Bailey is the Associate Director of the Center for Leadership and Community Engagement at Rollins College. Based out of Winter Park, Florida, Bailey’s main responsibility is to direct the Bonner’s Leader Program, an initiative that sends a group of 40 Rollins students out to different nonprofits in high-impact arenas, from education and the environment to hunger to homelessness. Bailey’s best piece of advice to interested students is to get involved with as many organizations as possible while in school and to build your network as widespread as possible.
Transcript
So my name is Bailey Clark and I serve as the Associate Director in the Center for Leadership and Community Engagement at Rollins College. So the mission of the Center for Leadership and Community Engagement is to support students, faculty and staff with opportunities to get involved in the community and hopefully create positive change. My role specifically within the office is to direct the Bonner Leaders Program. That's a program for 40 students at Rollins that dedicate six to eight hours every week with a non-profit organization in the greater Orlando area. So they focus on impact areas like the environment, education, hunger and homelessness, poverty and the goal is for them to take on roles within those organizations that help the organization fulfill its mission. So everything from placing them in organizations where they are passionate about the mission to giving them tools to be successful in their roles. We do weekly courses with them. We provide monthly trainings on non-profit, best practices in non-profit management, volunteer management and things like that to make sure that they're successful in their roles. Currently I'm teaching a class on non-profit management and we've invited our partners from the Edyth Bush Institute to come in and talk about what it means to start a non-profit organization. Quite a few of the students that we work with are really passionate about the organizations that they work with and perhaps want to either pursue a career in non-profit management or start their own non-profit one day. So we go through what that takes and we've talked a lot about how many non-profit organizations exist in the Central Florida area and ways to either plug into existing ones or enhance the work that they're currently doing. In addition to my role with the Bonner Program, I support the Community Engagement designated courses on campus. So those are courses where students spend at least 15 hours per semester working with a non-profit organization. Anything from helping elementary schools to develop curriculum to working with local health organizations to better serve the populations within their communities, to working with environmental issues through the sciences. We provide resources to faculty and students to make that possible.
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