Kathi Trawver wins 2008 Selkregg Community Engagement and Service Learning Award

The Center for Community Engagement and Learning would like to announce Kathi Trawver as this year's 2008 Selkregg Community Engagement and Service Learning Award winner.

The Selkregg Community Engagement and Service Learning Award supports faculty to develop community-based, applied research and course-based service-learning projects. The award seeks to encourage, reward and inspire faculty at UAA to creatively engage their students in learning and research that equally benefits the students and the community at large.

Kathi Trawver, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work, is the 2008 winner of the Selkregg Community Engagement and Service Learning Award. Professor Trawver will be working on Project Homeless Connect; a recently developed national model that utilizes a cross-community collaboration to provide one-day, one-stop events designed to provide direct access to housing, services and hospitality in a one-stop model to individuals, families, and children experiencing homelessness.

Kathi has been involved with the Anchorage Project Homeless Connect since Fall of 2007. Since the first event, which took place in August 2007, the February 2008 event more than doubled the participants than the first time around. Kathi and her students have worked with the Anchorage Coalition on Homelessness, local community social service providers and the Mayor's office to help plan the event as well as offering services to individuals during the event and gathering data. Using the data they will be able to write up findings and make recommendations to further the effectiveness of future Project Homeless events in Anchorage.

Through her work Kathi will continue building partnerships between the UAA School of Social Work and the greater Anchorage Community. Students will gain hands-on experience in data collection, analysis and reporting while becoming engaged community members.