1. Issue a resolution or proclamation celebrating Michigan Week.
    
2. Take out an ad in your local newspaper or radio station thanking a community partner faculty, a student or a staff member doing important work in your community.
    
3. Use commencement creatively! Invite everyone in your community who is "commencing" to join you in a commencement parade, carrying signs declaring their new beginnings. The signs should be works of art saying things like, "I am commencing sixth grade;" "I am commencing a new business;" "I am commencing life as a new resident of this community;" "I am commencing retirement;" "I am commencing my garden;" "I am commencing a new job as a teacher." Then plant the signs in a public place as a commencement garden.
    
4. Give honorary degrees to Michigan artists and humanists and celebrate them during Michigan Week.
    
5. When Michigan artists, performers and scholars are featured in events on your campus during Michigan Week, use your campus media outlets, your news and information office, and your office of public affairs to broadcast this fact.
    
6. Challenge each department to develop a "friends" group with strong Michigan connections (Friends of Women's Studies, Friends of Architecture, Friends of Philosophy). Invite that group to take on a substantive project, such as creating an archive of local women's organizations and women leaders, or hosting a panel of black architects.
    
7. Web site suggestions: Post a list of faculty at your institution currently doing research on and in Michigan-related topics. Post a list of campus-community collaborations in your area. Post a profile of a faculty member, a student, a staff member or a resident who is doing particularly important work in your community. Link all of these to a "Michigan Resources" button on your institution's home page.
    
8. Hold a Michigan film festival.  Click here for more information on features filmed in Michigan.
    
9. Work with Native American communities in your area to explore and understand their historical connection with your college or university.
    
10. Work with your alumni association to identify graduates who are doing outstanding work in the arts, humanities and design in Michigan institutions and communities. Ask these alums to share their strategies at reunion events.
     
11. Host a speaker series of your faculty in a local public library. Host a speaker series on campus inviting local community experts to speak.
     
12. Give an award to an outstanding campus-community collaboration in your area.
     
13. Create a bus tour of the state for your faculty. Announce this new program during Michigan Week.
     
14. Commission Michigan architects, landscape architects and designers for new design and construction projects.
     
15. Bring community and campus poets together for an open-mike night at a local bookstore.
     
16. Form a cultural engagement council for your campus, bringing together the directors of museums, libraries, botanical gardens, performing arts series, humanities institutes and other cultural programs that serve both campus and community interests.
     
17. Develop a community-service learning project for the fourth-grade Michigan history curriculum.
     
18. Check out the resources at the Center for Great Lakes Culture.
     
19. Plan an election-day festival on your campus, and invite town and gown. Price of admission: one "I voted" sticker. Announce this during Michigan Week.
     
20. Create college courses on Michigan history and literature, working with local and regional partners.
     
21. Connect faculty, staff and students on your campus with the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the Michigan Humanities Council.
     
22. Plan an art or historical exhibit with a Michigan theme. Could the exhibit be shared between campus and community exhibit spaces?
     
23. Co-sponsor a town meeting on the question, "What does civic engagement mean for Michigan?"
     
24. Contact Michigan Campus Compact to learn about its community-service learning initiatives that benefit students and the state.
     
25. Celebrate Michigan Week your own unique way, May 16-22, 2009!

Updated 1/15/2009

Department of History, Arts and Libraries
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