When

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 at 6:00 PM PST
-to-
Friday, November 8, 2019 at 1:00 PM PST
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Where

Salishan Resort
7760 North Highway 101
Gleneden Beach, OR 97388  

 
Driving Directions 

Contact

Katie Archambault
Oregon Community College Association
503-399-9912
katie@occa17.com
 

2019 Annual OCCA Conference

Finding Your Why: Personalizing the Community College Mission

Please join us for the 2019 OCCA Annual Conference on November 6-8 at Salishan Resort!

The conference registration deadline is October 21, 2019 (no cancelations after October 14, but you may transfer registration to another person).

  • Full Conference: $485
  • One Day - Thursday: $250
  • Howard Cherry Banquet: $75
  • One Day - Friday: $250
  • Student: $295
  • Guest (meals only): $295

For hotel accommodations, please call Salishan Resort at 1-800-452-2300 to make your room reservation under the group code "Oregon Community College Association."

  • Traditional guestroom - $107
  • Deluxe guestroom - $129.00
  • Premier guestroom - $149.00

The reservation deadline for the contracted rate is October 7, 2019.

We have a great program lined up and are pleased to announced the following key note speakers:

Dr. Michael A. Baston is the 7th President of Rockland Community College. A national leader who helps develop comprehensive supports that foster college completion, Dr. Baston’s work has been featured on MSNBC, and in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic, The Community College Times, and Black Enterprise Magazine. Additionally, he’s a contributing author to Race, Education, and Reintegrating Formerly Incarcerated Citizens and The Handbook for Student Affairs in Community Colleges.

Dr. Baston was a member of the inaugural class of Aspen Institute Presidential Fellows for Community College Excellence where he explored systemic issues affecting the educational access pipeline and student success. As a national Guided Pathways coach for American Association of Community Colleges, he is noted for his work with college leadership teams around the nation, helping them integrate student success initiatives to advance college completion. Dr. Baston is the incoming Co-Chair of Jobs For The Future’s Policy Leadership Trust, a Commissioner of American Association of Community College’s Commission on Institutional Infrastructure and Transformation and member of the National Advisory Board of Center for Community College Student Engagement.

Dr. Baston began his career as a public interest lawyer representing various educational institutions and social justice organizations. His work with academic clients led him to pursue a second career in academia as both a professor of legal studies and business and a student affairs administrator. Dr. Baston holds a BA from Iona College, a JD from Brooklyn Law School, and an EdD from St. John Fisher College.

Michael Benitez, Ph.D., is a nationally-acclaimed activist-scholar, practitioner, and educator, with extensive experience in diversity issues in higher education. He is known for his down-to-earth, insightful commentary and critical perspectives on social and cultural issues, addressing areas of social justice education, leadership, intersectionality and identity development, race and ethnic relations, knowledge production, postcolonial thought and critical race theory, and critical pedagogy and practice in higher education. 

A highly-sought-out speaker and workshop leader at colleges and conferences nationwide, he has also authored book chapters and articles on student identity, hip hop culture, cultural centers, cultural and ethnic studies, institutional research and campus climates, and supporting faculty of color.

Dr. Benitez is co-editor of the anthology, Crash Course: Reflections on the Film “Crash” for Critical Dialogues About Race, Power and Privilege, and has contributed to online magazines, scholarly databases, books, and journals. His most recent work on supporting faculty of color can be found in AACU’s Liberal Education (2017) , and his work on creating campus community participatory frameworks for difficult conversations and institutional action, in New Directions in Institutional Research (2017). Benitez has been featured in educational documentaries, such as "Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity" (2012), and has appeared on talk shows such as Worlds Apart, Hard Knock Radio, and Speak out with Tim Wise.

Part of his success lies in his ability to speak heart-to-heart while bridging theory and scholarly inquiry with everyday life, his use of accessible language that multiple audiences can relate to, and his deep knowledge and practice of innovate equity and inclusion based strategies and approaches to address some of higher education’s more pressing campus climate issues of today, providing multi-context and issue frameworks for empowerment and transformation.

Dr. Benitez has served higher education in different capacities over the last two decades, including academic and student affairs, equity and inclusion, Title IX, and teaching. Currently, he serves as the Dean of Diversity and Inclusion/Chief Diversity Officer, as well as Title IX Officer, at the University of Puget Sound, providing leadership over the coordination, implementation, and assessment of operational and strategic goals related to diversity strategic planning and institutional efforts to foster and sustain an equitable and inclusive campus climate. He also serves on Puget Sound’s Race and Pedagogy Institute Leadership team.

In previous roles, Dr. Benitez has served as Director of Intercultural Development and the Black Cultural Center at Lafayette College, as adjunct faculty in the Graduate School of Leadership and Professional Advancement at Duquesne University, and as Director of Intercultural Engagement and Leadership at Grinnell College. Informed partly by his poetry and love for spoken word, and as Director of Diversity Initiatives and Social Justice at Dickinson College, Dr. Benitez established the Diversity Monologues, an ongoing annual program aimed at highlighting the creative talents of students while addressing diversity and social justice - a program he has helped implement and shape at multiple institutions.

Dr. Benitez completed both his B.S. and M.Ed. at the Pennsylvania State University, where he gained interest in pursuing doctoral studies as a McNair scholars, and holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy with a focus on Social Justice in Higher Education, from Iowa State University School of Education, and has been recognized with several leadership and scholarly awards, throughout his career.

Dr. Greg Hamann is currently serving Linn-Benton Community College (Albany, OR) as its sixth president, a position he has held since February 2010. At LBCC, Hamann is actively leading the campus in turning their historically strong commitment to student access into an equally strong commitment to student success and completion, doing so with promising results by engaging with the LBCC community as well as with other colleges and state and national initiatives like Win-Win, Foundations of Excellence and Achieving the Dream.  Recently, LBCC’s commitment to and progress in supporting student success was nationally recognized by being included among a select group of just 30 community colleges nationwide to participate in and pilot the American Association of Community College’s Pathways Initiative, a collaboration by national leaders organizations in higher education to substantially improve student completion rates.  Dr. Hamann also serves as an Adjunct Instructor in the Doctoral Education Program at Oregon State University.

At the community level, Dr. Hamann is an active participant in and contributor to a variety of regional educational and workforce projects and initiatives, including Pipeline, a unique partnership between leading businesses, county and city leaders, area school districts and LBCC in order to simultaneously create new jobs and the well-trained workforce to fill them.  In addition, Dr. Hamann serves as Chair of the Board for his area’s Boys and Girls Club and Board Member for his Chamber of Commerce.  Dr. Hamann is an active contributor at the State level, serving as a Governor-appointed member of Oregon’s Quality Education Commission and Department of Corrections Reentry Council as well as contributing on numerous Task Forces working to increase education’s effectiveness in improving the quality of life for all Oregonians. 

At the National level, Dr. Hamann is a Director and Executive Committee Chair for Finance and Audit for the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) Board of Directors, a member of the Oversight Board for the Voluntary Framework for Accountability (VFA), and a member of the President’s Advisory Council to the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT).  He recently served as a member of the Steering Committee for the 21st Century Initiative Implementation Team, and is the Immediate Past Chair of the AACC President’s Academy Executive Committee.  He is also the Chair of the Board for the National Coalition of Certification Centers (NC3), a coalition of education providers and corporations that develops, implements and sustains industry-recognized portable certifications built on national skills standards.

Before serving as LBCC’s president, Dr. Hamann was president at Clatsop Community College (Astoria, OR) for seven years and, before that, served as the Chief Finance and Operations Officer at Northwest College (Powell, WY).  In addition to his 19 years of service in our community colleges, Dr. Hamann has taught middle school and served 16 years in a variety of student services and administrative roles at two private 4-year institutions, Whitworth University (Spokane, WA) and Bethel University (St. Paul, MN). Hamann has a doctorate in Educational Leadership from Gonzaga University, a master’s in Counseling Psychology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and bachelor's degrees in both Psychology and Social Studies Education from the University of Minnesota.