Jim Vaughan

On the model factory floor of the Haley Barbour Center for Manufacturing Excellence, freshmen from three different University of Mississippi schools test their chops, learning the basics of manufacturing techniques in plastics, welding, 3-D printing and more.

Model factory floor of the Haley Barbour
Center for Manufacturing Excellence

The CME students aren’t planning to work on the line, but the experiences will inform their expertise as they assume professional roles. Entering the workforce, they will be graduates of an innovative academic program charged with creating industry leaders who have an exceptionally well-rounded understanding of manufacturing.

The CME is the only program of its kind. It offers a minor in “manufacturing engineering” to its students from the School of Accountancy and School of Business Administration and an emphasis in manufacturing to students from the School of Engineering. With over 140 students enrolled and a projected enrollment of 200, the interdisciplinary CME will turn out engineers versed in strategic planning, accountants who get marketing and business administrators who understand the nuts and bolts of manufacturing.

“We are training students to be professionals in the manufacturing workforce,” said James Vaughan, director of the CME and F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “We’re producing very well-rounded students. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an engineering major or an accounting major; you’re all treated as one. If it’s technology-slanted, the business and accounting students have to catch up. If it’s a strategic planning course, then the engineering students have to figure out the business side of it.”

The interdisciplinary strategy was formed as a response to the needs of the state’s manufacturing industry. The center’s initial funding was tied to the incentive package that brought Toyota Motor Corp. to Blue Springs in 2007. Toyota returned part of its incentive package with the request that the state invest the funds in programs to benefit education and produce a strong manufacturing workforce. With leadership from Chancellor Emeritus Robert Khayat and former Gov. Haley Barbour, part of those funds helped establish the CME in June 2008.

“Toyota needed professional development,” Vaughan said. “They needed the business people, they needed the engineers, and they needed the higher-level training–the people who would be running the plant.”

Under the guidance of a 20-member advisory board composed of leaders in Mississippi’s manufacturing industry and co-appointed by the governor and chancellor, the program responds to feedback from Mississippi’s business leaders and follows the Toyota Production System concept, which emphasizes continuous improvement, respect for employees, a long-term philosophy and more. Experts from Toyota work closely with the CME to develop TPS courses and to encourage the TPS philosophy in the school.

“Our advisory board is telling us what industry really needs and expecting us to produce that individual,” Vaughan said. “This program doesn’t exist anywhere else. We’re creating it as we go. If our courses aren’t better this year than last year, then we’re not doing our job.”

Governor Haley Barbour and
Chancellor Dan Jones

CME students are encouraged to pursue internships and cooperative education, or “co-op,” experiences as part of their studies. In the co-op programs, students dedicate two semesters to working in a manufacturing company, accruing three credit hours over the two semesters and earning real wages. The experience allows graduates to become better competitors on the job market. Students have been placed in GE Aviation in Batesville, Caterpillar in Corinth, Viking Range in Greenwood and other companies. It is the first formal cooperative education program developed for the university.

CME officials hope to maintain the program’s enrollment of Mississippi students and to continue welcoming students from across the country. So far, students have enrolled from as far away as Vermont, California, Wisconsin, Florida and Texas, eager to take advantage of the program’s unique interdisciplinary offerings.

The CME also has a close working relationship with Insight Park and shares its goal of economic development.

“Part of the reason we’re here is not just to supply people to go to work for existing industry, but also to be an attraction for industry moving in,” Vaughan said. “We can supply your professional workforce. You don’t have to get all your people from California to move here.”

Tucker Carrington

With more than 650 people incarcerated per 100,000 residents, Mississippi has one of nation’s highest per capita incarceration rates, and it’s a harrowing fact that some of those people are serving time for crimes they did not commit.

Since its establishment in 2007, the University of Mississippi-based Mississippi Innocence Project has provided legal aid and expertise to exonerate nine innocent men. Wrongfully convicted for murder, rape, armed carjacking and other crimes, the men were able to clear their names and walk free, but not without losing years or even decades of their lives to erroneous convictions.

In one case, a felon with a history of sexual assault convictions went without punishment for the murders of two 3-year-old Noxubee County girls while two innocent men served sentences for the crimes. The true perpetuator, Justin Albert Johnson, had been a suspect in both cases, a fact that was overlooked until the Mississippi Innocence Project secured DNA evidence linking Johnson to one of the crimes and prompting a confession. The exonerated men, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, were the victims of flawed forensic science and inadequate, underfinanced defenses; tragically, if Johnson had been apprehended for the first murder, the second never would have occurred. The case is a disturbing example of what can go wrong when the system fails, but it’s also a hopeful example of how innocence work can lead to amends.

Besides defending prisoners, MIP has initiated policy changes to correct flaws in the criminal justice system. In 2009, MIP helped state legislators craft a bill to allow post-conviction access to DNA testing and to require that biological evidence collected at crime scenes be preserved as long as a case is unsolved or a convicted defendant is under state supervision. MIP’s legislative successes also include the passage of a bill to financially compensate those who have been exonerated, many of whom have no money, housing or job opportunities and limited education. Most recently, the group led stakeholders from around the state in the process of reforming the state’s medical examiner law.

The medical examiner reform is a strong example of what can be achieved when the university works with partners around the state to address a problem in the criminal justice system, said Tucker Carrington, director of the Mississippi Innocence Project and assistant professor of law.

“Coroners came, people from the public safety commission came, a lot of legislators came—Brooks and Brewer, Mississippi Innocence, it was a big crowd, and it was the first time anyone had gotten that group of people together to say, ‘There’s a problem we need to correct,'” Carrington said. “In one collaborative effort, we changed the medical and legal structure in the state for the good.”

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Mississippi Innocence, a film by Joe York, tells the story of the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer.

Carrington and his small team receive hundreds of applications each year from people seeking help behind bars. Pending litigation includes several DNA cases and several more that concern the flawed forensic procedures of a medical examiner who testified in hundreds of trials.

MIP was established in 2007 with support from the John and Renée Grisham Foundation, the Wilbur Colom Foundation and others. A film about the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, Mississippi Innocence, has informed a wider audience about innocence work and has been featured in film festivals, viewed in law school classrooms, and screened by the Newseum and the American Constitutional Society and its chapters.

MIP also runs an Innocence Clinic through the UM School of Law. The clinic’s mission is to provide students with professional experience and an opportunity to serve the public. Students develop valuable legal skills as they assist MIP’s clients.

“Clinical education gives students a way to get their feet wet,” Carrington said. “They get to put theory into practice for the first time ever as lawyers. They deal with clients and witnesses and whoever else may be connected to a case for the first time. In a profession where those skills are of paramount importance, the educational component is critical.”

Carrington, who served as a public defender for a decade before directing MIP, said that the UM law school has its greatest potential for positive change in educating the next generation of Mississippi’s lawyers.

“We’re not going to change all of the race and class issues in the criminal justice system, but what we can do is produce lawyers who understand what it means to be a lawyer and to do that job ethically and zealously,” he said. “A lawyer’s ability to come up against what we think of as systemic issues that involve fairness, fundamental rights, race and class, and to reflect on those things is a rare commodity. Our hope is that they will take some of the lessons they have learned here and move the state forward.”

Tom Clancy

Fifty years ago, prosecutors could rely on paper trails and crime scene photos to provide courtroom evidence. But the transition from a paper-based world to a digital one has brought many murky questions. In today’s digitized society, where does privacy end and what are the limitations of a search warrant? Questions like these represent the core of the Cybercrime Initiative led by the University of Mississippi’s National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law.

“Even in a garden-variety case that would otherwise have had nothing to do with cybercrime before the advent of digital evidence, there’s a possibility or likelihood today that we are going to find some digital evidence,” said Thomas Clancy, director of the center and research professor of law. Founded in 2000 and based at the UM School of Law, the center has received funding from the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of Justice Programs.

The University of Mississippi’s School of Law is housed in the new Robert C. Khayat Law Center.

Clancy speaks at a Cyber Crime Initiative conference.

Legal professionals and law enforcement officials attend a Fourth Amendment Conference.

Clancy established the Cybercrime Initiative in 2002, when his expertise in search and seizure led him to anticipate the expanding role digital evidence would play in law enforcement. Since then, Clancy and his colleagues have served a national need by offering continuing education opportunities to judges, prosecutors, law enforcement agents and others regarding computer-related crimes and the legal framework used to seize digital evidence. Over the past decade, the center has hosted dozens of conferences and webinars on cybercrimes from ID theft to fraud to child pornography; some of the conferences have been conducted in partnership with the National Association of Attorneys General. Although the center is national in scope, the Cybercrime Initiative has been particularly beneficial in its home state.

“We’ve worked very closely with the attorney general’s office to help them create, develop and provide expertise and training for their cybercrime unit within the state of Mississippi,” Clancy said. “The Mississippi Attorney General’s office has one of the better units in the country, which has been there for almost a decade now.”

Besides spearheading the Cybercrime Initiative, Clancy also founded two law school programs through the center. The Prosecution Externship Program places UM law students in prosecutors’ offices throughout the state, allowing them to gain valuable experience while at the same time assisting the state’s prosecutors. The Criminal Appeals Clinic allows UM law students to represent convicted persons on appeal. Both programs were initially run through the center and have since been adopted by the School of Law.

“The Criminal Appeals Clinic increases the quality of the representation for those people on appeal and gives the law students real hands-on experience, providing the appellate courts with quality arguments and generally improving the state’s criminal justice,” Clancy said. “On one side, we’re helping prosecutors; on the other, we’re helping the courts through the representation of people.”

Stephen Monroe

A passion for service is a special trait, powerful in an individual and even more effective when that individual is working with a team. Two programs emerging from the University of Mississippi’s College of Liberal Arts are focused on organizing community service efforts to maximize their impact on the UM campus and beyond.

The Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, program, established in 1965 and incorporated into AmeriCorps in the 1990s, has had a rapidly expanding presence on campus, growing from one volunteer in 2010-2011 to 23 volunteers in 2013-2014. VISTA volunteers are tasked with finding creative and sustainable ways to develop or expand educational opportunities. To achieve this, they work within and outside the university, serving educational and nonprofit organizations across north Mississippi in exchange for a modest living allowance, health benefits and an education grant.

Allison Van Pelt: AmeriCorps VISTA

“Our VISTAs are doing great things in communities around north Mississippi,” said Stephen Monroe, assistant dean of liberal arts. “They are supporting nonprofits and schools that serve low-income children and adults. Our VISTAs write grants, create and improve programs, recruit volunteers and build bridges back to our flagship university and its many resources.”

In a few short years, north Mississippi VISTA volunteers have racked up many accomplishments, creating new service opportunities and enhancing existing programs. VISTAs partnered with Lafayette County and the LOU Volunteer Center to organize and plan the community’s first ever 9/11 Day of Service and Commemoration and MLK Day of Service. The VISTAs created a peer mentoring program to benefit low-income, first-generation Mississippi college students, and they helped launch the Horizons summer learning program to ensure that low-income children do not experience summer learning loss. The VISTA project at UM is now the largest in Mississippi, and its impact continues to expand.

The UM VISTAs have diverse backgrounds. Some hail from across the country, some have graduate degrees, some have not yet attended college, and many are recent UM graduates who span the disciplines. Their shared qualities are their passion, intelligence and aptitude for communication, Monroe said.

“To serve in VISTA, you have to be willing to live in poverty while you fight poverty, and that’s a big commitment. These are Americans willing to answer the call to national service, and they are making a positive impact on Mississippi—and on our country.”

For many of those volunteers, participation in VISTA has been a successful launching pad to graduate studies; previous volunteers have gone on to study at Vanderbilt, Harvard and other institutions. All participants gain professional experience in grant writing and other marketable skills.

Although VISTA is a one-year limited engagement, the program’s best results occur when VISTA volunteers use their time to set the wheels in motion for sustainable programs that can continue long after their year of service has ended.

The story of VISTA’s first north Mississippi volunteer provides a shining example of how the “pay it forward” effort can work. The volunteer, Hildreth Davis, a retired community college teacher, created a service-learning plan to be implemented through the College of Liberal Arts. Although faculty members had long been interested in incorporating service learning into their classes, there had not yet been an incentive or support to establish the course components. With Davis’s help, Monroe was able to develop a service-learning development plan that resulted in nine new service-learning courses that have benefited more than 600 students. Davis also contributed to the creation of the UM College Corps, a student service leadership organization that now boasts 72 members.

The UM College Corps is a new model for service on campus. Students are assigned to a nonprofit or school in Oxford or Lafayette County for the entire academic year, contributing 10 hours per week. At the end of the year, students who have successfully completed their hours are eligible for the $1,200 Segal AmeriCorps Education Award. Funding from the Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service is supporting the College Corps. The program has its origins in the College of Liberal Arts, but students from other schools are also participating. Both the service-learning development plan and the College Corps are being supported and encouraged by the McLean Institute for Public Service and Community Engagement.

“Along with many others, I am extremely excited about the creation of the McLean Institute,” Monroe said. “As a university, we needed this coordinating infrastructure. We will now be more organized and more effective as we research and address some of Mississippi’s most pressing problems.”

Mary Margaret Saulters,
College Corps member

The College Corps was formed in response to needs expressed by local leaders who saw a benefit to working one-on-one with students over an extended time. The program has 12 partners. In the last three years, College Corps members have implemented a Spanish language initiative at the Boys and Girls Club, helped the Leap Frog Tutoring Program expand by some 30%, organized food donations for Oxford’s 9/11 day of service, and joined with VISTAs to clean a town park in Como. Also, 17 College Corps members are placed as volunteers in “Jumpstart” programs in two Oxford-Lafayette day care programs that prepare children with the math, language and science skills they need to succeed in kindergarten.

One recent College Corps member, Mary Margaret Saulters, received major recognition for her efforts to remedy regional social and food inequalities, including the 2013 Governor’s Initiative for Volunteer Excellence Outstanding College Student award and a 2013 Newman Civic Fellow accolade from Campus Compact, a civic engagement coalition.

“Through the College Corps, our students are meeting the needs of local nonprofits,” Monroe said. “They are supporting these vital, frontline organizations through reliable and committed service. College Corps members do the things—little and big—that need to be done.”

Robert Forster

Although the small businesses that have weathered the recession may get little press or praise, there’s no denying their importance or the critical duty of helping them stay afloat. The UM-based Mississippi Small Business Development Center provides this life raft, counseling small business owners as they start, develop and sustain their companies.

“We’re a state of small businesses,” said Robert Forster, chief operations officer of the Mississippi SBDC. “If you go to a small town in Mississippi and go out to the Little League park, when you look at the fence in the outfield, it’s the local insurance agents and the local laundry businesses who are supporting the team. That still exists very much in Mississippi.”

The SBDC’s mission is to guide people starting new businesses and to help existing businesses succeed as they face challenges, whether they are floundering or facing exponential growth. To do so, the SBDC hires and trains counselors who hold classes, workshops and one-on-one meetings to train and educate small business entrepreneurs. Many of the counselors are retired bankers or experienced business owners, and some volunteer for no compensation. They work primarily with businesses that have fewer than 50 employees and reach approximately 2,000 clients throughout the state each year.

“Here in Mississippi, about every 18 months, we create what we would like to refer to as another Toyota plant—that’s about 2,000 jobs created and retained,” Forster said. “By creating new businesses and retaining business, we minimize what the state has to pay out in unemployment compensation. We save the state close to $5 million a year by creating and maintaining businesses.”

The program, which is funded in part by the U.S. Small Business Administration, has provided outposts in all 50 states and the U.S. territories since its creation in the early 1980s. Mississippi matches the program’s federal funds with support from the Legislature and from the state’s two- and four-year colleges. Nine program offices are scattered throughout Mississippi, with the state headquarters at Ole Miss.

Counselors also receive training to help clients with atypical needs, including minority-owned businesses and those that export products internationally. No matter what the business may be, the focus is helping entrepreneurs develop business plans and determining whether they are well-prepared and have obtained the skills, focus, determination and resources to begin a venture. Often, lenders refer clients to the SBDC, valuing the counselors’ guidance as an important boost toward a venture’s success.

“We don’t do the work for them,” Forster said. “We teach them how to do their own financial analysis, to put together a business plan that is going to be successful, and when we feel they have reached a certain point, we’ll send them back to the banker.”

Besides the work of its counselors, the SBDC receives support from resources within and outside the university. Student aides from the UM School of Law help businesses with patents, trademarks and technology development.

Forster, who was born in El Salvador and grew up in Guatemala, enjoys the opportunity to work with small businesses and to give back to the university and to the state. When he arrived at the UM School of Law as a young man, he did not know anyone in Mississippi, but support from the law school dean and assistant dean helped him secure loans and scholarships and start his career with solid footing.

“They allowed me essentially to become my own person financially and to get an education,” Forster said. “I have never forgotten that and thought always about returning to Mississippi and finding a little niche where I could return something to the state.”

Susan Glisson

Mississippi bears the heavy weight of history when it comes to race relations. According to the William Winter Institute, this history gives Mississippi both the opportunity and responsibility to lead the nation’s continuing path toward equality.

For more than 10 years, the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation has been a partner in Mississippi’s efforts to learn, grow and heal. That path toward progress includes confronting the past, fostering dialogue in the present and helping the next generation of Mississippians live with greater understanding and sensitivity about race relations and history.

With the goal of assisting Mississippi communities that seek racial reconciliation, the institute facilitates a process called the “Welcome Table” aimed at engaging community leaders in positive community-building.

“We’re not wedded to any outcomes in a community, because communities know best for themselves,” said Susan Glisson, Winter Institute executive director and assistant professor of Southern studies. “When parties in a community don’t necessarily trust each other, hopefully they can trust us, and we can help them create a safe space to build relationships, learn to respect each other and work together to identify and initiate a project they want to work on together. We support them throughout that entire process, up to and including working on whatever project they identify.”

Most of the communities that have sought the institute’s support have had well-known histories of racial violence. The institute supported the work of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission in Tallahatchie County, worked with Newton County to honor the family of Medgar Evers and helped the university organize commemorative activities surrounding the 40th anniversary of its desegregation. The institute also supported the Philadelphia Coalition, a group of Neshoba County leaders who banded together to commemorate the 1964 murders there of three civil rights workers in a process that ultimately led to the 2005 conviction of their killer, a feat of restorative justice.

The institute was also instrumental in forming Mississippi ARC, a coalition of progressive service groups working together to identify equitable policies. More than 60 organizations are part of an informal network that tackles topics ranging from health to juvenile justice to education.

Alongside its community-building efforts, the institute is committed to ensuring tomorrow’s leaders develop critical consciousness regarding race and civil rights history. The institute worked closely with the Mississippi Department of Education to implement a 2006 law requiring a civil rights curriculum in Mississippi’s public schools and to create curricular objectives. Thanks to support from the Kellogg Foundation, the institute also recently added an academic director to its staff, allowing it to form more academic partnerships across the UM campus.

Additionally, the institute established a Summer Youth Institute in 2010. The Summer Youth Institute invites rising high school sophomores and juniors to the Oxford campus. With the guidance of UM faculty members and undergraduate students, the youth spend nine days learning about civil rights history, being trained to analyze their communities in terms of strengths and weaknesses, and thinking about projects they can implement when they return home.

“We try to create a space where they can build relationships across various identity lines and become a team that’s going to support each other,” Glisson said. “Several have gone back and started really amazing projects concerning teen pregnancy, community gardens, mentoring programs and more. They’ve done tremendous work.”

Susan C. Allen

Persevering for more than 130 years in one of the nation’s most economically fragile regions, Mound Bayou has a fascinating history: it was the first all-black community established by freed slaves in the Mississippi Delta. The University of Mississippi’s Department of Social Work has launched a program to work with the community in preservation and development efforts with the ultimate goal of fostering healthy lifestyles, economic development and better education.

For two years, the university’s community-building efforts have been led by Susan C. Allen, associate professor of social work and director of the Master of Social Work program. At the heart of the Mound Bayou program are multidisciplinary service-learning classes that allow a mix of graduate and undergraduate students to conduct research and outreach while staying in Mound Bayou.

“Living in the community helps our students understand the importance of knowing the community in which you work and practice,” Allen said. “Service learning has been really good for letting students understand what we talk about in class about engaging a community and assessing the importance of the community itself being involved.”

While in Mound Bayou, students have conducted community asset mapping, a process used to identify community resources that hold the potential to promote community development. Students have also conducted a youth-targeted historic preservation workshop, mapped the historical cemetery to identify the town’s founders and inventoried historical documents for preservation purposes. The Continuing Education and Outreach program and the Social Work Department also hosted a summer Youth Summit on the Oxford campus for Mound Bayou teens in order to develop a youth-led coalition for community development.

The Taborian Hospital, pre-renovation

Allen and her students have embarked on a partnership to assist the community as it develops its new Taborian Urgent Care Center. The clinic will be housed in the historic Taborian Hospital, which opened in 1942 as one of only two African-American hospitals in the state, but closed in the 1980s. In the partnership, the Department of Social Work is responding to the need identified by Mound Bayou community leadership to engage residents in the importance of behavioral health intervention. Eventually, a behavioral health clinic may be included as part of the Taborian Urgent Care Clinic, with graduate students from the Department of Social Work serving as clinical interns.

The clinic has the potential to not only serve the community’s health care and behavioral health needs, but also to provide occupational opportunities for Mound Bayou residents. To help achieve that goal, the university works with the community to develop strategies to train residents for the jobs expected to arise from the center’s opening.

The UM social work program is one of only four master’s-granting programs in the state and the only one with a clinical focus. This means graduates of the Ole Miss master’s program are eligible to become state-licensed to provide therapeutic interventions for people with significant mental health or behavioral health problems. Clinical training teaches social workers to make a clinical diagnosis and to assess patients using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

An artist’s rendering of the newly
renovated Taborian Urgent Care

“We’re teaching people how to do therapy at an individual, group or family level, but what’s also important to look at when considering the kinds of issues Mississippi has—particularly people who are in poverty, who have may experienced marginalization or discrimination—is that we want our graduates and future social workers to understand how those conditions affect whatever’s going on clinically. You can’t do clinical social work isolated from the context in which these things occurred.”

Allen stresses that a social worker’s success depends upon the ability to place oneself within the context of a community. The program’s unique theoretical model requires students to employ critical consciousness in three steps: first, by understanding their own identities; second, by understanding the context of the environments they are entering; and third, by determining how to select the needed therapeutic intervention in that context. Allen is developing a system to evaluate the efficacy of that novel approach.

“Even though we’re a clinical program, and we’re teaching people how to be competent in therapy, we also have a model grounded in critical consciousness and a social justice framework so that we can uniquely address those issues that are prevalent in Mississippi that call for people to need clinical services,” Allen said. “Just watching students see how to improve their practice though this model has been really exciting. We’re definitely having an impact.”

William Nicholas

Starting a business is a major risk. With hard work and dedication, the rewards may be great, but the path to success is often paved with unforeseen obstacles and setbacks. A resource to smooth out that road is the University of Mississippi’s Applied Research and Innovation Hub, which opened its doors in January 2012.

The Applied Research and Innovation Hub is housed at Insight Park, the university’s research park. Its 15 tenants have access to state-of-the-art technologies, collaborations with UM researchers and campus-provided business and legal expertise.

“Insight Park is growing enterprises linked to the university’s research community,” said William Nicholas, assistant director of Insight Park. “It’s a place where faculty start-ups come to grow, and where the university’s research resources can be an asset to existing enterprises, both those within Mississippi and those relocating to the state.”

The 62,000-square-foot Innovation Hub includes incubator office suites, seminar and executive conferences rooms, wet and dry laboratories, larger multi-tenant spaces and robust common areas, including two outdoor courtyards ideal for special events and large receptions. The building is designed to foster interaction among tenants, promoting partnership and collaboration. In all, Insight Park contains 19 acres designed to incorporate a host of sustainable and green features, including a geothermal field and solar shading at the Innovation Hub, cisterns for collecting rainwater at the Medicinal Plant Garden, and bike lanes and sidewalks along Insight Park Avenue to help employees easily access the rich array of recreational, residential and shopping options.

Elizabeth Randall

One of the building’s first tenants was the Randall Commercial Group LLC, a commercial real estate investment firm owned by Elizabeth Randall, a fourth-generation Ole Miss graduate and adjunct instructor in the School of Business Administration. Besides running her firm from the Innovation Hub, Randall serves as Insight Park’s executive-in-residence, acting as a source of guidance for the park’s other tenants and answering their questions about business plans, administration, strategy and intellectual property.

“Being the executive-in-residence enables me to meet brilliant entrepreneurs and get a glimpse into their businesses,” Randall said. “I have a background in private equity mergers and acquisition and have navigated through a start-up company, so I hope my experiences are providing a little guidance and advice as to the things that worked for us and, more importantly in hindsight, the things we would have done differently. The learning is reciprocal, as I am certainly learning from them, and hopefully they are learning from me too.”

The decision to relocate her businesses to the Innovation Hub was an easy choice.

Randall Commercial Group

“The Ole Miss campus has always been a place where I have felt a great creative energy, really from my first day on campus as a freshman,” she said. “When we had the opportunity to move our offices to Insight Park, we knew it was where we needed to be. We needed a place where we could be productive, focused and diligently grow the company; the Innovation Hub at Insight Park has been and continues to be the place for us.”

Besides the executive-in-residence program, Innovation Hub tenants also benefit from access to experts in UM academic departments, the law school’s transactional law clinic, state offices of the Small Business Development Center and the Office of Research and Sponsored Program’s Division of Technology Management.

Student involvement is one of the most exciting and promising perks of locating within the Innovation Hub, according to Nicholas. The park’s tenants have opportunities to leverage student talent in everything from business to accounting to law. Recently, six upper-level undergraduates from the School of Journalism’s integrated marketing and communications program developed a comprehensive marketing plan for the Innovation Hub and Insight Park. Annual innovation boot camps hosted by the School of Business Administration allowed students from multiple departments to learn from experts in entrepreneurship.

“University of Mississippi students are very engaged with what’s going on at Insight Park,” said Nicholas. “They want opportunities to gain experience, but they also contribute by bringing energy and ideas. We are committed to growing opportunities for our students as we increase our tenant base.”

Ryan Rigney

The building has even offered free office space to the finalists of the business school’s annual Gillespie Business Plan Competition. Previous winner Ryan Rigney launched his video game studio, Utah Raptor Games, there in September 2011. The office space has allowed him to juggle the busy life of a student entrepreneur and to share his work with the world.

“Although the work of creation itself can be satisfying, the real reward is sharing the end-result with others and seeing what they make of it,” Rigney said.

The park’s success is buoyed by partnerships with the governor’s office, Mississippi Development Authority, Oxford-Lafayette County Economic Development Foundation, UM Division of Technology Management and other regional economic development groups. In particular, strategic priorities include attracting health care and biopharmaceutical companies to locate within the park.

“The University of Mississippi is fortunate to be home to many well-established, nationally leading research centers and institutes, and we have a wealth of research expertise among our faculty,” said Alice M. Clark, vice chancellor for research and sponsored programs and leader of the university’s economic development efforts. “There is a direct connection between Mississippi’s economic development and the state’s future. Insight Park is a place of great opportunities for that future.”

With a diverse patent portfolio that runs the gamut of applications from pharmacy care services to acoustic devices, the university is abounding with promise of innovation. Walt Chambliss, director of the UM Division of Technology Management, sees nurturing start-up firms with ties to university technology as a key to strengthening the state’s economic vitality.

“In the past, UM technologies were licensed mostly by established companies outside of Mississippi or entrepreneurs in the Northeast or the West Coast who started companies based on our technologies in their backyards,” Chambliss said. “Recently, however, we licensed UM technologies to startup companies in Tupelo and Memphis. Ideally, in 10 years, we’ll be licensing most of our technologies to companies located in Mississippi.

“The facilities we now have at Insight Park and the Oxford Enterprise Center are critical to our ability to impact the economy in the state. It’s going to take companies putting boots on the ground in Oxford, collaborating with our researchers on a daily basis and transferring out innovations.”

Albert Nylander

In the nation’s poorest state, alleviating poverty is a complicated task and will require a collective effort. The University of Mississippi’s McLean Institute for Public Service and Community Engagement aims to improve quality of life for all Mississippians by fighting poverty through education and serving as a cohesive force for building partnerships on and off the UM campus.

“The McLean Institute has an opportunity to expand our culture of scholarship and engagement and to form avenues for authentic partnerships with our communities,” said Albert Nylander, the institute’s director. “We partner with nonprofits and the private sector, and with schools and others throughout the state. We learn as much from them as we hope they learn from us.”

Aligned with the UM 2020 plan and Chancellor Dan Jones’ vision for university-wide service engagement, the institute recently revitalized its mission to serve as the university’s coordinating unit for community engagement and service-learning. In this role, the institute will collaborate with faculty members, students and staff to support and promote community and leadership development, civic engagement efforts, service-learning courses, and community-based research activities.

Chancellor Dan Jones and Albert Nylander speak at the Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service meeting.

Horizons students swim at the University of Mississippi Turner Center.

A Horizons student practices academic skills during the summer program.

Members of Delta Leadership Institute’s Executive Academy convene on the University of Mississippi campus.

During an alternative spring break, student volunteers paint maps at West Tallahatchie High School.

“There are great opportunities for UM students and faculty to serve Mississippi communities, and I think the McLean Institute will play an important role in encouraging that engagement,” said Ryan Parsons, program coordinator for the McLean Institute and a 2011 UM alumnus.

Ryan Parsons

The institute’s recent efforts are focused on expanding access to education for Mississippi’s low-income children. It has worked with partners in the College of Liberal Arts to bring the Horizons program, a national summer learning program for elementary and middle school students, to campus. Horizons is geared toward closing the summer achievement gap seen at higher rates among low-income students. The program will expand by one class each summer until it serves kindergarten through eighth grade, with a goal of retaining each student for all nine summers.

“We want the students to enjoy learning and look forward to coming back to Horizons summer after summer to increase the long term positive impacts,” said Emma Tkachuck, McLean project manager and Horizons director.

To improve retention, Horizons is engaging parents and students year-round through family and student learning activities. Community involvement is also key to Horizons’ success.

Emma Tkachuck

“Because Horizons combines academics with enrichment and recreation, we have a unique opportunity to engage with campus and community partners to provide a broad range of experiences to the students and positively impact the community as a whole,” said Tkachuck.

The McLean Institute’s approach to improving quality of life in the state is rooted in community engagement and extends to communities across the greater Delta region. Recently, the institute was awarded nearly $1 million from the Delta Regional Authority to direct the Delta Leadership Institute. The Delta Leadership Institute offers a year-long executive academy that builds leadership and advocacy skills among Delta residents to promote community and economic development throughout the region. The McLean Institute is the administrative lead partner in a collaboration that includes partners at Arkansas State University and the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

The 2013-2014 Delta Leadership Institute class consists of 51 leaders from the public, private and nonprofit sectors. During seven sessions held across the DRA service area and in Washington, DC, these leaders will take a regional approach to studying entrepreneurship, sustainability, broadband, transportation, public education, and access to health care, in addition to developing skills to build coalitions and communicate effectively with elected officials.

Laura Martin

“The Delta Leadership Institute is an opportunity for individuals who are already leaders in their communities to interact with others from across the region to identify parallel challenges they face around community and economic development,” explained Laura Martin, project manager at the institute. “Our goal is to equip these leaders with the tools they need to create opportunity in their communities and across the region.”

In addition to its off-campus activities, the institute supports the development of service-learning courses on campus through initiatives that provide financial support for new and existing courses. Service-learning courses integrate community service and classroom instruction to expand students’ perspectives and help strengthen communities. The institute’s service-learning awards go to exceptional new courses and to existing ones that have demonstrated evidence of community-identified need, merit, feasibility and university-community partnership. The institute has also hosted Brown Bag presentations to enrich dialogue around service and community engagement on campus.

Vaughn (left) and Sandy (right) Grisham

“We want to be a resource on campus for faculty members who perhaps don’t know a lot about service learning, or who don’t have tools to support the development of a syllabus, worksheets for discussion or expectations for students when they go into the community as researchers or volunteers,” Martin said. “We’re looking forward to developing tools to support faculty.”

Founded in 1984, the McLean Institute was named in honor of George McLean, a community development leader and the founder of the CREATE Foundation. At the end of his life, McLean approached UM sociology professor Vaughn Grisham (now Emeritus Professor of Sociology) with the request that they partner to establish an agency at the University of Mississippi that would be a resource for communities and regions seeking to raise quality of life. Following McLean’s death, his widow, Anna Keirsey McLean, made the first donation to establish the McLean Institute. Grisham directed the institute for almost three decades.

The institute’s recent expansion has received support from donors, including a $600,000 anonymous gift. Nylander, a Greenwood native, credits his experiences working for the McLean Institute in the 1990s with opening his eyes to the intellectual and academic aspects of social movements dedicated to community development.

“Working with Vaughn Grisham made me aware of addressing poverty structurally in the state,” Nylander said. “So many people look at poverty in terms of personal indicators, but it’s more complex than that. I don’t always see poverty. I see potential. That’s got to be our hope: that people don’t just accept forces they could not have controlled—that they can break those barriers.

“As we bridge education and tap into the unbelievable potential of Mississippians, we can do a lot. It’s going to take all of us coming together if we want to tackle poverty alleviation. Poverty didn’t happen overnight, and we’re not going to correct it overnight.”

John Green

Growing the number of health care professionals in the state, reducing health disparities, improving education and making economically sound development choices—all are goals that can be tackled more effectively through teamwork. Through the Institute for Community-Based Research, a multi-organizational collaborative of academic researchers, students and nonprofit leaders, the University of Mississippi’s Center for Population Studies is providing assessment, evaluation and developmental guidance for a portfolio of programs directed at supporting Mississippi.

“Our role is to help with assessment and evaluation—such as secondary data, health statistics and population statistics—and beyond that, to help our partners design and redesign programs to pursue innovations and to think critically about the challenges they are facing,” said John J. Green, director of the Center for Population Studies and associate professor of sociology. “We’re not just evaluating a program at the end; we’re working together throughout the process.”

One of the institute’s programs, New Pathways to Health, aims to address health disparities in the Mississippi Delta though community education and by inspiring young people to pursue careers in health care. The program responds to the needs of the state, including shortages in health care providers and the low number of physicians and nurses per capita. Through the program’s youth component led by the Tri-County Workforce Alliance, middle school students participate in workshops to expand their understanding of the predominant health conditions in their communities. High school students complete a health mentorship program and high school seniors are eligible to complete a Certified Nursing Assistant program. Evaluations from two years of programming have shown substantial success: students have improved test scores, expressed motivation to succeed in school, and learned ways to improve their own health and act as positive influences for friends and family.

“The idea behind the New Pathways program is linking education and workforce development with health outcomes,” Green said. “We started with the perspective of knowing there are problems within the educational systems in terms of academic performance or graduation rates, and knowing that there’s also a broader nursing and health care shortage. The big picture idea is that we would like to see more graduates who are pursuing health care education and careers in Mississippi.”

New Pathways to Health also aims to improve health care by providing innovative training opportunities for those already on the road to becoming health professionals. The program offers a unique form of nursing clinical training through the Mississippi Office of Nursing Workforce. In the program, students are placed in Dedicated Education Units, or DEUs. Because many nurses cite the quality of their field placements as a major determining factor in where they will eventually practice the nursing profession, the DEU model aims to provide a more positive, supportive and collegial environment.

“The idea behind a Dedicated Education Unit is to provide a much more positive, supportive environment so that the student leaves it not only better educated but also wanting to work there,” Green said. “This is the first time a Dedicated Education Unit has been offered in the Delta region.”

A sustainable approach, the DEU model can also benefit the region by reducing the costs of training new hires.

“Research shows that once DEUs are adopted, they actually are cost-neutral or even create savings,” he said. “Our approach is to determine how we can develop new practices so that in three to five years, they could actually sustain themselves.”

We’re trying to help the health care professionals, the social service professionals, the educators to say, ‘How can we provide a supportive environment for the people we serve, and as a result, at least reduce the stressors a little bit?’”

New Pathways to Health is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and is a collaborative partnership between the Center for Population Studies, the Aaron E. Henry Community Health Services Center, the Center for Community and Economic Development, Coahoma County Higher Education Center, Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi, Dreyfus Health Foundation, Mississippi Office of Nursing Workforce and the Tri-County Workforce Alliance.

A second institute partnership is geared toward finding more productive ways to address the problem of preterm births in Mississippi. Data show that there are racial disparities in the rates of preterm births as well as fluctuations by age and income.

In partnership with Women and Children Health Initiatives and the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Center for Population Studies conducted community dialogue sessions to obtain qualitative data from nurses, social workers, nutritionists, educators and others who work with women at risk of having preterm births or babies with poor birth outcomes. Part of an initiative called Right! from the Start, the dialogue sessions identified gaps in resources and an unproductive tendency to frame discussions about birth outcomes on individual responsibility rather than on providing resources and services to mitigate negative outcomes. As a result, a follow-up dialogue session featured panels on how to reduce social stressors, provide nutrition education and support breastfeeding.

“Instead of just looking at data and saying the rates are bad, we want to engage people in conversations about what is currently being done and what resources exist,” Green said. “We also want to determine how we can work together across organizations to try to impact this. We’re trying to help the health care professionals, the social service professionals, the educators to say, ‘How can we provide a supportive environment for the people we serve, and as a result, at least reduce the stressors a little bit?'”

The overall focus of the Center for Population Studies is education, outreach and research related to population issues. The center houses the State Data Center of Mississippi, which allows it to provide a unique set of services to the Institute for Community-Based Research. The center also provides technical assistance to researchers, policymakers and other users of state census data. Additionally, it hosts an annual meeting to help local and regional planning and development groups make strategic use of the state’s data for business planning and other purposes.

Through internships, assistantships and class projects, graduate and undergraduate students work in the Center for Population Studies. A summer Honors College course focusing on population health and health professions allows students to be exposed to an interdisciplinary, real-world perspective on health.

Although Green’s work has led him to locations as diverse as Jamaica, the Pacific Islands, China, South Africa and Northern Ireland, his work in Mississippi is paramount.

“I definitely think about the work that I do as being place-driven. Thinking statewide about issues such as education, health and economic development—that’s really exciting. I want to be able to say, at the end of the day, that hopefully, this work contributed to Mississippi.”