Proceedings Now Available for Veterans Capacity Building Institute

June 25, 2009- Proceedings are now available for the University of Washington's (UW) AccessComputing Veterans Capacity Building Institute (CBI), held February 10-13, 2009, in Seattle.

Participants in this two-and-one-half day event included student services leaders, administrators, and teaching faculty from institutions around the county. Hosted by the UW, the CBI provided a forum for comparing recruitment and access challenges, sharing successful practices, developing collaborations, and identifying systemic change initiatives for increasing the capacity of institutions to serve veterans with disabilities. Specific goals of this CBI were to gain information about recruiting, serving, and retaining veterans on postsecondary campuses; brainstorm ideas for bridging the gap between computing faculty, disability services faculty, and veterans services; share information about best practices for serving veterans, funding opportunities, and resources; and network.

The CBI was comprised of panel and individual presentations and working group discussions. Panel discussions offered participants opportunities to discover new ways for various veteran and campus disability services to collaborate to improve veterans' postsecondary experience. Individual presentations included information on the new G.I. Bill, computing and IT career opportunities for veterans, as well as best practices for institutions serving veterans with disabilities.

AccessComputing Capacity Building activities are funded by the National Science Foundation (grant #CNS-0540615 and #CNS-0837508). They were coordinated by the Alliance for Access to Computing Careers, which is led by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and DO-IT at the University of Washington.