The Institute Foundation is a student service organization (recognized by the Association of Student Activities) dedicated to empowering students at MIT. To help students gain more control over their lives here at the Institute, we offer a number of services.

First, we run the Student Resource Service (SRS). This is a group of students located throughout the residences and departments who can help other students with problems they may be having at MIT. We help people with all kinds of questions, ranging from who to go to set up new activities, to help with strange bill charges, to what to do for more serious mistreatment cases. To help us in this effort, we receive professional support from MIT's Public Service Center.

SRS members go through an eight-hour training program, during which we teach the organization of MIT (2-3 hours), an understanding of power and influence (2 hours), active listening and methods of solving problems (2 hours), and practicing helping students deal with problems (1-2 hours). Generally, those who have gone through this course have found it very useful, both with helping other people and with solving their own problems with the Institute.

The fall training session has yet to be scheduled, but will be held either in September or early October. Let us know if you are interested in the training by sending mail to resources@mit.edu.

The next service is the monthly e-mail journal Institvte, which is a community forum that publishes quality analyses of student affairs issues. The Student Resource Service seeks to help individual students and student groups with specific questions, whereas Institvte provides students (and any other member of the community) with an effective means to analzye and influence MIT policy. Institvte has been quite influential in the past -- our dedicated readers include most of MIT's senior officials and faculty, and we have helped improve student policies. For example, we helped bring about programs to reduce dormitory overcrowding and resdesign MIT's dining system. We are, however, looking for new staff to edit the journal and to publicize its existence to the community. The latter is especially important, since our community forum is truly effective only if the community-at-large uses it.

The Foundation also maintains the Institvte Digital Information Service (INDIS). INDIS is a web based service that offers links to commonly needed information sites, such as news articles, job listings, and social events, all from one easy-to-use (and unobtrusive) pull-down menu. This is a new service, and we need staff interested in growing and maintaining it.

There are two other services we provide. First, if you take the SRS training, you will receive a Guidebook, which includes 60 pages detailed information about MIT's various offices and resources, along with communications skills notes that will help you to use these resources effectively. Thanks to a generous donation from our advisor, MIT Ombudsperson Mary Rowe, we will be distributing these books throughout campus.

Finally, we offer a number of seminars during to teach students useful leadership and management skills. Currently, we teach seminars on project management and negotiation. We will be offering a compressed version of the project management seminar over Patriots' Weekend.

Note that we are not limited to doing these services. We can provide new services at any time, provided that they are within our fundamental purpose -- to empower MIT students. If you have any ideas, please feel free to recommend them.