Geneva College hosted Envision on April 12, 2025, at the B-HIVE in downtown Beaver Falls. Envision is a new campus initiative designed to challenge students to gain real-life experience in positively contributing toward the life of a community. It's a chance to practice good citizenship and community involvement while putting class knowledge and skills into practice. The topic for this year was waste abandonment, or illegal dumping of large unwanted items like a couch or television onto public or private land.
Envision is meant to show students that they don’t have to wait until graduation to become informed and involved neighbors. Although the program could have been focused on an issue that was national or even global in scope, the planning team for Envision, along with community leaders, settled on waste abandonment for the topic because it exists in a local context, both in Beaver Falls and elsewhere. Assistant Director of the Center for Calling & Career Sarah Faulkner, a member of the planning team, reflected on why the issue was chosen.
“We were hoping to start with our local community. Because you’re not just a student here at Geneva, you’re a resident of Beaver Falls. We wanted to invite students into a different way of knowing this place and the people around you.”
Envision was made possible by grant funding through the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE), which has also funded the Coherence Sophomore Retreat and the Coherence + Summer Fellows Program.
Krista Autrey, director of the Center for Calling & Career, explained, “Those three [initiatives] fit into a larger long-term plan to develop more robust co-curricular programming around calling and vocation. How do we think about this as bigger than just our careers? Am I aware of what’s going on in the community? And how can I contribute positively toward those things?”
This year, Envision was a one-day event lasting from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., hosted by the B-HIVE (Beaver Valley Hub for Innovation, Venture, and Entrepreneurship) in downtown Beaver Falls. The vision of the B-HIVE is to provide resources to help entrepreneurs in the Beaver Valley region plan, launch, and grow their businesses, as well as partnering with local schools like Geneva College to provide spaces for innovation and creativity.
Twelve students from a variety of majors gathered there to learn about waste abandonment in Beaver Falls and then to design their own proposals, in teams of three, for dealing with the issue.
Students first heard from Doug Carson, a staff member of the Beaver Falls Community Development Corporation (CDC), on our city’s current practices in handling waste and some of the contributing factors to abandonment. Later, Wendy Whelpley, director of Geneva’s City House and executive director of the CDC, shared information on local businesses and ministries that would be of assistance as potential partners for students’ proposals, as well as messaging channels that the CDC regularly utilizes in its own work. Finally, Geneva English professor Dan Williams, PhD, advised students on giving compelling presentations.
After three phases of researching, designing, and finalizing proposals, each group presented its work during dinner in a twenty-minute presentation to a panel of three judges — Carson, Whelpley, and Williams. Each group, along with their invitees to the dinner, got to listen to the other presentations and applaud their peers’ hard work. The winning proposal was an initiative for twice yearly Community Clean Up Days in Beaver Falls, which would gather residents, Geneva students, local organization Tiger Pause and other local non-profits, and middle and high school students for a comprehensive cleanup effort.
Each group took away valuable knowledge from the event. Students reflected on the importance of caring for the place in which they live and the issues that they most want to see solved in their local communities, regardless of whether or not they relate to waste abandonment.
Abigail Foerster, a senior who participated in the Coherence Retreat, summer Fellows program, and Envision, remarked, “I feel honored to have been given the opportunity to take part in so many wonderful experiences. This grant that Geneva was given has shaped my college experience. With Envision specifically, it is not often that I, as a college student, am asked to find a solution for real-world problems and taken seriously. I felt valued by all of the facilitators, as they wanted us to think about this issue deeply and find a way to better our community. The event was hard work, but good work.”
Geneva College plans to host Envision again next year, inviting students to engage in another topic of local importance.
Reagan Shields ‘26
Request Information
Learn more about Geneva College.
Have questions? Call us at 724-847-6505.
Online Course Login
myGeneva Student Portal
© Geneva College | All rights reserved