a lot of students who have to juggle that. Because, yeah, I mean it's, I've had students bring kids to class before. And sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn't. And I know colleagues that get really crazy about that. I try to be as flexible. I mean, I generally, my general feeling is, as long as it doesn't inflict on what other people are working on, then that's great. I've done that when I was in grad school. I brought my- But it depends on the kid. Yeah, it depends on the kid. And it's a lot to ask of a kid to sit there quietly and some kids will do it, some kids won't. No, but thank you for that. I mean, I do think that, have you done planning around your physical space design at the college? How has that affected that in terms of the way you've got these childcare facilities, this childcare facility set up? Or is it off campus? Yeah, so we've been very, I think we've been very thoughtful, very mindful of what we need to do. And this kind of touches on the question around liability a little bit too. So maybe it's a two-pronged response. We are located, all of our homes are truly like residential looking homes, which I also think is important by the way, because if you're raising children and you want the space to feel like home, then it should look like home. There's nothing institutional like in terms of like the look or the feel, they're all homes and the other pieces and they are community living environments. So when we thought about this in terms of safety is the number one, the children's safety is the number one threshold of which we design everything. So we're card access only, we even have cameras by the doors and things like that. We have green spaces behind the homes, playgrounds behind the homes. And then we've incorporated it very intentionally, again, spaces inside the homes to create that two-generation feel and approach. So play areas for the kids and children's libraries where like books are highly accessible, having them wifi'd and just equipped with everything the moms need to succeed. We have studies in the houses for the moms, so places where they can study, where maybe other children are sleeping inside each home. So I think what we've done is we've thought about, and we've also asked our families, we've asked our students, what do you need and what are you looking for? What would make this ideal for you? And we've responded with those types of offerings in those spaces and so they are on the lower campus. That's the one piece where I will say that's been great for us because we're contained. So we don't have a lot of overlap. We don't have a lot of traffic of other students at the university going through those homes or even near those frankly, but they're close enough that if we have special programming that we're doing or anything else, you're still part of campus. In fact, the newest house that I mentioned before that we're opening is quite literally right next door to the president's house at our university. So to give you a sense of how embedded our program is and then sort of the layout of the land, we're very much a campus community environment and it's conducive to our families, but we have enough containment also to keep our families and especially our children safe. And I do have, we have a full housing contract, a community living contract that our families all sign every semester. So we not only have the structure and the infrastructure to support what we're doing, but we also have a lot of rules and civility codes and governance with our families and the houses too. So sort of that internal flexible balance. You're building these houses fresh and I mean, these are new build or the conversions from existing buildings? Where are you finding the space for them? Well, they're all conversions. So like as I mentioned, the first house was a convent. So what we've done is we walk through and then we start to allocate the spaces to meet the needs of our families and we get creative, we get really creative but it's worked out really well for us. We've been lucky we've had some funding through grants to do some capital work, some renovation work and we're able to outfit them including the playgrounds that I mentioned. Those were all grant funds that we utilized to establish that in our program as well. Do you realize how ironic it is to send unmarried mothers into convents, right? Oh, we're not gonna go there. I'm sorry, I don't want to go meet evil on you. No, it's okay, we're not, we're not. Tom, thank you for your perspective. Great questions and good luck in Ohio. Say hi to Jeremy. Thanks, we'll do it. We had a quick question on that from Jeanette who asks, do you have images or a virtual tour perhaps of the parenting residential community? You know what, we actually are about to do that and I'll certainly share it so that you will have it. We have been, we've been very careful about how we share information on our houses because we are very protective of our families. What I mentioned to before, it's no exaggeration to say that some of our moms have been through some pretty difficult circumstances. They have been through domestic violence situations. Sometimes there's a PFA involved. So we don't necessarily want to heavily advertise exact location and spaces for their privacy and protection. However, we are doing a video to show our new house that we're opening so you can see an interior and see how we have our main floors, our community living environments, all of our moms then get their own respected bedrooms, their children get their own bedrooms on the other floors of the homes. So they have their own outfitted spaces. Moms don't really have to bring much. I always say this, more often than not, our moms are coming to us with maybe a car, their child, and maybe a few garbage bags of clothing. So we're prepared to outfit and make sure that they're ready to go, whether it's to start school. We do free books. We provide help with car repairs. We provide gas cards for transportation. We provide food for food insecurity. Literally all of those issues that you see that poverty creates and surfaces for families, we're just sort of, we're knocking them back down, we're knocking those barriers back down, so. Yeah. Well, that's terrific. And by the way, in the bottom left of the screen here today, you should be able to see a kind of mustard colored button and that should take you to the program's homepage. So there's information there as well, some media. Thank you for that answer, Catherine. That was an example of, that's two video questions. John and Tom both came up. So if you want to ask a video question, just click the raised hand. We had a couple of comments that came into Jeanette, who is all over this. Jeanette is just really on this topic today, where you two need to connect afterwards. She says, our department, early childhood and education, will be installing high-flex technology to help support student flexibility and physical attendance. So that's an interesting blend there. And to link back to Lisa's question about majors, and to give you all a sense of history for a moment, Vanessa Vail writes that, by the time I got back finishing a BA in 1989, it was a relatively new program for displaced homemakers, but only for nursing or business courses. So from 1989 to 2022, you can see that arc of history change. Oh, this is great. We have more questions coming in. And this is a question I can't display on the screen. This actually came in from someone who really wanted to be here, but couldn't make it because of a conflict. And I promised I would ask this question. This is Christine Wolfe Einstein, who is a wonderful person. She asks, I've been seeing the number of on-campus childcare centers trend down over time, while the number of parents in college is trending up. Recognizing that on-campus childcare is costly and complex to provide and scale, are there other practices and policies that campuses should be considering, especially with respect to allowing student parents to bring their children on campus? Yeah, I mean, I think that goes back to what we were talking about before in terms of collaborations. I think part of it is also institutional buy-in on creating a campus culture that can be a little bit more kid-friendly, if you will, or student-parent-friendly. There are a number of ways you can mitigate that. Part of what we do here is another good example of it is all of our education majors are required to have clearances completed and are already working with children. And we do a number of programs here, including tutoring for our children with our ed majors on campus. And they're a good fit for that. We also have what we call a Kids on Campus Program, which is an activity-based program where moms get a little bit of a break for about two hours and they can go to the library or run on campus, things that they might wanna do, while their children are having this sort of fun, family-enriching experience with college students who have all of those clearances in place with us and are invested in working with kids and are gonna be future educators themselves. So we do different types of things like that that could help perhaps provide services on campus, maybe even while parents are in class and they have another opportunity on campus to perhaps have something like that occur. That's a good fit. But the other thing are collaborations. We have a really great working relationship with a lot of the daycares within our community right here that are literally within a few miles of campus. And so when our moms go to school and are in school during the day, the children can be in daycare within a mile of campus. And we help them to do that. And we also help them with the subsidies that can help to make that a feasible option. So, and I will say another key thing to think about would be priority placement for federal work study jobs for parenting students who are looking to make sure they meet the subsidy requirements for the hours they need for the subsidy. So our women, for example, get that priority placement here on our campus so that they can accomplish the 10 hours of work a week that they need in order to maintain the childcare subsidy in our county. That's, again, I'm just amazed, Catherine, how many hats you wear between your tax attorney, your federal government wrangler, your community organizer, it's just tremendous. And poor Sarah Sanguario one of our good friends here says, right in line with our discussion, my toddler is now throwing a tantrum. Which has happened during my classes. I like that director Paul Adol considers the needs of the kids to be able to be kids. And then also in the chat, David Ron mentions that at Cuyahoga Community College, they partner with Cleveland State to build a scholar house across from our city campus, which is, let me see if I get the quote right. This is a, for single parent children, sorry, for single college student parents and their minor children. Wow, this is terrific to see. Friends, we have only five minutes left. I want to make sure that we get all of your questions. And we have one that comes from Charles Finley and Charles asks another very practical question. I don't know if I can get it. What is the responsibility of the students to participate in the Catholic faith tradition of the university? Well, our student, we have a mercy heritage here at Ms. Ricordia, but we have no requirement of that nature with our program. So, we have women from, like I said, all over the country, from all of different aspects of religion, spiritual presentation, whatever it is that you would like to call it. There's absolutely no requirement to be a participant in our program of that nature. So, we welcome every student who wants to be with us. That meets our basic requirements for our program and we're certainly welcome to join us, Sal. Well, that's a good question. That's a good question. And thank you for that very, very clear answer. Roxanne Riskin mentions that libraries can offer assistance. And I'm just wondering, as a big fan of libraries, what's the library role at Ms. Ricordia, sorry, either the Ms. Ricordia University academic library or any public libraries in the area? Well, if I speak to the Ms. Ricordia University library, they're wonderful to work with and collaborate with us all of the time. They offer individual and group sort of tutoring sessions to become familiar with the library and the resources and the different assets they can offer to our students. We include them in orientation and they also will come to the houses. We've had librarians that actually came to the houses and would sit with our families and discuss the types of resources they can access in the library. We also have a built into the library is a children's library on the university campus. So there is a space for children in the library too where they can access resources, children's books, videos and things of that nature as well. So they've been extremely supportive and I think it's been very nice to see too that they've helped us even to replenish the children's libraries that we have in our homes for our program too. So early learning and early literacy programming is a big priority in our program. So they've fundamentally been very helpful in that regard as well. Wow, that's... Brock Sanham, I'm so glad you brought that up and that's a wonderful connection. What a great partnership. Lisa Durf mentioned it's so important for young children to have access to print books. And so we have let's say one more question and this comes from Jeanette and she asks, what's the size of your parenting cohort and how are you identifying the parents and sharing information with those running the program? So in terms of the sizing of our parent cohort, we have our capacity goes up to 20 single mothers. So right now that's certainly our capacity and our goal to serve that number annually every academic year. And we certainly wanna make sure that between myself and we have two staff persons, myself and a coordinator and we work collaboratively together all the time to support all of our families. We do work also, as I mentioned before, mining all of those assets of our institution. We pretty much collaborate with every division and office within our institution here. And I'll give you quick examples. I've made swimming a requirement of all of our children learning how to swim, we think is a fundamental safety goal that all children should accomplish. But we do it for free with our swim academy here at the university. So all of our families are invited to participate in that. We work with our cap center, our counseling, our tutoring, our student success center. So there's all this cross collaboration that happens all the time. And with a lot of the approach that we have in-house, we wanna do everything we can to ensure the success of our students. So by working together with the coordinator who really serves as our primary case manager for our program, we're able to not only provide access to all the services that all of our students do, but then also connect them to all the different types of awesome provisional services that we have on our campus, campus way throughout the year too, that they also engage in and work in. So we're always sharing and working with all of our families in that regard as well. Wow, wow. Oh, that's a great thing. Just thinking about me, all these service, what a transformative experience this must be for the parents, but also for these children. What a great experience. Speaking of great experience, I'm afraid we have to bring this experience to a close. We have just hit the top of the hour and I like to close by asking you a question, Catherine. What's the best way to keep up with your work on this? Well, I would say, certainly, to check out our website, I think that's where we house a lot of our work and also we're on social media on Facebook as well. We do a lot of posting there in terms of different things that we're doing and driving initiatives, working with families, highlighting our outcomes and the success of our graduates and I think even with the parent pathways of Northeastern Pennsylvania component as well, we'll be continually updating and creating more options for information and information sharing on our website too. So I would say check us out there on the Ms. Reportia website, look for us if you have or have any questions and want to follow up with me, feel free to contact me. All of my contact information is there as well. I think it's on our QR code as well. So I encourage as much collaboration and learning as possible among institutions and I think that's just certainly the way to go in order to best support our families that are looking to access higher ed. I agree, I agree. I think we all agree and thank you so much, Katherine. This is tremendous work and I'm really glad that you took an hour out of that wonderful work to share it with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure and it's wonderful to speak with all of you and meet you today too. So thank you very much for having me. Well, great. Take care and be safe and keep up the great stuff. Thank you. Thank you, you too. Friends, I'm so glad you were able to make it today. This has been such an inspiring and exciting project to learn about. I'm so glad this resonated with some of you personally and directly. Listen, if you want to keep talking about this, just hit the hashtag FTTE on Twitter or at me at Brian Alexander or Shindig events or head over to my blog, BrianAlexander.org. We'd be glad to keep this conversation going. If you want to look back into our previous sessions, about any of these topics, including parenting, including motherhood, including space on campus, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and you can see them there. If you'd like to look at some of our upcoming projects or sorry, upcoming themes, everything from the climate crisis to reimagining education, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more. If you have any projects you wanna share with me, hit me up by email so I can share them with everybody else. And above all, thank you all for your time, for your thoughts, for your reflections, for your great questions. It's been exciting to learn about all of this and very inspiring. I hope you're all inspired and I look forward to hearing from all of you as the fall semester starts. Until then, take care, be safe, and we'll see you online. Bye-bye.