Watts Briefly
Issue No. 9 | March 7, 2025
The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Photo by James DeMers | Pixabay
-- Hear about federal policies’ effects on nonprofits
-- National honor for ‘Bridging’ coordinator
-- Learn how to analyze unstructured data
Lodestar Center hosts nonprofits, grantors for discussion on impact of new federal landscape, March 19
Join nonprofit sector leaders for a special discussion about potential impacts of recent federal policy changes on Arizona’s nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, sponsored by the ASU Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation.
“Federal Policies and Arizona: Nonprofits and Grantmakers Navigating the New Federal Landscape,” presented by the Lodestar Center, the Arizona Community Foundation, AZ Impact for Good and the Valley of the Sun United Way, will be held from 9 a.m. to noon Wednesday, March 19, in the Global Forum at the ASU Thunderbird School of Global Management, 401 N. First St., on the downtown Phoenix campus.
Admission is free but RSVP is required.
‘Bridging Success’ coordinator to receive national award from college student affairs administrators
Justine Cheung, program coordinator for the Watts College-based ASU Bridging Success, will be honored later this month by NASPA, Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, with its Socioeconomic and Class Issues in Higher Education Knowledge Community’s Outstanding Professional Award.
Bridging Success is a campus-based support program for students who have experienced foster care. Cheung’s award will be presented March 17 at NASPA’s annual conference in New Orleans.
Cheung said that “it feels really good” that her work at Bridging Success has been acknowledged at the national level of higher education.
“I was beyond flattered to receive this award since someone else nominated me and I wasn’t aware I was even in the running,” she said.
Cheung said she saw an opportunity to do something truly innovative when she began overseeing Bridging Success when it started in 2015.
“All I could think about was putting my head down, working hard and creating something that truly benefited our students,” Cheung said. “In the past 10 years, I’ve been blessed to have the constant support of (Watts College) Dean Cynthia Lietz and other dedicated people inside of ASU and at the national level doing similar work.”
In 2022, ASU President Michael Crow honored Bridging Success with the ASU President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness.
Learn how to analyze unstructured text data at ASU workshop, April 4
Introduce yourself to a range of computer-based methods for analyzing unstructured text data from the domains of text mining and corpus linguistics at an April 4 workshop.
Students and the public are invited to participate either in person or virtually at “Making Meaning out of Unstructured Text Data,” 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, April 4, in Room 238 in the University Center on ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus. The workshop’s presenter will be research analyst Jordan Batchelor of ASU’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, within the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
Registration is $50 for students and virtual attendees, $100 for non-students. Register and get more details here.
No prior experience with R is required and attendees of any disciplinary background are encouraged to attend. Participants will be guided on how to download the R programming language during the session, so please bring a computer to the workshop.
More information: Taylor Beck, tbeck9@asu.edu.