For nearly a year, most of us have been working remotely and experienced the engaging and challenging aspects of this experience. Throughout this time, many of us have participated in regular check-ins, team-building activities, dance parties and formal and informal gatherings afterhours, to name a few activities.

In numerous conversations I have had with colleagues from all four of our constituency groups, I came to realize that our College values (excellence, inclusivity, innovation and integrity) play an important role in our everyday experiences, especially now that most of us are working remotely:

1. They support the vision of our College and continue to mold our culture

2. They help us design the future we want, individually and collectively

3. They help us make organizational decisions that reflect our values

4. They remind us how to treat each other and, most importantly, our students

To highlight some of ways our colleagues demonstrate our four values, I asked senior leadership to provide a few names and an example of how they align their actions with our values so we can celebrate and honor them:

EXCELLENCE

Monica Filburn, department chair, Nursing, exemplified excellence when she expanded clinical opportunities for our nursing students, creating a weekend program in Harrisburg and an LPN program that meets all the State Board of Nursing requirements and transfers into our RN program.

Amanda Messmer, coordinator, HACC Foundation Operations, exemplified excellence when she spearheaded a fundraising campaign that raised much-needed money to combat our students’ food insecurities. Also, she secured a five-figure contribution from a donor in support of an endowed scholarship.

INCLUSIVITY

Jennie Baar, dean, School of Business, Technology & Industry, exemplified inclusivity for her work in gathering faculty feedback on the Midtown II moves and the creation of our weekly stakeholder group to bring together various aspects of the College to troubleshoot issues with hands-on labs.

Briana Legerlotz, coordinator, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging, demonstrates inclusivity as she works with department leaders to evaluate our LGBTQIA+ preferred name policy. She has highlighted several ways our departments are exclusive and has made efforts through guidance, conversation and training plans to ensure we remove institutional obstacles in the execution of our preferred name policy.

Kelly Swanson, executive director, Integrated Marketing Communications, exemplified inclusivity when she spearheaded the development of guidelines to limit hate speech on HACC-related social media sites. Also, she pointed out inappropriate and racially-insensitive images on a tool that HACC uses. Kelly embraces inclusion and diversity and is on the anti-racist journey.

INNOVATION

Howard Alexander, director of student success initiatives, demonstrated innovation when the College had to pivot quickly to remote service delivery, last spring. Howard led the effort to increase faculty and staff proficiency in the use of the NAVIGATE Platform. At that time, NAVIGATE was not his primary responsibility, but because he had knowledge of the technology, he accepted the additional responsibility to train and coach faculty and staff.

Rich Cardamone, assistant vice president, Finance, exemplified innovation for fully investing himself and engaging his team to deliver the accounting structure required for the One-College transition and the development of the 2021-22 budget. The efforts to fulfill these highly demanding and innovative tasks required he and his team to spend many hours checking and rechecking processes and data.

Andrea Hartranft, associate professor, Information Science, and Tamara Girardi, associate professor, English, for exemplifying innovation of the Open Educational Resources (OER) project, setting up a structure to support faculty, delivering training, and helping faculty launch OER projects.

Jaime Sholly, coordinator, Compensation & Classification, demonstrates innovation, daily, by bringing a solution-oriented mindset to her work. Recently, in the Classified Employees Organization (CEO) position review project, she utilized an existing process and increased the value to the CEO employees and their supervisors within the college. The project has provided both an acceptance and an understanding during a job classification change. This is a perfect example of incremental innovation, by taking a simple process and making it even better by improving communication and involvement.

Mike Wagner, executive director, Financial and Support Services, demonstrated innovation when he led the automation of a donor stewardship process. Stewardship is the art of thanking donors for their generosity. In the past, we have used a labor-intensive method to mail information to hundreds of donors twice a year. In late fall 2020, we automated the process, which resulted in more convenience for our donors and more effectiveness and efficiencies for the OCA team.

INTEGRITY

Jamie Eckrode, coordinator, Workforce Development, exemplifies integrity when engaging numerous internal and external customers on a wide-variety of division projects having to be the conduit to ensure the project is clearly defined, managed and completed.

Cindy Gavazzi, assistant vice president, Enterprise Services, demonstrates integrity when notifying stakeholders of progress made, decisions needed, and challenges faced regarding numerous IT projects she and her team are actively engaged in, currently. Her collaborative approach invites input into the planning and development of projects while remaining focused on the project's objectives.

Elgin Thomas, interim director, Employee Relations, demonstrates integrity and strong ethical principles in his employee relations work. Through his numerous written and verbal interactions with colleagues, he is honest, forthright, and courageous.

Theresa Richwine, executive director, Website Resources, demonstrated integrity when she was honest, open and truthful about an ineffective HACC webpage. The webpage was resulting in visitors leaving the page too quickly, which means they were not receiving the information they needed. Theresa reviewed analytics, identified the problem and recommended solutions to address it.

Please join me in congratulating these individuals by sending them a Hawk Eye or email. I also hope you will provide me with the names and specific actions other colleagues have done to exemplify our College values. Please do so at hacc.edu/feedback.

Thank you.

“If you absolutely cannot tolerate critics, then don’t do anything new or interesting.” Jeff Bezos