Mobile Senior Center Contin ues Operations in First Church, Expands to LaGrange

Mobile Senior Center Continues Operations in First Church, Expands to LaGrange

Sofia Tomasic

Senior Staff Writer

The Oberlin Senior Center closed permanently in March 2020 due to financial hardship. In September 2021, The Neighborhood Alliance, a nonprofit organization that provides family support services to the Oberlin community, launched a test replacement program called the Mobile Senior Center in collaboration with the First Church in Oberlin. Though the test program was originally meant to run for 90 days, the Mobile Senior Center continues to meet weekly on Mondays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the First Church’s community room.

When the Senior Center first shut down, many former attendees expected it to reopen once the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic wore off. Unfortunately, the Senior Center had been losing money for several years before the pandemic began, in part due to the cost of building maintenance. The Mobile Senior Center aims to provide seniors with some of the services formerly offered by the Senior Center without the additional cost of maintaining the building. The original Senior Center building has since been sold.

During meetings, seniors have the opportunity to eat a free meal, socialize, participate in various activities such as games, movies, and exercise, listen to guest speakers, and access other important resources like medical screenings. This month, the Mobile Senior Center provided blood pressure checks and glucose screenings, assisted with rent and utilities for people 60 and over, and hosted two guest speakers. As of Sept. 21, the program has expanded to an additional location in LaGrange, OH, meeting every third Wednesday.

Even seniors who don’t rely on the Mobile Senior Center for free meals or important support services are grateful for the opportunity to socialize. Jim and Jeanne Harris, for example, go to the Mobile Senior Center to play bridge with their friends and meet new people. Despite feeling like many of the services don’t apply to her and her husband, Jeanne Harris considers the meetings to be informative.

“There were several meetings where they gave information about how to get special services,” Harris said. “Somebody came on macular degeneration and somebody else came on how to get Lorain County services.”

Despite the popularity and success of the Mobile Senior Center, it has not replaced many of the services that the Senior Center provided and is limited to meeting only once a week.

When the original Senior Center closed, former member and volunteer Margaret Gueulette asked First Church Reverend David Hill about using church space for the Mobile Senior Center. Gueulette attends the Mobile Senior Center for a variety of services and activities, but mostly for the sense of community.

“I do the exercise class, we play bridge, and we are in a Scrabble group that plays,” Gueulette said. “When the Senior Center first closed, we did it in my garage.”

She feels that meeting once a week is not a real replacement for the community and resources lost with the Senior Center. The Senior Center had also provided resources like weaving and quilting equipment, an extensive library, and reliable access to computers.

“I know that there were some elderly people that came almost every day for coffee and just to sit around and talk,” Gueulette said.

Hill doesn’t see the Mobile Senior Center expanding much more within the church’s space, as the space needs to be available other days of the week for other groups and services.

As a result, community members are looking for a more permanent replacement for the Senior Center. According to Hill, patrons of the Mobile Senior Center are hoping to move into the building that was formerly Prospect Elementary School; the school district is currently considering how the space will be used.

If that doesn’t pan out, Hill is happy to continue hosting the Mobile Senior Center at First Church for the foreseeable future. He is very proud of the program and loves seeing the church space being used for the community.

“We’re happy to see the church used,” Hill said. “Even a couple of additional seniors from our church have shown up because of the exercise part of it. I think it’s going really, really well.”

Presence Data Collection Altered Following Student Concerns

Alexa Stevens News Editor

At the start of this semester, the College began using Presence, a software program designed to organize campus events and track attendee data. Recently, students have expressed concerns over Presence’s data-tracking habits.

Presence describes its services as supporting colleges and universities in managing and automating processes, engaging more students, tracking and collecting engagement data, assessing behaviors and trends, and encouraging and measuring experiential learning and co-curricular opportunities. Modern Campus, the company that acquired Presence in 2021, works with more than 1,400 colleges and universities across North America.

“Presence is a student engagement and learning solution that powers universities to improve retention rates by tracking and learning about their students’ involvement patterns and behaviors,” a Modern Campus press release on the software reads. “Serving more than 250 higher education institutions across North America, Presence makes it easy to visualize and assess engagement efforts through data, streamline workflows for departments and student organizations, and map learning outcomes to opportunities for student success.”

Presence has two interfaces: the organizer view and the attendee view. Any student can use the Student Portal, GOberlin, to discover organizations they would like to join and events they would like to attend. Events students have attended — regardless of whether they signed up for them via the GOberlin portal — will appear on their profile. The organization pages display the organization’s email, website, whether it was active in 2021–22, a description of the organization, and a feed linked to the organization’s social media account, as well as any upcoming events hosted by the organization.

According to Associate Dean of Students Thom Julian, the implementation of Presence is the result of a yearlong search for the software best suited to needs expressed by student organization leaders. The search was conducted in collaboration with the Office of Student Leadership and Involvement staff and the Center for Information Technology. Feedback was collected from focus groups with student organizations, the Vibrant Campus Task Force, and peer institutions. Presence was identified as the ideal software to streamline and digitize student organizations’ processes to improve understanding through data.

“We are quite early into the implementation of Presence, and our focus this semester is onboarding student organization leaders to organization management and event creation,” Julian wrote in an email to the Review.

Earlier in the semester, shortly after Presence’s implementation, students expressed concerns about the nature of the data the software was tracking. Presence pulls data from Banner and tracks students’ involvement via various demographics, including GPA, race, gender, citizenship status, and national origin, which becomes accessible to event organizers. In response to this feedback, the Office of Student Leadership and Involvement has since altered its use of Presence so that it only tracks data on events with 50 attendees or more.

Julian discussed the anonymity of the data.

“All student demographic data is in an anonymous aggregate form,” Julian wrote. “The intention of this data is to ensure that we are equitably serving all populations on campus with our student involvement offerings.”

College second-year Tabitha Bird, a treasurer in training and the general manager at the Cat in the Cream, has spent some time understanding the new software and its use at Cat in the Cream events.

“The 50-person limit was to make it pretty much impossible … to figure out exactly which person matches which identifiers,” Bird said. “Then we cut down the limit of identifiers that would be accessible to general student [organizations].”

Students also expressed that they felt surveyed by the data collection and have identified that some of the data accessible to organizers may not always be accurate.

“One of the biggest problems we have is that unless students are taking it upon themselves to update gender markers and other such things with the offices, we don’t have control over that,” Bird said.

Cat in the Cream staff members use Presence to identify how many people are attending their events and what parts of campus student attendees are coming from. They hope to get more information that will help them figure out how to increase the diversity of students at events.

“Last year, we had a lot of problems where people felt that … certain events were unintentionally segregated for various reasons, and that there was basically just a lack of diversity in groups on campus — we took that very seriously,” Bird said. “We have [found that] people who mostly live on North Campus [are] coming to our events, which makes a bit of sense because we’re located on North Campus, but it’s also really disappointing.”

According to Julian, Presence will continue to be updated in future semesters to provide more information and functions.

“We will introduce other features such as student finance tools, event feedback, organization elections, and much more,” Julian wrote.