People, Pressures, Progress, and a Plea: Collaboration to Create a STEM Center

Please join us for a report on our journey, the progress and issues encountered as we are attempting to focus our ideas and energies toward a common goal, the development of a STEM center to support our students and to reach out to the community at large. Start with a menagerie of personalities and interests, add even more as we seek to enlarge our task force, and you get a mix that seems overly difficult to meld into a single mindset. And then, after much collaboration on a tentative proposal, we decide to switch gears and seek funding to support the hosting of a conference to bring all the interested parties together, including K-12 educators, local business leaders, and other potential community partners. Our efforts will be summarized, and our goals and issues exposed, all so that we can ask session attendees for their comments and ideas as we continue to try to frame and finish our final proposal