Anyone traveling from building to building on Northern Kentucky University’s campus has likely noticed large buckets of umbrellas conveniently located by their entrances. If you’ve taken refuge under one of these complimentary canopies, you can thank sophomore musical theater major Mollie Tagher and her classmates for the cover. Mollie hatched the idea for the NKUmbrella project last year as part of Dr. Tonya Krouse’s Honors 102 class titled The Meaning of Life.
“We were talking about different community-building activities and how we could serve our community,” Mollie says. “Dr. Krouse initially asked us to come up with ideas for a placemaking project for the class to work on. It was raining on campus, and I noticed a ton of students walking around without umbrellas or rain jackets. They just had their hoods up trying not to get wet.”
Placemaking—a person-centered approach to the development of public spaces—was an integral concept in Krouse’s course, which challenged students to discuss big questions, derive personal meaning from their answers and use what they learned to make a difference in their community. Though the class considered many possibilities for their collaborative project, Krouse believes that distributing umbrellas to students and faculty around campus prevailed because of its focus on access.
“If you have a student on campus who doesn’t have an umbrella, they might not get to class. As simple as it may seem talking about not getting wet, the class was thinking about things in terms of student success."
“If you have a student on campus who doesn’t have an umbrella, they might not get to class,” she says. “As simple as it may seem talking about not getting wet, the class was thinking about things in terms of student success. Is having an umbrella going to make the difference between passing or failing a test? Is it going to be the difference between making it to class or missing class? It came from a place of deep reflection about what can get in the way of students doing well.”
The class split up into smaller teams to bring the idea to fruition, with each group focusing on a single aspect of the project from budgeting to marketing to design. Mollie worked as a member of the management team, overseeing the progress of the class as a whole.
Gub Skelton, a computer science major and member of the class’ creation team, took the lead on securing the materials needed for designing the buckets that would hold the umbrellas.
“The project changed shape over the time we worked on it,” Gub says. “In previous plans, the bins were going to be five-gallon buckets before campus faculty donated them. I like to think I helped shape the project by helping communicate with the other groups about our own plans and what the creation team was thinking of doing.”
As part of the assignment, Krouse asked each team to prepare a PowerPoint presentation to show Dr. Ryan Salzman, associate professor of political science and head of placemaking on campus, for approval and feedback.
“As a teacher, I want my students to feel that their assignments have consequence,” Krouse says. “And this presentation was meaningful to them. They were talking to somebody that wasn’t in our class who had the power to say yes or no. And they were able to get a ‘yes’ out of it.”
Despite Salzman’s initial enthusiasm, the class also needed to get the approval of Facilities Management. Luckily, Jim Parker, superintendent of Building Services, also embraced the project, donating their own buckets and helping deliver them to various locations around campus.
“We worked with Facilities Management a lot,” Mollie says. “Initially, we didn’t realize how much would go into getting the umbrellas into each building, what they would have to look like and if the janitorial staff would have to clean out the containers. There were so many people we had to talk to within the NKU community. It gave me a lot of insight into how to get started if I ever wanted to do a project like this again.”
Mollie and Gub both agree that the most rewarding moment of the whole project was finally seeing the umbrellas and containers installed around campus. The class was able to order nearly 200 total umbrellas, funded by the First-Year Experience office.
“It’s such a wonderful feeling to see the product of our hard work and going, ‘I did that!’” Gub says. T
his year, Krouse’s current Honors students have continued to nurture the project. Over the summer, Mark Neikirk, executive director of NKU’s Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement, proposed a collaborative effort between NKUmbrella and his own department’s Ready, Set Vote campaign. Krouse teaches two courses on social justice in the honors college: the first, which is law-focused, has concentrated more on community outreach related to local elections, while her class on community engagement is devising ways to improve and sustain NKUmbrella.
“Are the bins located in the right spot? How can we get people to return the umbrellas? These are questions we’ll focus on,” Krouse says.
The Scripps Howard Center’s support also allowed Krouse’s class to double their total supply of umbrellas to nearly 500.
“My fantasy is that there will be a rainy day on campus, and you’ll have visiting tour groups come through and see our umbrellas everywhere they look,” she says.
