Fall 2009 - Vol 2, Issue 1
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Dear Friends,
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Dear friends,
As I write, the snow is falling hard; most offices at Bates are
closed in the face of the first big winter storm. Since the warm spring day when we sent you
the first issue of the Harward Center's electronic newsletter, there has been
much exciting news to tell.
With the help of the Bonner Foundation, the Center has
launched a new Bonner Leader Program, bringing together a talented and
energetic cohort of Bates undergraduates to pursue leadership development
through public engagement. With the
guidance of our staff colleagues Ellen Alcorn, Therese Fleming, and Marty
Deschaines, the Bonners have already carried this new venture further than any
of us dreamed possible in one semester. (They
are even pulling us into our first, timid forays into video and new
media.) In this issue, Therese Fleming
introduces you to this important new program at the Center.
The Harward Center is committed to creating multiyear, sustained
community partnerships-collaboratories, as we call them-that offer deep benefits
to both our community and the Bates education.
This issue gives you a snapshot of one such collaboratory, centered on
nutrition and food; it focuses on an exciting new Environmental Studies seminar
whose students are doing community-based research on food security and the
regional food system.
In other stories, you'll learn about the Lakeside Concert
Series, the annual summer festival managed by our colleague Brenda Pelletier;
about the public policy partnerships course that Peggy Rotundo has created in
conjunction with the Politics Department; about the environmental research that
took place at the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area this summer; and much
else. The "Student Spotlight" features
junior Patrick Williams, who single-handedly launched a youth squash and
academic enrichment program for immigrant teens in Lewiston this summer.
If these stories have whetted your interest in the Harward
Center, and civic engagement at Bates generally, please visit our website. If you want more detail, I invite you to look
at our Year End Summary for 2008-09.
In January, I will start a six-month leave of absence to
write a book about the liberal arts, the arts of citizenship, and public
scholarship. My colleague, Professor
Georgia Nigro of the Bates Psychology Department, is serving as Interim
Director of the Harward Center during that time. I look forward to reading her letter in the next
issue of the newsletter. In the
meantime, all of us at the Center would love to hear from you-to hear about
your own community engagement work and to hear your thoughts about ours. Please be in touch.
All my best,
David Scobey
Director, Harward Center for Community Partnerships
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Introducing the Bonner Leader Program Submitted by Mary Therese Fleming, Americorps VISTA
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After an intensive
year-long planning process, the Bonner Leader Program - part of a national
network of student leadership programs on college campuses funded in part by
the Bonner Foundation in Princeton, NJ - began its first year at Bates this fall
with an Orientation weekend at Shortridge, a coastal retreat center at
Bates-Morse Mountain. There were lots of
laughs, bonding activities, team-building, and bugs (on a hike to Morse
Mountain), as well as important discussions about Bates College, Lewiston-Auburn,
and community engagement.
Bonner students
were selected for their history of community engagement, either in their high
schools or here at Bates. The
program calls for students to spend eight hours per week working in the community
and two hours per week engaged in training and reflection activities. The range of their work is as diverse as the
13 Bonners themselves, who come to the work with a wide array of backgrounds
and interests. Many of the first-year
students have chosen to work with mentoring programs such as Trinity and
Hillview. Sarah Davis, our senior Bonner,
has woven her Bonner work into her thesis project, which is looking at the
potential effectiveness of the Time Bank's role in refugee resettlement. Other students have been able to create
partnerships with organizations working in issue areas of academic or personal interest
to them, such as food security, access to legal services for local-income
residents, and civic storytelling.
An important part
of the program is to develop among participants the sense that they are part of
a larger movement to create a culture of service on college campuses. Two
students, sophomore Alyse Bigger and first-year Emily Majsak, are serving as
our "Bonner Congress Representatives," and have just returned from the
Foundation's annual gathering in Virginia for students from Bonner campuses
across the country. Each school's
representatives were asked to bring a proposal designed to improve their
campus' program. As is fitting for a
newly-established program, Alyse and Emily went hoping to gain insight on how
to increase Bonner's name recognition and impact on the Bates campus. These and other insights gleaned from this first-year
experience will be critical as we build towards a full-sized Bonner Leader Program of 40 students over the next four years.
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Focus on Collaboratories: The Community Food Assessment Submitted by Holly Lasagna, Director, Community-Based Learning Program
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This fall, for the first time, Environmental Studies is
offering an interdisciplinary capstone seminar that is required of all ES
concentrators. The goal of the course is to bring juniors and seniors from
various concentrations together to work with community members on
interdisciplinary projects that share a common theme. To that end, the Harward Center and the
Environmental Studies Department are working together on a sustained collaboratory
project that focuses on the Local Food
for Lewiston community food assessment project. Students in the class are doing
community-based research with the community food assessment steering
committee on four co-created projects that focus on how to make
Lewiston-Auburn a food-secure community by creating a healthy, local food
system. The projects include: working
with a community team to assess food insecurity in Lewiston through
quantitative surveying; researching how to connect government-sponsored food
programs with the local food supply system; assessing the capacity of
Androscoggin County to produce local food; and investigating national models of
urban farm projects.
The course is being co-taught by professors Holly Ewing and
Sonja Pieck. Pieck says of this unique
collaboration, "The Environmental Studies capstone course has benefited
greatly from collaborating with the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.
Our course this term focuses on 'Food, Justice and the City,' and community-engaged
research forms the key pillar of the curriculum. Through various
community-based projects, students are learning to grapple with the concrete,
lived reality of hunger and food insecurity in Lewiston-Auburn, are acquiring
methodological skills, and are gaining an appreciation for the sensitivity and
humility needed to collaborate with community partners. Students and community
members thus become co-creators of knowledge that will be of importance for
future work trying to address food insecurity in the area."
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News from the Coast Submitted by Laura Sewall, Director, Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and Shortridge Coastal Center
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The first ever Shortridge Summer Residency began
sometime in early June, and no doubt, it was in a downpour. It rained nearly
every day that month.
Everything everywhere was
damp, and it was cold outside-and each of the five students staying at
Shortridge was supposed to be out there in the woods, on the beach and in the
marshes of Morse Mountain. I was afraid they would jump ship. I'd check on them
and find them eating, reading, strewn around the couches-and to my amazement,
smiling. After the first couple of weeks, they went out collecting data in all
sorts of weather, as if it was normal to muck around the marsh in the pouring rain.
Kurt Shuler and Alexandra Disney collected profiles of Seawall beach; Elyse
Judice and Carter Kindley measured dissolved oxygen levels in the Sprague River
Marsh, took time lapse photos and sank into ditches; and Alex Hernandez assisted
me in developing a management plan for Morse Mountain.
Alexandra,
Elyse and Carter all had to leave Shortridge by late-July, just as the sun was
appearing regularly. By the end of August, Alex and Kurt had completed their
work-and fished, surfed, kayaked, and been thoroughly welcomed into the
community. Kurt and Professor Mike Retelle reported on their work at the annual
Small Point community meeting in August and Alex ended up having more dinners
at the house next door-my sister's-than at my own. I was pleased all the way
around-but even better, Elyse is back and still collecting data.
During
Fall recess, Elyse, Bev Johnson and Judy Marden happily slogged around the
marsh, wading from pool to pool to collect water, mud and plant samples.
Elyse's thesis research, funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Services, will
identify carbon isotopes in differing parts of the marsh and help to determine
the efficacy of salt marsh restoration methods-and specifically, restoration
efforts made at Morse Mountain in 2000 and 2001. Elyse's data also promise to
raise more research questions. If you are interested in the natural sciences
and want to wade around in all sorts of weather, please contact Laura Sewall at
the Harward Center, or Bev Johnson in the Geology Department.
The Coastal Center at Shortridge is
available for Bates faculty and student research and for retreat. Please
contact Laura Sewall for further information about research
opportunities at Bates-Morse Mountain or the Summer Residency Program at the Shortridge
Coastal Center.
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What Are Our Community Partners Saying?
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"This
project is so helpful to a small historical society like ours. Not only did it organize, house, and produce
finding aids for the collections the students worked on, but it also provided
us a professional roadmap to build on for the rest of our collections and a foundation
for the future. We couldn't afford to spend much on archival supplies as
this project has on our collections. Now we can purchase more of the
proper material over time to eventually provide our collections with the care
they require."
-Laura Juraska
President,
Leeds Historical Society
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Key Initiative: Public Policy Submitted by Peggy Rotundo, Director, Policy and Strategic Initiatives
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From the very beginning of the College's effort to build community-based learning and community engagement programs in the mid-1990s, Bates
students have been engaged in policy research and volunteer advocacy work
concerning public affairs. In recent
years, the Center made a commitment to deepen our policy thread. In collaboration with the Politics
Department, we have launched "Internships in Public Policy Research," a seminar
in which students pursue collaboratively-designed policy projects in and for
state agencies and Maine NGOs. Two years
ago, we launched the Civic Forum, an annual series of panels and lectures
bringing public leaders, advocates, activists, and policy experts to campus to
discuss issues of importance to Bates, Maine, and beyond.
In 2008-09, our policy thread grew still longer. With a grant from Learn and Serve America,
Bates joined the Policy Options project, a network of nearly two dozen colleges
and universities convened by the Bonner Foundation to do policy research and
prepare issue briefs for a national Policy Options wiki. Nicole Witherbee, a policy analyst at the
Maine Center for Economic Policy, serves as Project Coordinator for the
project, as well as the primary seminar instructor for the public policy
internships seminar. Her students (and
other Bates undergraduates doing policy research) prepared issue briefs for the
Policy Options wiki. Although the policy internships seminar will remain the
anchor of our involvement in this network, our aim is to include more
disciplines, faculty, and students in the national project and to use the
Policy Options wiki as an opportunity to disseminate the wide,
multidisciplinary array of policy research done at Bates.
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New Partnerships: The Downtown Education Collaborative Submitted by David Scobey, Director
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Perhaps the most ambitious partnership of the Harward Center is the Downtown Education Collaborative. DEC is a seven-member partnership (including Bates and other academic and community institutions in Lewiston) that pursues collaborative community-based education work in and with the city's under-served downtown neighborhood. Although Bates administers the grants that fund DEC, the Collaborative has its own staff and storefront center. One of its most important efforts is the Academic Success project, which supports educational attainment among downtown (largely immigrant) teens through a five-day after-school homework and tutoring program at two community computer centers.
The demand for after-school help is great. Many middle- and high-school youth in downtown Lewiston are English Language Learners (sometimes illiterate in their own native language), who require special, sustained support to succeed academically. The participants are enthusiastic. Almost from the start, the program averaged 25-40 students daily, with nearly 300 individual youth taking part. When the school year began in September 2009, daily attendance spiked as high as 75. The project draws some 30 tutors from all four local colleges, working on math, reading, and writing skills. Fifteen come from Bates. Bates students come to the service project via multiple paths: as volunteers, through community-work study, and as part of service-learning courses in Education, Math, and other departments.
The impact on the participants' academic success has been noticeable. Both of the program sites-Lewiston Public Library and High School-track attendance, and the Lewiston Middle and High Schools monitor the academic performance of participants. "Grade reports for...students who attended regularly were evaluated," reports the Lewiston district's ELL Coordinator. "For most students, this was a significant change from previous school history."
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Summer Revisited: The Lakeside Concert Series Submitted by Kristen Cloutier, Assistant Director for Center Operations
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The 2009 Midsummer Lakeside Concert
Series featured such artists as Maine singer-songwriter Carolyn Currie, who has
charmed audiences across the U.S., including at Bates, with her layered
blend of folk, ballads and Celtic music; Maine-based folk trio Ti' Acadie, the
collaboration of Bates Dance Festival musicians known as the One World Music
Ensemble and R�veillons!, a band known for its modern take on traditional
Quebecois music.
Lakeside concerts are held on consecutive Thursdays in July and August in
the Florence Keigwin Amphitheater at the College's Lake Andrews. Sponsored by the Harward Center for Community
Partnerships and the Bingham Betterment Fund, the concerts are open to the
public at no cost. Picnics are encouraged, as is bringing lawn chairs or
blankets.
If you weren't able to make it this summer, please
join us next year!
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Student Spotlight: Patrick Williams '11
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"This past summer, I directed a summer squash camp for boys in
Lewiston for eight weeks, using the facilities at Bates College, to
host ten special campers: five were Somali refugees, four were
Sudanese, and one was from Ghana. Trinity Jubilee Center was my host
organization, providing liability insurance for the camp. I spent my
days teaching these boys how to play squash, but more importantly,
how to live their lives differently. In recent years, downtown
Lewiston has seen a lot of fighting among young males. Some of these
fights involved a few of the campers. One of my goals was to get
them to realize that fighting is never the right choice. I offered
them alternatives to fighting by allowing them to take their
arguments out on the squash court. By the end of the program, these
boys had grown to trust and respect me, as I grew to trust and
respect them. The experience I had at the Lewiston Squash Camp was
one of the highlights of my life because of those boys and everyone
else who helped make the camp possible."
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Questions? Please contact Kristen Cloutier at [email protected] or 207-786-6202 Or visit us online.
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