PARTNERSHIPS

To help communities address and ultimately meet the complex issues facing them, strong and successful partnerships are essential. For communities to be prosperous in the 21st century, a coalition of dynamic and diverse partnerships will need to be developed where individuals and organizations will gather to bring resources together, to share expertise and promote advocacy and awareness of external and internal pressures being exerted on the community at large. Kean University through the Gateway Institute is able to devote campus resources and expertise through the involvement of faculty, staff, and students in a series of projects throughout New Jersey. Gateway’s partnerships with numerous organizations allows us to further the development of Kean University beyond our campus and surrounding communities, but across the Gateway region.

The Gateway Institute sponsors, supports, and participates in programs that support our overall mission and goals, such as:

• "A is for Archives - Getting Started with Preservation: Documents and Archival Collections" workshop presented by the Union County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs. This session explained the deterioration process inherent in materials and introduced the basics of preservation planning.
• "Grant Writing and Beyond: The Nuts and Bolts of Finding and Applying for Grants" sponsored by the Center for Non-Profit Corporations. This was a four (4) day workshop that sought to introduce participants to the grant writing process. It was directed toward the novice and guided them through the steps of an experienced grant writer.
• Four Mondays in June: Community 2000 was a series of weekly roundtable discussions focusing on topics of community concerns identified by a planning group of Westfield citizens convened by then Mayor Thomas C. Jardim. Topics included "Raising Children of Tolerance, Values and Purpose" whose primary focus centered on moral and spiritual regard.
• Sports Management Symposium: Sports in Society 2002 co-sponsored by Kean’s College of Business and Public Administration and Kean’s Department of Continuing and Professional Education, in partnership with Fleet Bank. The symposium covered the role of sports media and how far their boundaries should extend, the code of ethics practiced by sports merchandising giants like Nike and Adidas, how television and cable networks influence sports, and whether the advent of sports agents has helped or hurt professional athletics.
• More Computers for More Kids was a program conducted by Gateway’s Community Outreach Partnership Center where Kean University contributed 40 high tech computers to family day care providers in the Family Day Care Network. Its goal was to give children and young people access to computers so they could communicate with schools and transact business through the World Wide Web.