Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University (LCOOU) has appointed Danielle Carley as the dean of student services. Her new responsibilities are to oversee LCOOU’s Student Services Department, which includes support services like TRiO, the learning center, and student organizations. Carley aims to encourage a higher student presence on campus. Consequently, she is working with student services on several areas of operations, such as expanding student orientation to a full-week of breakout sessions, involving student services in community-based committees and boards, and detailing student support efforts for the upcoming strategic action plan.

“My perspective shifted when I moved from being assistant dean to dean of student services,” Carley says. “Instead of overseeing career services and working alongside TRiO, for example, now I must oversee both. My work is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. I must keep asking myself and my team, what is the picture we’re trying to create?”

Dean Carley grew up on the LCO reservation. She and her father enrolled in a math class in 1989 at what was then Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College. Afterward, she worked at Grand Casinos, INC., where she met her husband Edwin A. Carley. They moved from Wisconsin to Mississippi to Delaware to assist in opening two other highly successful casinos. When they moved back to Wisconsin, she started working as a cage cashier for the Grindstone Creek Casino. With family support, she returned to LCOOCC and graduated with a liberal arts associate’s degree in 2003.

Carley went on to work as an HR director for the LCO tribe for three years before joining LCOOCC as the assistant for the Work Based Learning Program in 2005. After five years, she earned a promotion to the director position and later became the associate dean of student affairs as well as associate dean of the Work Based Learning Program. She maintains the same level of passion for her work as when she first started.

“We’ve always been surviving as LCO people. Forever we’ve been surviving, surviving. I want to see us shift to thriving,” Carley says. “My hope is that we become a place of healing and self-reflection for those who walk through our doors. We all have a purpose in this life, and I want us to be a place that helps people find their purpose.”