Free bicycle helmets and a safety poster at Creighton at Highlander’s child safety center.
Creighton at Highlander, led by the university’s Institute for Population Health, is a space created in collaboration with Seventy-Five North, a nonprofit dedicated to bettering the Highlander neighborhood of North Omaha, to help the university engage with the Omaha community and promote health and well-being. Following a period of closure from July through October for renovations, the Highlander hosted an open house for Creighton University students, staff and faculty to learn more about the center’s community-oriented mission and new spaces.
“Creighton’s here in this space, and we’re here for the community,” April Dixon, the director of the Highlander, said. “I think that connection to the community is always missed and maybe even misunderstood, but [we’re] able to be here for families [and] to provide that connection with students, faculty and staff so that they get experience working with the community and then have those touch points, those community connections. … Anything that we do is basically community driven.”
At last Friday’s open house, this was shown to Creighton students, staff and faculty. Dixon said the event was intended to educate people about the space and introduce them to the upgrades that debuted in October, as well as get people thinking about how they can use it to get involved in community outreach.
“I was here quite a bit in its previous set-up, and I wanted to see how the updates went, which I really like, and it makes a lot of sense to me,” Andrew Baruth, Ph.D., the director of the Office of Sustainability Programs, said about attending the event. “I also try to find ways to partner with this team, with the Institute for Population Health, with the Highlander team as often as I can, because part of sustainability is really trying to figure out how to be integrated into the community, and they’re already tapped into the community.”
Baruth added that having this space in North Omaha is important.
“Some of the work that we’re doing with students, faculty, staff also engages the North Omaha community in particular … In the sustainability realm, it’s around environmental justice. What better way to make sure we’re doing it in a useful way for the North Omaha community than actually being embedded in the North Omaha community and working with staff who know the people, know the players, know the connections?” Baruth said, pointing to issues like the North Omaha Station coal plant and lead to contamination.
One of the recent renovations to the Highlander includes a new child safety center, according to Dixon. This center provides free resources on safe infant sleep practices, injury prevention and other information parents may need. They can also learn about how to properly use baby gates and car seats. Most of this education is often only available in hospitals after a baby is born.
The safety center is working to overcome language barriers, Dixon said, by translating resources into multiple languages and having models of things like windows and baby gates so they can show people how to use them rather than trying to tell them.
The child safety center also provides families with free or reduced-cost necessities for keeping their children safe. Families can get window locks, gun locks, cabinet locks, bicycle helmets, prescription lock boxes and other safety equipment for free. More expensive items, like car seats, are available at wholesale cost. Any money that the Highlander gets from these goes back into purchasing more resources to provide families with.
This child safety center was modeled after the Doernbecher Children’s Safety Center in Portland, Ore.. Highlander staff visited the center in Portland to learn about how they got started and what they did, according to Dixon.
JONAH LAGRANGE/THE CREIGHTONIAN
Car seats, along with other safety items, are available to families at free or reduced cost at Creighton University at Highlander.
In addition to the child safety center, the Highlander now has multiple meeting rooms and a classroom. The meeting rooms, which can be reserved via 25Live, are available to anyone from Creighton for community-driven purposes. Additionally, they’ve already been used by groups like the North Omaha Community Care Council and the Refugee Task Force.
Baruth said that he is excited to use the meeting room. He thinks they will be more convenient spaces for conversations with community partners than the main campus due to the ease of parking and available rooms.
Other initiatives at the Highlander include programs like the Juvenile Justice Law Clinic, which provides legal services to youth with cases open in the Douglas County Juvenile Court, and educational programs. The center staff are looking for more ways to engage with the community, and they said strengthening the community is an important part of the Highlander.
“One of the things that I like the most is learning about myself through community and listening to their experiences, because some of those experiences, I’ve lived myself,” Alejandra Rebolledo-Gomez, the Highlander’s community engagement coordinator, said. “We can create more communities. Not just the word ‘community,’ but community means strength, knowledge, collaboration …We can continue building that.”
The reopened, renovated Highlander at Creighton aims to be a space in North Omaha, serving the community in as many ways as possible.