The "Hail-Jane" Project to Save a Center

In 2021 and after a highly successful 10-year existence, the Center for STEM Learning at CU Boulder (one of the founding members of NSEC) was de-funded by the university administration following a dramatic and political internal battle. Suddenly faced with a "soft money survival" situation and the dwindling engagement of our Fellows and other internal partners, a new director was brought in to help rescue the Center. I am that director. With only 2 years of limited funding in the bank, I have embarked on an Hail-Mary project to re-ignite our STEM innovation engines. It is more precisely a "Hail-Jane Project" because we have partnered with the Jane Goodall Institute and local companies like Google Boulder to pioneer a new STEM nested mentoring project that engages STEM professionals with underserved university student proteges who in turn serve as mentors to local middle and high school students using Goodall's "Roots & Shoots" education model as a platform. The program focuses on making STEM learning more personally relevant to marginalized students through powerful community experiences and building identities among our youth as capable change agents. We will either succeed in securing corporate funding and become a Roots & Shoots basecamp location to expand our model nationwide to the benefit of many thousands of students — or we will land the plane and close the hangar. This talk will tell the story as it stands halfway through ... we have one year left.