New BioHio tenant provides ways for nonprofits to collaborate

BioHio Research Park, located on the Wooster campus of CFAES’s research arm, OARDC, announces the addition of Cureo to its incubator. Cureo provides online collaboration technology software for nonprofit boards, committees, teams and community taskforces. Continue reading

‘A chance to connect with people around the state’

OSU President DrakeOhio State President Michael V. Drake last week visited CFAES’s South Centers in Piketon and rolled up his sleeves working in a Vinton County community garden as part of his July-long tour of Ohio. Read about the food crisis in Vinton County, where the last grocery store closed in 2013, and about efforts to improve food security there and throughout Ohio in CFAES’s latest Continuum magazine (PDF; cover story, starts on p. 2). Check out photos of President Drake — and of Brutus Buckeye and CFAES Dean Bruce McPheron, among others — at the community garden by the Vinton County Courier’s Pam Johnson here. (Photo: University Communications.)

8 ways a city’s vacant lots can be good for the environment

Greening vacant lotsIn Cleveland, CFAES’s Mary Gardiner and her team are doing a large-scale, never-tried-before study. They’re evaluating eight different landscape treatments on 64 vacant lots in eight Cleveland neighborhoods. Why: To see how the treatments affect biodiversity and ecosystem function in the lots — and hopefully to come up with cheaper, greener options to just planting the lots with grass. Read more. (Find a New York Times story on the work here.)

‘I knew it was what I wanted to do with my life’

medium_Seger.Krystal_OSU.jpgKrystal Seger, pictured, serves as a health volunteer in Uganda. A CFAES graduate, she’s one of 64 Ohio State alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps. Read more about her work and about Ohio State’s top 5 ranking as a producer of Peace Corps volunteers here. (Photo: Office of International Programs, CFAES.)

‘Indispensable opportunity’ to make a difference

Kennedy_greeting_Peace_Corps_volunteers,_1961Ohio State ranks fourth on the Peace Corps’ latest list of the top volunteer-producing large universities. In all, 64 current Peace Corps volunteers are Buckeye alumni. Read more, including about CFAES alumna Krystal Seger’s work in Uganda, here. Ohio State’s Peace Corps office is housed within CFAES. The photo, from the U.S. National Archives, shows President John F. Kennedy greeting Peace Corps volunteers in 1961, the year he established the agency. Since then, 1,735 Ohio State graduates have served as Peace Corps volunteers.