College of the Canyons recently announced that it received a $25,000 grant through Stanley Black & Decker’s Global Impact Challenge to support students enrolled in the college’s new construction technology pathway.
Initiated in 2021, the Global Impact Challenge grant program will award up to $25 million in grant funding over five years to nonprofits supporting trade workforce development initiatives in the construction and manufacturing sectors. As a Makers grant recipient, COC is among 91 organizations that will help skill and reskill roughly 210,448 makers throughout 2023.
In 2022, COC launched its new construction technology pathway with the support of Stanley Black & Decker’s inaugural Global Impact Challenge program. The pre-construction technology lab technician will work onsite to provide 50 COC students with one-on-one attention, additional instruction, and mentorship support.
“This grant will be instrumental in helping our students receive high-quality training with the most up-to-date construction technology available,” said Harriet Happel, dean of career education, integrative learning, and the Employment Center at the college.
COC’s entry-level construction technology program leads to certification in introductory craft skills and residential/commercial construction. It helps students gain experience with basic power tools for carpentry and masonry. Stanley Black & Decker’s in-kind tool donation helped create hands-on skills attainment labs for training.
“Stanley Black & Decker is immensely proud to support College of the Canyons as they work to skill and reskill the next generation of trade professionals,” said Stanley Black & Decker Corporate Responsibility Officer Deb Geyer. “Currently, in the U.S., there are an estimated 650,000 open construction jobs and 10 million unfilled manufacturing jobs globally. Our purpose is to support ‘Those Who Make the World,’ and being able to fund educational programs and nonprofits that are revitalizing trade careers directly connects to our core mission. Thanks to this year’s Makers Grant Recipients, we will be one step closer to closing the trade skills gap together.”
In related news, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded College of the Canyons a $3 million Title V Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions (DHSI) grant to help the college support Hispanic students pursuing degrees in STEM and increase retention and completion rates of Hispanic students attending college for the first time.
“We are very excited about this Title V grant,” said Dr. Omar Torres, chief instructional officer at the college. “As a Hispanic-serving institution, COC will be better equipped than ever to provide our Hispanic students with the tools, resources, and support they need to thrive in STEM fields academically.”
Beginning October 2023, the five-year grant will provide the college with funding to support Hispanic students pursuing STEM degrees through a multi-faceted approach of redesigning Open Educational Resources (OER) with Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) elements, providing student counseling and support services, as well as increasing the availability of MESA-type services.
In addition, the grant will allow COC to offer robust professional development training in culturally relevant pedagogy to strengthen the capacity and knowledge of faculty to better engage with the diverse needs of Hispanic students.
COC’s Hispanic student population has steadily grown. In 2022, COC was ranked No. 17 and 35 in The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education Magazine for enrolling the most Hispanic students and granting the most degrees, respectively.
According to the data, the college had a Hispanic population of 15,410 students, totaling 49% of the total student enrollment, which was 31,696 in 2020-21. That same year, of the 3,200 associate degrees awarded by the college, 1,459-degree recipients were Hispanic students.
“This funding will make a significant impact for so many of our Hispanic students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college,” Jasmine Ruys, vice president of student services at the college, said in the release. “We want to do everything we can to help our students succeed while at COC, but also prepare them for the transfer process to a four-year STEM program.”
It’s National Hispanic-Serving Institutions Week! 49% of our COC student body is Hispanic. We were named a Hispanic-Serving Institution by @usdoegov in 2015. We are proud to be one of 569 HSIs that educate and empower Hispanic/Latina/o/x students. #HSIWeek #HSIServe pic.twitter.com/IZz8RYWBGq
— CollegeoftheCanyons (@canyons) September 15, 2022
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