Summer University is a three-day professional and personal development conference for full- and part-time staff. It is a mixture of self-improvement, service, and fun events for employees at UVU to show our appreciation for the exceptional care you do every day to support our students.
Save the Date, May 13 - 15, 2024
Activities
| 7:30am | UCCU/UVU Employee Golf Tournament at Talon’s Cove ($25.00) |
| 9:00am – 2:00pm | Activities (Note: Limit 1 activity per employee) • Bingo
• Bowling • Massage Chairs • Pickle Ball
• Climbing Wall • Mindfulness Sound Bath |
Morning
| 8:30am – 9:50am | General session kick-off (Breakfast Provided) Opening Keynote: Ben Kjar Location: SC Ballroom |
| 9:50am – 10:00am | Break |
| 10:00am – 11:00am | Breakout Sessions |
| 11:00am – 11:10am | Break |
| 11:10am – 12:10pm | Breakout Sessions |
| 12:10pm – 1:30pm | Food voucher will be available. Information to come. |
Afternoon
| 1:30pm – 2:30pm | Breakout Sessions |
| 2:30pm – 2:40pm | Break |
| 2:40pm – 3:40pm | Breakout Sessions |
Use code SUMMERU to get up to 10 FREE tickets to the UVU vs Utah Baseball Game! Grab your family and head out to the ball field!
UCCU Ball Park: Tuesday, May 16, 2023 at 6:05 PM (MT)
Morning
| 8:00am – 11:30am | Service projects: See options below |
Afternoon
| Noon – 1:30pm | General Session Closing (Lunch Provided) Closing Keynote: Cydni Tetro CEO & Boardmember, Brandless, Inc.) Location: SC Ballroom |
*Schedule may be subject to updates.
Summer University t-shirts and meal vouchers will be available for pickup from People and Culture the week of Summer University, May 15-17
The Growing Resilient and Inclusive Together (GRIT) Garden is a joint initiative of UVU Sustainability and UVU Biology. The GRIT Garden aims to improve nutrition access and quality for the UVU community by growing fresh healthy produce for the UVU food pantry.
This service project will primarily consist of planting crops in the garden and weeding
garden beds. Depending on how the growing season is going there may also be some early
season crops to harvest. Be prepared to be working outdoors: dress appropriately for
the weather and working in the dirt, wear sun protection, and bring drinking water.
Wear closed-toe shoes, no sandals. Please bring your own work gloves and tools. This
project will be on-campus.
Family Haven
Habitat for Humanity Restore
Help Me Grow Kits
Help Me Grow Utah is a free information and referral helpline that provides parents, physicians, and community partners across Utah with resources to make a difference in the lives of pregnant parents and families with children 8 and under. Help Me Grow Kits are kits the United Way builds to help children learn and grow.
Magic Yarn Project
The Magic Yarn Project creates magic in the lives of children battling cancer by making yarn wigs for children going through Chemotherapy. Chemotherapy treatments often leave young scalps too sensitive for scratchy traditional wigs, but yarn wigs are comfy, soft, and warm. Magic Yarn wigs are inspired by beloved Disney characters and invite children back to the world of play and daydreaming. They are a beacon of fun, laughter, and imagination during a scary time.
This project is very simple. Volunteers will be tying the yarn onto premade hats to create the princess wig. Wigs take 60-90 minutes to complete.
Ben Kjar
Ben Kjar was born with Crouzons syndrome (a craniofacial anomaly), and as a young boy the doctors told him that he would live a different life.....and that’s exactly what he’s done!! He has risen above any of life’s challenges and become a Victor not a victim. Ben believes the real way to become truly wealthy is to travel and experience culture and it’s people. If you can connect with mankind, you will have a rich life.
Ben is Utah Valley University’s first-ever NCAA Division 1 Wrestling All-American and has represented the USA team internationally. He is also an international professional speaker and has told his story to millions around the globe, in front of crowds of up to 10,000 people! Ben and his wife, LaCol, are proud parents of 3 beautiful adopted kids which are 4 yrs old and under.
Cyndi Tetro
Cydni Tetro, CEO of Brandless, is an innovator of experience, a growth leader, technologist, STEM advocate, author, and speaker. She recently raised $118M, the largest fundraise led by a woman in Silicon Slopes. Brandless is a mission-driven omnichannel commerce platform that is growing through technology and the acquisition of mission-driven brands. Prior to that she was CEO of ForgeDX, a customer acceleration platform used by companies like Verizon, Adobe, Microsoft, Dell. She was also founder and CEO of 3DpulsMe, a 3D printing personalization platform, where you could become an Ironman action figure. She spent 5 years at Disney in Imagineering leading technology commercialization and building technology businesses inside Disney, including with Theme Parks, ESPN and ABC. She is founder and President of the Women Tech Council. She holds a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s in computer science from BYU.
Expand your knowledge of UVU's insurance offerings with the following video trainings:
Announcing updates to the Utah Valley University Retirement Plans. You don’t want to miss this informative session available to you.
Presenters: Kirk Welch, CFP®, ChFC®, AIF®, PPC® and Zac Huish, M.S., CFP®, MPAS®, APMA®, CRPS®, HUB International Investment Services, Inc.
When: Tuesday, May 18 at 9:00am
Tyler teaches a class for Community Education and other Community Outlets, as well as gives private consultation on how to bring your soil back to life. Tyler has created a vermiculture/Probiotic system that creates "Heavenly" compost that even smells good. He also teaches on Fungi, how to find and use them in cooking, and Soil to Table cooking. He is currently working with the GRIT Garden to healthier produce and incredible amount of food for our student food bank. He would teach an incredible class, but could also help to highlight the GRIT Garden and what it is accomplishing for our University, and how the rest of the University can get involved.
What is Joy? What is Success? Is there such a thing as being Joyfully Successful? Most people have goals, dreams, and aspirations, yet often we look back and find that what we do is seldom what we want.
For those who dream of saying, "Everything I want is everything I have" - there is a way. "Life consists not in holding good cards, but in playing those you hold well."
Be yourself. In the recipe of life "family/friends and professional/personal pursuits" blend together. Knowledge can be acquired, skills refined, but talents are innate (combining as strengths). Take this fun, highly-interactive course to discover: your decision-making, preferences, and social-interactions; what is/could be; and what it means to say, "This is me."
* Be sure to bring your Smart Phone, Laptop, or Tablet.
UVU has offered generations of Utahns the opportunity to change their life trajectories, develop their full potential, and impact the world. Providing access and removing financial barriers to empower the next generation of leaders is at the center of the university’s mission and the launch of EverGREEN, UVU’s inaugural comprehensive fundraising campaign.
This session will help:
While working with neurodiverse employees, supervisors may overlook opportunities to create a more inclusive professional experience, and neurodiverse employees may struggle to recognize and/or articulate their strengths, needs, and motivators. These missed opportunities can result in unrealized potential, disengagement, and a negative impact on organizational culture. How can we better support one another and cultivate a more inclusive environment? Based on best practices and personal experience, this presentation offers awareness, strategies, and tools for both employees and supervisors to improve relationships and increase success in the workplace. Participants will walk away with insight into ADHD and executive functioning and a reflection on how they can apply a new approach to their daily work, leadership, and organizational culture.
What is a FOI? An FOI is a workshop from the Foundations of Inclusion Series hosted by the Office of Inclusion & Diversity. Topics range from Race & Ethnicity, to Veterans, to Class & Socioeconomic Status, to may more! These topics give knowledge that is vital to giving students more customized guidance and care, not to mention enhancing the department culture. Come to find out how the work, how to sign up, and how to use this free resource to increase your department culture in a positive way!
Many large organizations have experienced the negative effects of department silos, and higher education has seen these effects also. Often, these silos can lead to less than productive work cultures spread throughout the organization. Digital transformation at UVU has recently been reorganizing their work structures to facilitate cross team communication, divisional partnerships, efficiency and strategic focus, shared ownership of products, and a culture of organizational cooperation. Come learn about the processes they followed, the current outcomes, and some pitfalls to avoid when working through a cultural and organizational restructuring.
Learning a foreign language can be a wonderful way to expand our personal and career horizons and improve our ability to relate to our students and colleagues in our increasingly diverse campus culture. However, realistic pathways to fluency can be hard to find, especially for working professionals. Thankfully, UVU employees have access to a number of powerful and unique language-learning opportunities on campus, including free classes and language tutoring, as well as many more independent resources online. By the end of this presentation, attendees will be familiarized with the general and UVU-specific language resources available to them and will be able to articulate basic strategies for foreign language acquisition and retention. This information is drawn from my experience as a full-time learning specialist and a tutor of six languages.
We Bleed Green! Come to our Branding and Marketing presentation and learn what it takes to look and talk like a true Wolverine! We will be sharing all branding and logo updates, walk you through all the do-it-yourself resources provided for you from marketing and share with you our present A Place For You Campaign.
If you are new to UVU and need to familiarize yourself with the UVU brand, this class is for you. If you have been here a while but are not familiar with all the resources available, this class is for your.
Come for some fun swag and prizes!
Learn how to utilize Canva to make your life easier. We'll cover how to create a free account, how to upload your images, and how to use the tools provided in Canva to create posters, cards, flyers, invitations, even how to make a custom t-shirt design for a team or family reunion.
Please bring your computer with you.
In 2006 while serving a combat tour in Afghanistan as an Army Reservist, I was wounded by a suicide bomber driving a vehicle full of explosives who detonated himself near my Humvee. The blast set me on fire and left me as a battlefield casualty. After spending 10 months in an army hospital recovering from my wounds I returned to Utah with a new perspective on life. We are all battling life, however, we all need a "Get Tough or Die" attitude to survive this fight. The UVU 2023 theme of "Organizational Culture" is what the military was founded on. As a result of doing things right, and being surrounded by warriors, I survived Hell. I'm willing to share my experiences with my UVU comrades. Thanks.
Why is it that what we do rarely equals what we are capable of doing? Many people feel that to achieve a higher level of professional or personal performance requires more education than they currently have. While that may be true in some cases, most, if not all people can make exponential gains in their productivity and performance through a greater understanding of the mind and how to start implementing what they already know how to do on a regular basis. This understanding can help people to make positive habit changes quickly in order to leverage what they already know.
This is a workshop about assertive and compassionate communication. I will primarily be basing this presentation on a theory called Nonviolent Communication (NVC) by Marshall Rosenburg. NVC teaches people to communicate and hear emotions and needs rather than judgements.
Ants have been running their colonies successfully for millions of years, and there are valuable leadership lessons we can learn from them. This leadership presentation explores seven key lessons we can take from the humble ant, including unity, teamwork, communication, perseverance, delegation, selflessness, and organization. By examining how ants work together towards a common goal, assign roles and responsibilities, communicate effectively, persevere in the face of adversity, delegate tasks, prioritize the good of the group, and stay organized and efficient, we can improve our own leadership and create more successful teams and organizations. Join us for this inspiring and insightful presentation on what ants can teach us about leadership, teamwork, and organizational culture.
Heidi teaches a Community Education Course on "Happy Habits." She has been featured twice on KSL as well. Her class promises the Elevate your happiness no matter what you are experiencing in life by learning these five happiness hacks for the science of well-being.
Have you thought about adjusting your yard design to better match your current family culture and needs? Maybe you have need to reduce the maintenance load or create a more water wise gardening space. The principles of creating outdoor spaces and landscape design based around your family and space needs are fairly simple and can open up a variety of ways to better enjoy your yard. Come learn how to work through and rethink how to best make your yard into the outdoor spaces you have always wanted.
With so many bills proposed in state legislatures across the country limiting Diversity and Inclusion work and LGBTQIA+ people's access to support both on and off campus, it is more and more important to better understand the reasons EID is so important in higher education. With the goal of every institution being retention of students so they are able to graduate or complete their degrees, Diversity and Inclusion work is extremely important. Giving students who are at higher risk of stoping or dropping out the resources and support they need to stay in school. From gender and sexual identities, to underserved racial identities and ethnicities, to first generation students, to veterans and military affiliated students, these services are designed to help students feel like they have a place in higher education and are aware of the support resources that are available for every student - in short, to help them understand the hidden curriculums that come along with higher education, financial aid, and other nuances that they may not know or understand. It is also important to look at the history and context of higher education, which started out serving rich white families, to the opening of what are now Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the inclusion of other races and ethnicities, to the inclusion of women, and to now, where many of these groups are still at high risk of dropping out.
Effective survey design and implementation. This session will focus on survey creation within the context of strategic planning fo data usage. Participants will learn about instituional literacy on surveys including the importance of survey design, implementation, and data analysis. Additionally, the session will cover survey best practices, providing participants with guidelines to ensure their surveys are effective and reliable tools for gathering data.
When people think of Mexican food, most think of tacos, burritos and nachos. In this workshop I want to show attendees a few additional simple Mexican dishes they can make at home. While we wait for the food to cook, I will share tips and tricks to traveling in Mexico. As a native Mexican and someone that travels to several part of Mexico every year, I will provide information about currency, places to visit and avoid, cultural etiquette and much more.
This workshop is an introduction to hand embroidery! Participants will be able to learn and practice basic embroidery stitches to create a modern and trendy embroidery hoop. (Supplies will be provided.)
In a workforce plagued by post pandemic obstacles and opportunities, organizations are faced with increasing challenges to inspire, invest in, and retain talent. Stringent conditions including budget cuts, headcount reduction and the requirement to continue to do more with less plague employers and employees alike. Building a culture of accountability, especially in an era of professional "climate change", will allow organizations to reap the benefits of culture building rather than culture recovery and by default creates a natural climate of retention and a more inspired and invested workforce.
Using lessons learned from my recent humanitarian expedition to Kenya, Africa, we will discuss leadership principles and how they apply to improving organizational culture for students, staff and faculty. Lessons will be framed within the UVU values of exceptional care, exceptional accountability, and exceptional results. Group discussion will be used to incorporate the lessons into participants' individual circumstances and interactions.
So often, family members do everything they can to change their loved one battling or suffering from an addiction or other destructive behaviors. The reality is that we can only change ourselves, and our loved ones will make changes in their own lives when they feel capable and empowered.
This presentation shares tools that empower family members to have positive, loving relationships with their loved ones, even when making destructive choices. When we change our thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors, we can change our home environment and the dynamic of our relationship with our loved ones, and we shift the consequences of our loved ones’ actions away from us and back to them.
A few of the tools we will share during the presentation: No ACE’ing, One-Liners, Think-Plan-Act, Give and Receive Support.
I will be presenting on the benefits of mindfulness and meditation practices and teaching some easy techniques such as breath and body awareness, loving kindness, and self acceptance. The presentation will be a mixed format with the first half covering the basics of mindflulness and meditation, including their benefits, and the second half, experimenting with the techniques we will cover.
No single aspect of our health functions alone. This session will explore Deep Health and how our physical, social, emotional, environmental, mental, and existential health make up the "whole-person, whole-life" phenomenon. We will also explore how stress effects each area and ways we can mange the chronic stress we all experience.
Do you love gardening and wish for more room to grow more varieties? Would you love to learn how to leverage the space you have for the highest yields? If so, this session can help you shift your thinking and create a high yield "culture" in your garden spaces. In Vertical Growing and Small Space Gardening, we will be covering techniques and ideas for growing higher yields in small spaces. We will look at new spaces with which you may be able to raise vegetables. Looking at thing 3D and identifying what works in what space is a key in this discussion. New ideas will be shared such as grape plant hedges, espalier fruit tree pruning, cucumber trellis, the three sisters, intensive planting, and succession plantings. If you enjoyed the gardening sessions at past Summer University presentations, you won't want to miss this one!
This presentation will connect the resources and opportunities of Roots of Knowledge with the staff and faculty of UVU Campus. Our vision is that as an art installation, Roots of Knowledge is an educational space, and an active department within the Fulton Library at Utah Valley University. We are building up a variety of engaged learning opportunities and see our success in tandem with our relationships with our campus community. Here we will present more about these projects and how they might support the great work already happening here.
This fun and entertaining presentation covers some important life lessons we can learn and apply from Eddie Van Halen - the most impressive rock guitarist in history. With music, jokes and a few personal observations, learn the value of dedication, preparedness, flexibility, seeking help from others, overcoming addiction, building racial bridges, and paying it forward.
This session will concentrate on setting meaningful goals and taking them from idea to implementing habits, including recovering from failure.
At UVU, we firmly believe that everyone has a place. As an open enrollment university we have a unique opportunity to accept and welcome everyone who has a desire to learn. With that opportunity comes the responsibility to actively focus on promoting an inclusive culture - for our students, for our colleagues, and for our community. My presentation will highlight why a focus on inclusive culture is essential and specific ways that we can become stronger inclusive leaders.
The objective of this presentation is to encourage team members and individuals to identify opportunities during times that seem hard and hopeless and to provide a 3-step plan they can implement to face the current crisis and set themselves up to reduce the impact on future hardships.
Many research studies have affirmed that most employees don't leave an organization because of pay, benefits, or because they want to leave their specific field or industry. The number one reason they leave, 39% of employees as reported in a landmark study, is because they have a poor relationship with their supervisor. What people want in a leader is approachability. Someone who will work "shoulder to shoulder" with. They want the training, tools, and equipment they need to do their jobs well. They want appreciation, efficient processes, and systems as well as opportunities for professional development. In this session, learn from the research on how to make one-on-one meetings more effective and to develop a stronger organizational culture better suited to attract and retain great talent.
Everyone has stress in their lives, but it’s how you deal with it that matters! I will demonstrate yoga and mindfulness poses and exercises that you can do right from your desk. I will also demonstrate basic Vinyasa yoga poses that can be done on a mat. If you would like to participate on the yoga mat, be sure to wear your stretchy pants.
Live from one of UVU's new Digital Teaching Studios, Instructional Training Technologist and Club/High School Soccer Official Keenan Adcock (and a few his OTL colleagues will present how 1) what someone loves, 2) what someone is good at, 3) what someone can be paid for, 4) what the world needs, and 5) Comedy Improv Training combine to improve the world, find success, make the world smile, discover your secret superpower, and supercharge your Organization's Culture!
We all get frustrated when our computers or other technology do not work in the way they are meant to. In trying to solve these problems, we don’t always know where to start or are daunted by the solutions we see. However, sometimes all we need is to demystify the process and have a couple tools under our belts to fix many of the issues that we often face. In this session, I hope to teach and inform you about how to work through most general technology issues and what to do when it becomes more advanced. You will learn how to navigate settings, menus and manuals; be familiarized with common issues and solutions; as well as how best to search the internet and what sources to rely on.
In this break-out session, participants will learn how to juggle - literally and figuratively! Toss juggling is often used as a metaphor for the inherent difficulty of balancing priorities, values, or goals - but this metaphor is incomplete. Toss juggling is only one niche in a much wider world of object manipulation and flow arts performance, with thousands of cultural approaches to the same general concept (e.g. ribbon dancing vs. fire spinning). Likewise, there are many institution and employee-level approaches to the same goal. Good organizational culture is mission-oriented, but not homogenous; it's flexible where appropriate, and open to diverse ideas, identities, and dialogues. A healthy organization does not promote panic tossing priorities in the air and seeing which one hits the ground first: it promotes balance. This session will include hands-on juggling / flow arts activities - while the main content will be focused on the psychology of flexibility and prioritization in organizational culture.
ChatGPT is a contentious talking point in academia. But what can AI tell the broader scope of UVU faculty and staff about our own organization and the principles and architectures upon which it is built? Using AI systems we can gain a critical, dispassionate voice about our frameworks, principles, and their effectiveness and applicability. AI can even show us minor errors and elements that create misunderstanding or unintended meaning. In this session we will demonstrate ChatGPT's ability to critique the documents, policies and frameworks that define our organizational culture. Bring your smartphones because a hands-on exercise will provide an introduction on how to leverage these tools to empower greater outcomes in your work.
Are you confused about the differences between SharePoint and OneDrive, and wonder which to use for file storage and sharing? Let's make file sharing fun and easy with a presentation on these two awesome platforms. We'll explore their similarities and differences, and cover best practices for using them in departments, workgroups, and individually. Plus, we'll throw in some tips and tricks to make your work-life more organized and efficient. So, let's join forces and conquer the world of file sharing together!
Utah Valley University has the ability to contact students using the Cadence Mongoose text messaging system. Using this system as team can be tricky and tedious if you don't know how to plan out a strategy of how to use it. In this presentation I will cover the various features of the system, including making text templates, automated messages, and scheduling messages in advance. Attendees will also learn best practices for crafting effective and engaging messages, as well as how to ensure students don't think they are talking to robots. By the end of the presentation, I hope you will be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to use the Cadence Mongoose system to keep students informed and engaged. It's Goosin Time!
