Long bike rides are an annual tradition for Dr. John Sygielski, who spent several weeks biking from New Orleans to Nashville this summer, traveling along the Natchez Trace Parkway and passing through Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee. Along the way, he raised close to $5,000 for his school’s emergency grant fund through a GoFundMe campaign.
Sygielski, known to most as “Dr. Ski,” is the president of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College, an institution serving approximately 25,000 students on five campuses in the greater Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area. The emergency fund helps students cover the unexpected — a car breaking down, a security deposit for an apartment or a medical bill. Students can apply for a one-time grant of $500.
That grant program is just one of the many ways that HACC seeks to make life easier for its students and make their educational goals more attainable. “For many of our students, if not for us, who?” Sygielski asks. “We’re often the first hope, and the second hope, and the last hope.”
HACC is the largest postsecondary institution in the Harrisburg area and serves a diverse student body, not only with regard to racial and ethnic representation, but also in terms of students’ life experiences.
“We have a huge distribution in age here,” says Warren Anderson, HACC’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. “A student who graduated from high school last year might be sitting in a classroom with someone who graduated high school 40 years ago.”
The chief diversity and inclusion officer position is new to the college. Anderson, the first to hold the role, joined HACC in July 2016. As a member of the president’s cabinet, the chief diversity and inclusion officer position has a prominent role within the college’s executive leadership team. In that sense, HACC is a leader among Pennsylvania’s 14 community colleges. Only a handful of HACC’s peers have a cabinet-level position dedicated to diversity and equity or are planning to create such a role.
Although Anderson has been with HACC for just over a year, he says that the institution has made impressive strides in creating an inclusive environment across each of HACC’s five campuses.
