2011 Award Recipients

Vice President’s Award for Diversity

Award for Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Creativity

The VP Award for Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Creativity honors Outreach faculty, staff, and technical-service employees who reject complacency; break new ground through innovative cross-unit programs, processes, and services; and create viable solutions to problems, products, services, or processes uniquely designed to transform our work to meet the evolving needs of our customers.
Recipient: Heather Fennessey, Director of the Penn State Small Business Development Center, PennTAP, and the PA Clean Technology Resource Center

Award for Leadership

Regardless of our position within Outreach, we each have a responsibility as individuals and members of teams to create an environment that enables every employee to advance the Outreach vision. The Vice President's Award for Leadership honors Outreach faculty, staff, and technical-service employees who exhibit a commitment to excellence in doing the good work of the organization; who inspire and motivate others to succeed; who demonstrate fiscal stewardship; and who demonstrate disciplined responsiveness.
Recipient: Recipient: Jim Korner, Assistant Vice President, Penn State Professional Education

Award for Engagement

The Vice President's Award for Engagement honors Outreach faculty, staff, and technical-service employees who demonstrate exceptional commitment to advancing lifelong learning and student engagement and who champion and create a supportive environment for education as a part of our professional work environment.
Recipient: Donna Yale, PA Technical Assistance Program's e-business consultant for Northern Tier and North East regions

Award for Diversity

Outreach definition of Diversity: "Diversity is the existence of a wide range of individual differences … present within any group of people."
Outreach values diversity and works to put our individual differences to work for the common good. The Vice President's Award for Diversity honors Outreach faculty, staff, and technical-service employees who support and appreciate diversity, ensure that our workforce is diverse, empower others, and bring a variety of perspectives and programming to the workplace and to the diverse audiences whom Outreach serves.
Recipient: Emily Reddy, Associate Producer, WPSU

Award for Excellent Service

The Vice President's Award for Excellent Service honors Outreach faculty, staff, and technical-service employees who show passion for and consistently provide excellent service to internal and external clientele, including, but not limited to, customers, students, constituents, faculty, campuses, communities, and co-workers. These unsung heroes consistently go above and beyond to make others’ experience with Outreach successful.
Recipient: Elaine Files, Outreach Contract and Proposal Specialist

One Bridge Award

As we follow the Outreach Strategic Roadmap into the future, we are committed to creating one single, elegant bridge to Penn State. Collaboration across Outreach is key to seamless interactions with our University partners and with our customers and community associates. The Vice President’s One Bridge Award honors faculty, staff, and technical-service employees who—as individuals or teams—have worked together in new ways and have leveraged our entrepreneurial spirit to find new synergies among our units.
Recipient: Deno De Ciantis, Director, The Penn State Center—Engaging Pittsburgh