Mike Wolanin | The Republic Indiana Commission for Higher Education Commissioner Chris Lowery joins guests in a round of applause for John Burnett, executive vice chair for the Community Education Coalition, during the 25th anniversary celebration for the Community Education Coalition at the Columbus Learning Center in Columbus, Ind., Wednesday, July 12, 2023.
A unique collaboration has just reached a significant milestone.
The Community Education Coalition (CEC) celebrated its 25th anniversary and thanked its partners for their support during a private reception entitled “25 years of Momentum” at the Columbus Learning Center Wednesday evening. Attendees included leaders from local education, business and government sectors.
Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Chris Lowery was one of the featured speakers at the event, along with various coalition leaders.
This included CEC President and CEO Kathy Oren, who described the coalition as “a partnership of stakeholders from the public, private and social sector who have a desire to see our community and our region grow and prosper for all people with a focus on education, equity and opportunity.”
“The work has been successful because all of us, every one of you in the room, are working together to embed equity in everything we do, to link students with excellent education opportunities aligned with outstanding career opportunities at local employers leading to a strong economy now and in the future,” she said.
The origins of the coalition date back to 1996, when the community asked the Hudson Institute to help them envision the future of Columbus’ economy.
The institute found that the city’s future was “all about people,” recalled executive vice chair John Burnett. He joked that, at the time, such a statement was “crazy talk,” but the community embraced the idea, which laid the foundation for the coalition.
“The CEC began very humbly in 1997 as an experiment housed in the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation,” said Oren. “It was a program developed by the business community alongside education partners. We expanded our work together, focused on the broad spectrum of education from early learning through higher education, serving all students — and in particular, students of color and students of all ages who families experience economic challenges.”
Since its creation, the CEC has become a “supporting” organization that serves 11 public entities, including both public school corporations in Bartholomew County, city and county government, Columbus Regional Health, the Heritage Fund, Indiana Workforce Development and the three higher education institutions located on the airpark campus, coalition officials said.
The coalition has also fostered several initiatives, such as the TuFuturo Latino education outreach program and CivicLab, and been involved with a number of projects, such as the expansion of AirPark Columbus College Campus facilities and the creation of Indiana University’s J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program.
The CEC’s impact has also spread beyond Columbus and Bartholomew County.
“We serve stakeholders throughout our community, region, state and increasingly in dozens of communities and regions throughout the country,” coalition officials said. “We share all that we learn and bring learning back from around the country, further connecting learning with economic opportunity for all people.”
One such example of the connection between education and opportunity is Ashley Dieter, the CEC’s director of finance and operations.
Dieter was a first-generation, non-traditional college student who initially earned an associate degree in accounting from Ivy Tech Community College’s Lafayette campus. She later moved to Columbus, where she became both a stay-at-home mom and an IUPUC student earning her bachelor’s degree.
The local campus was crucial to this balance, as an hour-long commute to Indianapolis would have been too much for her parental responsibilities, she said.
Dieter added that, in addition to wanting to complete her degree in finance, she also wanted to set an example for her daughters.
“My dad was a steel mill worker,” she said. “My mom did not work, and she was the caregiver. They did the best that they could with what they had, and we didn’t have that much. And so I wanted to break that cycle.”
After college, she went to work at Faurecia. However, when the opportunity arose to work with the CEC, it felt like a chance to return home.
“It was bringing me full circle to where I started and to where so many invested in me on this campus,” said Dieter. “And how could I pay it forward? Well, I could pay it forward by being at the exact place that so many of you, that were here when I was here as a student, invested in me.”
CEC board members Shannon McDonald and Brittany Diebolt also shared their personal stories as airpark alumni.
Board chair Jim Schacht, who is the vice president of corporate responsibility and community relations at Cummins and CEO of the Cummins Foundation, said that the coalition is a perfect example of the “collaborative spirit” that typifies Columbus.
“This partnership is alive and well today,” he said. “We can feel it. We can feel it in the room today in the way we work together, in the way we engage one another, and in the way we share our common commitment to the future, a commitment to ensuring that the productive partnership we have built and benefited from over the past 25 years will continue for the next 25 years and beyond.”
While the CEC technically turned 25 in 2022, Burnett said that the coalition chose to schedule its anniversary celebration in 2023 in the hope of finding a date that would work for its various partners and not overlap with other major events.
The coalition also chose Wednesday as the event date due to the fact that the Indiana Commission for Higher Education held its monthly meeting at Ivy Tech Community College – Columbus on Thursday, which they knew would likely bring several people from post-secondary institutions to Columbus.
Burnett added that they also wanted to thank the commission for its support and sponsorship of the Columbus Learning Center.
“Stan Jones was the commissioner for Indiana Commission for Higher Education, and his deputy commissioner, Kent Weldon — both of whom are now deceased, they were terrific people — but they said, ‘We can support this, and you all are going to have to do the work,’” he told The Republic. “‘And by the way, the state’s never had a shared use facility idea like this, of bringing together IU, Purdue and Ivy Tech. So it’s going to take all of you and it’s going to take your community alongside those three enterprises to make it happen.’”
Lowery expressed a deep admiration of the CEC dating back to before he even joined the commission.
“It’s special work that’s going on here,” he said. “All I want to do is take this thing that’s so special and help spread it across the state.”
