Mayor extraordinaire
Come spring, you’ll likely find Southfield Mayor Brenda Lawrence walking with her constituents at dawn in her beloved city.
Lawrence, ’05, exercises and talks with the people of Southfield three mornings a week in order to do two things at once: promote a healthy community and listen to the people who elected her.
By necessity, Lawrence has learned to be great at multitasking.
In addition to her mayoral position, she has a full-time job as human resources manager of training and development for the post office in Detroit, serving the training needs of 13,000 employees. And she earned her bachelor’s degree from CMU while working both jobs.
“I’m a person who, once I set my goals, I don’t allow excuses, and I don’t allow failure,” Lawrence says.
She took her CMU classes at each of the metro Detroit centers in whatever format she could squeeze them in – on weekends, compressed weeklong classes, one day a week, and online.
“I did a lot of looking around, and CMU was a perfect match because I had so many different options,” she says.
“It was a long journey. But if CMU can meet my needs, it can pretty much meet anyone’s needs.”
To support her public service interests, Lawrence earned a degree in community development with a concentration in public administration.
She began her community involvement in the public schools when her children were young.
“After my kids graduated, I still wanted to be involved in the community, so I ran for city council,” she says.
“I love public service. I like the fact that I can make a difference through policies, programs, and services. And I like having my thumb on the pulse of the city.
“Southfield is a great city. We are one of the largest business addresses, not only in Oakland County but also in the state. We have a strong community and a strong business community.”
Lawrence counts among her accomplishments more active community involvement and an enhancement of the city’s image through a curb-appeal program.
“We have a cleaner city and stronger community groups where people take ownership of the city, and we’re proud of it,” she says.
And as much as Lawrence promotes business development, she also focuses on preserving green space in the city.
“Because we are a vibrant community, we are inundated with requests for development or redevelopment,” she says. “We have to strike a balance between development and protecting the environment. This is a huge challenge.
“The development might be good, but we have to weigh the impact on our green space.”
If it could, her favorite walking park would thank her. •
Library from afar
CMU’s Off-Campus Library Services serves the needs of 7,000 students who need library services for courses they’re taking online or at off-campus locations.
The library staff provides research assistance by phone, e-mail, or through online chat sessions for students who often are busy professionals and welcome the help.
“We’ll do the search for them and give them a tailored list of articles and citations to choose from,” says Tim Peters, director of OCLS. “They’ll get the citations and abstracts to choose what articles they want.”
Then the document delivery area of OCLS scans the chosen articles and e-mails them out.
Through recent surveys, students and faculty have requested more e-books and streaming videos – two collection areas where OCLS is expanding.
Peters said e-books especially are handy because they’re accessible anywhere, and they’re electronically searchable.
“It’s really a perfect technology for off-campus folks,” he says. “It provides immediate access, and it ends the shuttling back and forth of printed books.”
Peters says CMU is considered a leader nationwide in providing off-campus library services.
“This type of information delivery is getting to be more and more of what libraries are getting into,” Peters says. “CMU has been a leader for a long time. We actually have an entire department devoted to serving our off-campus students and faculty. It’s exciting to be on the front end of where libraries are going.” •
