The office of University Centers and Leadership Programs (UCLP) exists to serve the University community in a variety of ways. The office's primary mission is two-fold. First, UCLP is charged to enhance student life and development by facilitating student involvement in organizations, providing broadly based programs of entertainment, cultural diversity and activities, and presenting opportunities to develop leadership, social, organizational, and interpersonal skills. This portion of our mission directly regards the enhancement of citizenship and leadership development.
The second aspect of UCLP's mission is to provide direction, management, and leadership to the student union programs. The student centers support the entire campus community. Our charge is to unify campus life while providing a variety of facilities to the students, staff, and segments of the general public. UCLP's facilities house food services, meeting rooms, the bookstore, post office, theater, recreation floor, phone company, computer lab, an academic department (Journalism), disability services, and correspondence studies. Relevant to our mission is the provision of space to accommodate meetings and conferences.
The staff works to provide a variety of educational, developmental, and leadership opportunities. During the months school is in session, approximately 80 programs are offered each month with monthly attendance figures ranging from 10,000 to 26,000 + people. Included in these programs are activities such as the state high school leadership conference, recreation floor activities, dynamic leadership seminars, hot topic presentations, career development workshops and niteclass dances ... Over 100 developmental seminars are offered each year with an average attendance of 25 + participants.
The Garrett Conference Center and Downing University Center continue to be used heavily by students, faculty, and guests. Estimated meetings use of these facilities each year is 73,000 + people in GCC and 84,000 + customers in DUC. Additionally, space in these buildings is used by journalism, agriculture, physical education and nursing to accommodate classes. Over 250,000 customers visited the bookstore, which is housed in DUC, and over 725,000 customer transactions occur in student center food service areas. Literally, the customer count greatly exceeds a million each year. This figure does not include the many visitors that use the facilities to study or just hang out! |
