My name is Diane Dujon and I am an alumni of CPCS, and I am the Director of the Competency Connection where I help students do all kinds of independent learning — whether it is from prior learning from experiences that they have had in the past, or if they want to set up new situations for learning in the present. Or maybe it's things they're already doing in their jobs or in their community or working with the people in their churches that connect to the competencies. So I help students to design a learning experience and to figure out which competencies those experiences relate to.

When I was a student here, we thought of all kinds of ways of demonstrating competencies. One time we decided we wanted to learn how to use the media. And so several of us wanted to learn how to do interviewing in an expert type way. So we decided we wanted to tackle the new issue of workfare. So we set up some interviews at a local radio station and we began to interview recipients as well as human service providers, as well as people in the labor field so that we could analyze workfare. And we made a documentary, and the name of the documentary was "Workfare, Anatomy of a Policy."

In the end, not only did we get competencies, but we ended up winning a national media award and we got flown to Washington, DC, to pick up this national media award, called the Alice award, named after a character on TV by Linda Lavin working in Mel's diner trying to scrape pennies together so that she could pay her bills. When we walked into the auditorium we saw everybody you ever see in the news media, all the television anchors. We saw people from the movies, all the movie actors and actresses, and us, six students from CPCS. It was awesome. We were the first non-professional group to win this major media award.