The Community Relations Coalition family is growing - pending approval from the East Lansing City Council.
The group of students, residents, city officials, landlords, business owners and MSU faculty work together to create bonds between student residents and permanent residents in city neighborhoods with the help of three new student neighborhood resource coordinators, which brings the total to six.
“Our plan is to expand,” coalition member Pat Enos said. “We wanted to double the number of neighborhood resource coordinators that we have for next year, and we wanted to stay in the locations we were in this year and add to that proximity.”
Enos, who also is the assistant to the vice president of student affairs and services at MSU, said the group will continue having students live in the Bailey and Oakhill neighborhoods and tentatively allow one student to coordinate one all-student section of Bailey.
While coalition members are calling the year a success, the project is still in danger of encountering budget troubles.
Because the program is funded by MSU and the city, it depends on both entities for financial support.
With a $325,000 deficit in the proposed budget for East Lansing’s 2001-02 budget, city officials are considering cutting funding for social service organizations like the coalition.
The six new coordinators have been hired pending financial help from the city.
“There’s a lot of things on the table right now and until the budget has passed,” Mayor Pro Tem Beth Schwarze said.
While the city council typically approves 1 percent of the general fund to go toward social service programs, Schwarze said the coalition could try alternative methods of fund raising and grant writing to fund its growth.
Coalition Chairman and education Professor Steve Kaagan said the group still has several pending grant requests, and doesn’t doubt that the group will continue with or without city support.
“We’re pretty much on target for what we want to be doing in terms of expanding our efforts,” he said. “The (coalition) is feeling pretty positive at this point.”
Coalition representatives fielded inquiries from students and interviewed about 12 people for the positions that require students to live in certain neighborhoods and take six credits. The students also receive a yearly stipend.
“We thought it was a good idea, so we wanted to expand it,” she said. “We wanted to seed the idea more broadly and get more people involved with it.”
Coordinator Stacy Faber, an advertising senior, said her year with the coalition has been beneficial to herself and the neighborhood. The final coalition-sponsored event for her section in the Bailey Neighborhood is from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Bailey Pump House, which is at the corner of Orchard and Ann streets.
“I think things have gone well,” she said. “We didn’t have clearly defined rules at the beginning of the year. This year was a lot of testing and seeing what works.”
