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Outreach: USF Shares Valuable Lessons With the Community
USF center director promotes the arts while focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion
By Rich Shopes | USF Sarasota-Manatee campus
ALREADY BUSY DENISE DAVIS-COTTON, director of USF’s Center for Partnerships in Arts Integrated Teaching (PAInT), is about to get even busier thanks to an $8.5 million arts learning grant.
A popular presence on the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus, Davis-Cotton was named principal investigator of the grant, which was awarded this fall by the U.S. Department of Education to strengthen arts-educational programming in the nation’s educational system.
Titled “Race, Equity, Arts and Cultural History (REACH),” the five-year program seeks to establish a national, replicable model to strengthen arts learning in U.S. schools and harness the effectiveness of arts integration as a catalyst to increase student engagement and achievement across multiple subject areas.
The Arts Schools Network (ASN), a collective group of national arts leaders, thought partners and valuable contributors to the arts, is working directly with Davis-Cotton to implement the program.
Specifically, it seeks to use demonstration schools – including the William Monroe Rowlett Academy for Arts and Communication (elementary) and the William Monroe Rowlett Academy for Arts and Communication (middle), both in Bradenton – as national models to design instructional practices on racial and cultural equity, while implementing arts education, arts integration and cultural initiatives in classrooms.
“This project builds upon my desire to promote programs and secure resources in the arts for socio-economically depressed communities,” Davis-Cotton says. “I am excited to share my leadership experience and motivation to help educators and teaching artists build upon their prior, current and future work in diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Helping local students has long been a hallmark of Davis-Cotton, founder and first principal of Detroit School of Arts. As director of the Center for PAInT, which is housed on the Sarasota-Manatee campus, she has helped develop innovative art-based programming across Florida.
Among her recent efforts, she produced a series of educational videos for children to view at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, she helped launch an educational-based summer camp for rising seventh-graders at Booker Middle School in Sarasota.
The camp, designed to ease the transition from sixth to seventh grade, helped focus the students on core subjects, including mathematics, science and language arts, as they prepared for the fall term.
More recently, she has turned her attention to a new and unique effort called the Beeler Scholars’ IDEIL Program, named for philanthropists Tom and Carol Beeler of Sarasota.
Started in 2020, IDEIL serves as an online “train-the-trainers” program for arts leaders, teachers, college instructors and others who, after completing the program, are encouraged to share its content with their host organizations.
The program’s aim is to connect ideas related to diversity, equity and inclusion with arts-integrated teaching, an instructional method that combines the arts with academics. IDEIL stands for Incorporate Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Life skills.
“The Beeler program empowers teaching artists and educators to engage in equity work that strengthens social cohesion, promotes shared values and celebrates the heritage, histories and cultural identities of an inclusive community,” Davis-Cotton says.
Hospitality Leadership helps industry deal with pandemic
By Sarah Sell | USF St. Petersburg campus
WHEN USF LAUNCHED ITS HOSPITALITY LEADERSHIP PROGRAM (HLP) in January 2020, business leaders knew such training was needed to help managers in the fast-paced industry thrive in the Tampa Bay region, where tourism is the heart of the economy. The program helps leaders from restaurants, hotels and craft breweries better manage business operations while dealing with staffing shortages by teaching them how to hire and retain top talent.
Nearly two years later, the program is more relevant than ever due to the industry challenges heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses are now dealing with supply chain issues and severe staffing problems that are worse than possibly ever before.
In the hospitality industry, it costs thousands of dollars each time a front-line employee walks away from a job. Turnover is high, and a tight labor market makes it challenging to fill vacant positions. Finding managers who can create a culture to counteract these trends is a struggle.
“We want to inspire people to get into the industry. That’s why we decided to focus on leadership because we saw there was an opportunity for these owners and general managers to create great organizations, which ultimately become a magnet for talent,” says David O’Neill, ’11 and MBA ’17, director of the Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership on the USF St. Petersburg campus.
The 16-week online program was designed with input from Tampa Bay hospitality leaders. A hospitality veteran developed the curriculum, transforming the workplace into a classroom to make learning relevant and impactful. Managers who successfully complete the course will lead more competently and create a healthy work-life balance for themselves and their staff.
“Initially, it was geared toward independent restaurant groups that don’t have resources or time to develop a program like this,” says Miguel Miranda, lead instructor of the HLP. “St. Petersburg is very much an independent restaurant-centric community. So, we had the community in mind when this was developed. We wanted to help the people in that position to achieve the goals of improving their operations.”
The program has since welcomed a cohort of managers from both independent and chain restaurants in the Tampa Bay region. Erika Glover is a manager at the Fourth Street Chick-fil-A in St. Petersburg. The franchise provided her with great training, but she wanted more.
“Giving feedback is not something that comes naturally to me and the tools taught in class truly allowed me to have difficult conversations. The best part was that the results by the employees were better than expected,” says Glover.
Scott Jones was also looking to become a better leader as the general manager of URBAN Brew & BBQ. He’s been in the restaurant business for several years and has run several kitchens, but he wanted more formal training in management.
“The course has given me the structure that I knew I needed, but was never taught. Our business is so busy and we never get to catch up. This has helped me plan better for the unexpected,” says Jones.
The skills learned in class are helping Glover and Jones deal with the problems brought on by the pandemic. In March 2020, the shutdown crushed the tourism industry in Florida. Once bustling with sun-swept tourists, local restaurants, hotels, bars and theme parks were now empty. Businesses had to lay off employees and re-evaluate their operations with health guidelines in place.
“It was already getting harder to find staff and the pandemic made everything worse. So now, the workforce that wasn’t there before definitely has looked at other options, mainly because the pandemic hit the restaurant industry the hardest,” Miranda explains. “It was closed longer, there were more restrictions and there was a perception of whether or not it was safe.”
Because of those challenges, the HLP was put on hold for nearly a year and a half. During that time, Muma College of Business leaders from the three USF campuses looked for ways to help the hospitality industry through virtual meetings with area businesses. Virtual roundtable sessions brought together participants from companies such as Busch Gardens, Columbia Restaurant Group and Sarasota Westin Hotels to discuss ways to address the economic impacts of the coronavirus lockdown. Additional webinars gave owners and general managers advice on how to weather the storm and rebound from the current crisis.
Afterward, hospitality owners and general managers had consultations about their businesses’ specific leadership needs with HLP instructors. Miranda stressed the importance of brand image and encouraged leaders to have foresight about the end of the crisis.
“When we look back on this, years from now, it won’t be so much about what we experienced but what we did. Good leadership is needed now more than ever.”
Miranda and his colleagues at USF viewed the challenges brought on by the pandemic as an opportunity to re-tool the program. The HLP now focuses on how businesses can increase the effectiveness in leadership that will create healthier work cultures and, in return, allow companies to get back to full operations and grow profits.
Restaurants, hotels, craft breweries and other hospitality businesses have seen a sharp rise in demand as customers resume social activities. However, while demand is growing, their ability to support the demand is limited, with a large number of workers not returning to work for a variety of reasons. Add to that supply chain issues and the skyrocketing cost of commodities such as beef, chicken and pork. As a result, the challenges continue to hit an essential industry for the region.
“Tourism brings people here; hospitality brings them back,” O’Neill says. “It gets them to move here, it’s part of the value that locals enjoy, and I think we have an opportunity as a region to be recognized not only for our great beaches and great cultural sites and attractions, but our great hospitality.”
The revamped HLP launched in August 2021 with participants from restaurants including Chick-fil-A, URBAN Brew & BBQ and Hooters. Additional sessions are being offered in 2022. The hope is to expand the program to anyone who needs it anywhere in the world.
“We’re already hearing that it’s matching the value that it’s promised,” O’Neill says. “Leadership, we think, is at the center of helping this industry solve its challenges now and in the future.”