Community Values Project to Represent Campus Priorities

Jillian Beaster
beasterjro@lakeforest.edu
News Editor

With the presidential search underway, Interim President Rob Krebs expressed interest in unifying the campus by creating community values to present to the new president and the campus. 

Overall, the project allows students, staff and faculty to collectively create and define shared values that reflect the campus community’s goals and beliefs. Receiving a cumulative response of 445/2,310 (19%) members of the campus community, the project exceeded their initial average of 10%-15% participation in campus surveys. 

Jackie Slaats, Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Career Advancement, assumed leadership for this project alongside Kim Davis and Melissa Werntz. They broke up the process into various stages across the second semester: campus-wide surveys, focus groups and listening sessions, summary, and eventually endorsement. 

Student participation has been encouraged throughout the entire process, as Slaats believes these values will have a positive impact on the overall community for years to come.

“What I heard really loud and clear from the students was they really want to bring our groups together,” Slaats said. “You know, we’re not separate groups, but we’re all Lake Forest College, we’re all Foresters.”

The process has been quick, but Slaats is happy with student participation and responses. 

“[Interim President Krebs] basically introduced it on email on January 29 and then those next two weeks, we went into the planning phases, and with a survey launching on February 19,” Slaats said. “I like we have the right concepts and the right ideas… now we have to work to come up with a [third] version, which is going to take the best of those into a version that we would present to college council.”

Taking feedback from both the surveys and the other planning and response sessions, Slaats combined the top responses from participants into two different paragraph statements, and students voted on their favorite option. These top responses were “community and engagement”, with “respect, accountability, opportunity, intellectual rigor” close behind. 

Slaats believes that the final product that will be presented to the College Council will bring Lake Forest College closer to its values and goals as an institution.
“Values drive mission,” Slaats said. “The mission is not changing…[these] values help us achieve our mission really clearly in strongly unified ways. Values drive mission, and I think that’s an important piece.”

Other than creating a clear mission, there is extreme benefit in student involvement in projects that involve them and the greater community.

“At the end of the day, to have that many students take a survey about values, something that doesn’t necessarily feel very tangible for a lot of students, I ‘d say that’s a pretty good response rate,” said Kate Kiameh, senior and Student Government Secretary. “Having a core set of values is just good for fostering our community… I think outlining these values allows us to better put forward what our college stands for.”

Of these top responses, Slaats tried to gain input on the number of words that would represent the community. 

“The consensus was [people] just want to be able to remember them, and we want to understand that if we should all be able to if they are our values…so the consensus was not more than five” Slaats said. 

Though these values were initially for the new president, both Kiameh and Slaats believe they will have a much deeper impact. 

“I think it’s really critical to have a very clear mission for our college in a time when higher education is so threatened and there’s so much outside influence on what higher ed institutions need to be doing or need to be promoting,” Kiameh said. “So I think making sure that we’re clear in our mission so that we can stand strong against outside influences. I think that’s also pretty critical.”The timeline for the Community Values project is winding down, with the final proposal presentation at the end of April for its endorsement and adoption.