COB’s Experiential Learning Center earns award

The Experiential Learning Center at NIU’s College of Business recently received the Educational Partner of the Year Award from Family Shelter Service.

Family Shelter Service is a not-for-profit organization that supports victims of domestic abuse and their children in DuPage County, handling an average of 600 calls per month.

To help the agency better handle that workload, faculty and students working through the ELC planned and created a new information technology infrastructure for FSS. They also created a new client information management system and a victim advocacy database (using software donated by Microsoft Corporation) to improve the agency’s ability to track and manage domestic violence cases.

One dividend of the ELC’s work has been a dramatic improvement in the ability of FSS to get help to victims of abuse more quickly.

In the past, FSS had four sites taking calls, logging notes on paper and then faxing the information to a central location where a co-coordinator would distribute the forms to advocates who would then return phone calls. That process could take hours.

Today, thanks to the NIU business students, hotline workers now log call information into a centralized database, making it instantly available to victim advocates who can return calls much more quickly and provide help much sooner.

“We never would have been able to make such technological leaps forward without the help of the ELC and NIU professors Jack Marchewka, Luis Flores and Chuck Downing,” said FSS Executive Director Karen Kuchar.

The center’s involvement with FSS was initiated three years ago by Flores, who serves on its board of directors.

The ELC formerly was known as the Business Information Technology Transfer Center, or BITTC. The center engages students who, working together with a faculty adviser, are assigned a business problem in the real world, analyze the issues and develop a plan for solutions.

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