First Year: Exploration

First years begin their Bonner journey in Block 3 with the first year adjunct coarse followed by some structured exploration with community partners who have identified "mini-internship" opportunities in the Spring semester. In your first year at CC, we encourage you to reach out to any and all current Bonners, as well as CCE staff members as you think through whether or not Bonner might be a good fit for you. Your first year is also a chance for you to explore your interests in community engagement work, so that you might be prepared to engage in some deeper learning and commitment. 

As you prepare to apply to the Bonner Fellowship at Colorado College in the beginning of the Fall, you might consider researching and journaling about the following questions - or talking with a friend or family member.

• What is Colorado College like, and how might my experience be different as a Bonner Fellow?
• What is Colorado Springs like? What issues does the city and region face, and where might I see myself getting involved to make a positive difference?
• What local partner organizations would I like to work with? Why are these organizations interesting to me?
• What might other Bonners be like? How might I build relationships with students in my cohort as well as older students?
• Who are the CCE staff members? How might I build a strong relationship with CCE staff? What additional resources does the CCE provide? How might I develop relationships with these staff members?
• How would I define success for myself in the Bonner Fellowship? Numbers of hours worked, impact made on individuals or groups, personal growth and well being? Something else?

The Bonner Fellowship is designed to help you grow personally through skill development, personal discernment, engagement with communities beyond the campus, and community formation with other Bonners. It's an opportunity for you to develop the skills you need to make a difference - both while you are a student in Colorado Springs and in your life after college. Bonner staff and other Bonners are here to support and facilitate that experience for you, but as with all of college - and throughout your life - you must take the lead role in your own education and development.

Second Year: Gain Experience

Your year of exploration should have led you to identify a population, issue, or skill upon which you will focus. Your second year is about working with an organization to focus on that issue, work with that population, or cultivate and develop your skills. Equally important is the development of a set of professional skills, habits, and sensibilities that prepare you to be effective in the world of work. You will have a site supervisor in the community to whom you will report throughout the second year, and learning how to communicate with your supervisor and other staff is a critical learning goal. You might also learn how community agencies function from the inside - how budgets are made, how priorities emerge as action items, how projects develop and are managed, and where your particular organization(s) sit within the larger ecosystem of nonprofit and government agencies in Colorado Springs.

In general, the second year is about going deeper than exploration: spending more time with one site; developing deeper knowledge about a particular issue or population; cultivating relationships with your fellow Bonners. In this year, you also want to prepare yourself to think about 'signature work' that you can do in your final year as a Bonner. Specifically, you want to begin thinking about possibilities for a capstone project, often a capacity building project, that you will implement in your final year. The goal is to meaningfully integrate your academic work and your community engagement into a project that will expand the capacity of a community site.

We encourage you to study abroad in your junior year in the program, and to begin exploring this in your sophomore year. By this time, you will hopefully have built a community with your Bonner cohort and other students at CC, narrowed in on your academic major and course of study, and developed some skills and sensibilities through community engagement that will be very helpful in a study abroad experience. We encourage you to build on all these experiences in creating a plan to study abroad in your junior year that includes community engagement. We ask that you develop this plan in conversation with CCE staff before you commit to a study abroad experience.

Finally, you will craft a Community Learning Agreement to govern your work and relationship with your community partner. You will create an updated CLA with your partner by the end of Block 1 and Block 3 for the Fall and Spring semesters.

Second Year Primary Experiential Learning Goals:

• Develop knowledge of an issue and gain experience working on that issue
• Develop professional communication skills
• Network with other students at CC in coalitions and organizations who may be interested in working on your issue in an effort to begin thinking about Collective Impact
• Start to think about your capstone project with a focus on capacity building, signature work
• If interested in study abroad, develop a plan for your junior year

Second Year Overview

• Ongoing: CCE Changemaker Curriculum blockly workshops, All Bonner meetings, community based internship
• Fall: CLA, Fall Retreat
• Spring: CLA, Spring Retreat
• Summer: Local or international funding possibilities (Apply for funding)

Third Year: Build on Experience

In the third year, you begin to pull together a number of major themes. You now have experience in a professional setting, practicing the skills and sensibilities you developed in your first two years. You should begin to integrate the academic insights born from your major into your community engaged work. You should now have a depth of knowledge about an issue, population, or skill - as you have been working to cultivate this for two years. You will also have a more firm understanding of the site where you have worked, and its place within the broader social structure of nonprofit and government agencies. Additionally, by the start of the third year, our hope is that you have come to understand what you might be able to do within the site where you work that can leave a lasting positive impact. The third year is all about planning and implementing a capstone project, signature work that will leave a lasting impact on the site where you work and which should be a starting place for the endeavors you will pursue in your postgraduate life. This document outlines the different kinds of capacity building projects by type that have been carried out across the country in Bonner schools throughout the network. Building capacity means the work you initiate can continue after you leave: the work is not dependent on you because your contribution will last after you are gone.

Planning such a project takes time, which is why we begin thinking about how to do this in the second year. By the start of your third year, you should have some ideas about what kind of project you'd like to undertake. You should be in constant conversation with Bonner staff in the CCE about your project, and before the end of Block 7 in your junior year you should submit a capstone project proposal. This proposal should be co-created with your site supervisor. 

Your on-campus role in the Bonner Fellowship also shifts in the third year in the program. You will be seen by younger Bonners as an example. Beyond just showing up, active participation in all-Bonner meetings and Bonner retreats becomes critical, as these are the spaces where you can interact with and become a co-educator for Bonners in their sophomore year. 

Finally, we actively encourage Bonners to study abroad during their junior year. It's important to communicate early and often with CCE Staff about your study abroad plans to ensure that you integrate community engagement into your study abroad program. 

Third Year Primary Experiential Learning Goals:

• Shift from adding capacity to building capacity
• Organize other students for off-campus community engagement
• Begin to bring academic insight to bear on your community work in preparation for postgraduate opportunities

Second Year Overview

• Ongoing: CCE Changemaker Curriculum blockly workshops, All Bonner meetings, community based internship
• Fall: CLA, Fall Retreat
• Spring: CLA, Spring Retreat, Capstone Proposal
• Summer: Local or international funding possibilities (Apply for funding)

Fourth Year: Build Capacity

The final year in the program is all about integration: the goal is to make sense of the work you have done in the community, on campus, and in the classroom through a culmintating capacity-building capstone project. 

You should begin to focus on your specific capstone project and think about how the work will be continued after you leave. This could include developing a plan with your community partner, recruiting additional students to help at your site, holding info sessions about the work of the site at CC and engaging in other public awareness campaigns. The key is to engage actively with your community partner in your senior year to begin the process of transitioning out of your role in a way that creates minimal disruption to the ongoing work of your community partner site.

During the first four blocks of your senior year, we encourage you to actively apply for postgraduate opportunities - some of which are available to you simply because you are a Colorado College student. Please review this list for more information on these opportunities. While not required, completing post-graduate applications are an excellent way to synthesize your experiences on campus and in the community for the purpose of finding the next step to gain experience and build skills. Post-graduate fellowships like the Watson Fellowship, the Fulbright, or the Peace Corps are often great ways to continue personal discernment and skill development.

We also encourage you to pursue employment applications or graduate school applications, as these are also an excellent way to articulate how you have integrated your academic work and community engagement.

This process of integrating your academic work is important for applications to graduate school, but we also strongly encourage you to review the host of postgraduate opportunities and fellowships available to you outside of traditional graduate programs. As noted above, in the fall of the senior year, you should also focus on leadership transition from the many roles you have come to occupy on campus and in the community. The process of effectively transitioning leadership is very important. CCE staff will help you by assisting you in developing the tools needed to succeed in this process, including developing transition documents and creating an onboarding or orientation for the students who will follow in your footsteps. This process, sometimes called succession planning, is a critical skill to develop as an undergraduate as you will likely utilize this throughout your career. In the second semester of the senior year, you should focus on completing your capstone and preparing and delivering the Senior Presentation of Learning. Particular attention should be given to explaining how your academic work influenced your community work, and how your community work influenced your academic work. This process of 'integrating' often distinct aspects of your college experience is explained in detail in this worksheet from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. A draft of the senior presentation of learning should be submitted to CCE Staff no later than the end of Block 7 of the student's senior year.

Fourth Year Primary Experiential Learning Goals:

• Integrating academic and community work
• Capacity-building Capstone Project
• Completing for postgraduate opportunities
• Succession planning
• Articulating your story

Fourth Year Overview

• Ongoing: CCE Changemaker Curriculum blockly workshops, All Bonner meetings, community based internship (with a focus on a Capstone project)
• Fall: CLA, Fall Retreat
• Spring: CLA, Spring Retreat, Senior Presentions of Learning, Graduation!!

Summer Fellowships

If you are interested in a summer internship and would like to stay in-the-loop on funding developments, please email tvoget@coloradocollege.edu.

Full time summers of community engagement are critical to your development as a Bonner Fellow. They give you a glimpse into what it is like to work full-time with an organization on an issue, and offer extremely valuable personal and professional experience. We recommend that you spend the summers that you have in the Bonner Fellowship working full time with a nonprofit or government agency on something you care about.

In the summer before you enter the Bonner Fellowship, it can be important to think about your first year at CC and your experience with community engagement thus far. Take stock of your experience and consider the following questions:

• What worked well for me this year in terms of establishing a social network at CC?
• What did I enjoy doing academically?
• What was I good at academically?
• What community engagement experiences were meaningful to me, and why?
• What community engagement experiences didn't prove meaningful to me, and why?
• What kind of trajectory might I envision for myself?
• What classes do I need to take to achieve this trajectory?
• What kind of community engagement experience do I need to achieve this trajectory?
• Did I find someone(s) who could be a mentor for me?

The summer after your first year in the program is an ideal time to complete a full-time summer of engagement. Consider continuing your work with the organization(s) you chose to work with throughout your first year, or consider working on the same issue at a different site in your hometown, if not in Colorado Springs. Consider also how you might expand your perspective on the issue on which you are focused by spending the academic year working in Colorado Springs, the first summer at a different domestic site, and then sharpening your experience by spending your second summer abroad. There are many possibilities if you develop a trajectory for yourself, make a plan, and communicate actively with CCE staff to bring that plan to reality. Keep in mind you have additional opportunities available to you to earn money working on something you care about through the CCE, and through other related programs like the Public Interest Fellowship Program, if you decide not to go the route of a full-time summer of engagement. The key is planning in advance and constant communication with CCE Staff.

The second summer is an excellent time to complete a summer of community engagement abroad. It's possible that you could continue your time abroad after completing blocks or a semester abroad in the junior year. Or, if you have not had a chance to study abroad during the academic year, the third summer could be the ideal time for you to spend at least two months working with a partner and issue of your choosing. The key is understanding how this experience fits into your trajectory, making a plan with CCE staff early on, and putting forward a competitive application to spend your summer abroad in the time between your junior and senior years.

Summer of Engagement Fellowship Eligibility and Requirements:

• Domestic: A Bonner Fellow in any class
• International: Preference given to Bonner students who have already demonstrated independence and ability to be self-directed through study abroad and/or Venture Grant and international internship experiences
• Complete the funding application on Summit before the end of Block 6
• Research and/or apply to other CC grants (i.e. Venture Grant, Career Center Internship Grant)
• For selected students, check-in with the Bonner Summer Intern(s) every 2 weeks
• For selected students, either write 2 reflections (one halfway through the internship, and another at the end) or create a project (like a blog, video documentary, etc). The purpose is to practice sharing your experience and reflecting, and to keep us updated on the amazing work you are doing!

Requests for summer funding will be reviewed based upon the following:

Criteria:

1. Student learning and impact - skill-based application, professional experience, interpersonal work
2. Community impact and sustainability
3. Integration with academics, fellowship, and profession
4. The extent to which the funding is needed and impactful
5. Eligibility: Students must have good standing in the program

Prioritization:

• Longer-duration internships (higher community and student impact)
• Applicant year in the program (prioritization for older students)