It was fitting that I met with Linda Oto, a long-time community partner of the CCCE, at a favorite study spot for Carleton students–Goodbye Blue Monday. As I would learn in the span of our conversation, she is as deeply passionate about the college students she partners with as she is about the middle schoolers she works with. Oto’s Carleton connection began when her husband, Rod, took a job at the college and the pair moved to Northfield with their two children, Carly and Ryan. Since that time that initial connection has transformed into the deeply valued partnership that Oto and the CCCE share today.
Upon moving to the city, Oto began working with the school district on a part-time basis, and eventually with the Northfield Mentoring Program. Seven years ago, when the federal government stopped providing grants to fund the program, she transitioned to the Middle School Youth Center where she has since experienced a tremendous amount of change in her engagement with Carleton. At the time she joined, the Youth Center worked with the ACT Center, the co-curricular precursor to the CCCE, and as each organization grew so did their connection with each other. “Our Carleton involvement has increased greatly,” she explains, “I mean, we have a lot more Carleton people coming, a lot more ACE projects happening. This is our third year hiring college students as staff. That has been a huge difference in what we can do because we can hire more kids than we can adults and for college kids it’s a great break.”
Oto’s official title is Youth Development Coordinator at the Youth Center, which is a free after-school drop in center, open Mondays through Thursdays. Her work tends to be with students who struggle or need extra support. This includes middle school students who value education but have a hard time with the step-by-step process of being a student, or do not necessarily see college in their futures. In this respect, the role of Carleton tutors takes a different angle than simply, say, math help; they find they need to build relationships and create a new dialogue to make progress. Oto emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between her students and Carleton students, “The middle school kids are surrounded by positive, caring people, caring adults from Carleton. And I think it’s a life lesson for Carleton [students]. It’s learning to be non-judgmental and accepting.”
After school help such as tutoring is just a small portion of what Oto coordinates with Carleton–and she partners with Carleton a lot. She is the person overseeing Young Chefs, Arts Connection, Girls Circle, the middle school garden, Summer Blast, and she works heavily with ACE faculty and classes. As of 2018, over half of the Youth Center’s programing is connected with the CCCE. She cites a couple of key features that have allowed the college and the Center to develop their wide breadth of programming; chiefly, the Youth Center’s flexibility, which enables students and faculty to reach out to her with ideas. She offers Young Chefs as an example, “Young Chefs, which is now a national program, was started by alumnus Vayu Rekdal ‘15. He wanted to start a men’s cooking club and he was just persistent, persistent, persistent. So we made that work. We’re really flexible, college students have a lot to share.” In conjunction with this latitude, she notes that having an office like the CCCE at the college creates a point of contact and allows ideas to mature more easily.
Throughout her time working in partnership with Carleton, Oto has seen numerous instances of Carleton students who had never wanted to work with youth, change their majors or careers because of a program they were involved with. “Students have switched from thinking they were going to go into pre-med to now being teachers. Or from being teachers to being school psychologists,” she tells me proudly. On a similar note, she adds, “I mean I never thought I’d work with kids. I mean that’s the funniest thing, I never planned to work with kids. And just, I had kids, I happened into it, and I can’t see doing anything else.” Involvement in community based programs guide Carleton students in their professional interests and expose them to the many ways community engagement can lead to successful careers.
Linda Oto is just one of over fifty community partners the CCCE works with across Rice County. Partners interested in long-term relationships can get connected in myriad ways, from project proposals to ACE courses–classes at Carleton that are create projects based on community identified needs. The relationships fostered by the CCCE between community members and Carleton students enable small projects like Young Chefs to grow and flourish, and make a national impact.