HCCP Logo Maroon
Fall 2011 - Vol 4, Issue 1
In This Issue
New Initiative: Tree Street Youth
Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative: A Visit from Linda Silka
Student Perspective: Project SHIFA
2011-2012 Student Volunteer Fellows
Course Focus: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Equality in American Education
Spotlight on Literacy: Project Storyboost
2011 Civic Forum Series
What Are Our Students Saying?
Support our Bonner Leader Program!
Join Our Mailing List!
Quick Links
Lisbon Street mural project of 1971

A River Lost and Found: The Androscoggin in Time and Place (Civic Forum Video)





Greetings!

Dear Friends,Georgia Nigro

 

The gaudy colors of fall have faded, but I still have color on my mind. When I learned in early fall that Emily Dickinson's hair was not brown, as I had always imagined, but auburn, I made a fieldtrip to Amherst in order to rejigger my ideas about her. I had to rearrange another set of ideas this fall when I encountered Michael Kolster's beautiful black and white photographs of the Androscoggin River, shown during one of our Civic Forums. There was the river I walk beside every morning revealing features and patterns I had never noticed before. Late in their presentation, Kolster and his co-presenter, historian Matthew Klingle, posed a question that resonates with all of us at the Harward Center: "The world is so amazingly generous. How do we figure out ways we can engage with it fully?"

 

For some at the Center and on the faculty, helping first-year students engage with the community has been a primary task this fall. Several first-year seminars have a community-based learning component this year, and our new Bonner Leaders have been exploring the community this semester before they select a particular form of community engagement for the winter semester. Ellen Alcorn, director of our Bonner Leader program, created a community scavenger hunt for new students, which invites them to participate in community events, such as Art Walk Lewiston Auburn, and sample local foods, such as sambusas at a Somali caf�. Students demonstrate their progress by writing reflections or uploading photographs or documents to their e-portfolios.

 

Our capacity to engage with the communities on both sides of the Androscoggin River received a great boost this fall when the College purchased another van for our use. We were able to devise a schedule for the first time, with loops to all the schools in Lewiston, leaving the second van to function as a taxi to schools in Auburn and other sites. Although a van may not seem like a worthy subject to introduce here, it is a vital piece of the scaffolding that enables students to engage in real-world problem-solving in the public sphere. Solving the transportation problem (for now!) freed us to listen more closely to students, faculty, and community partners, so we can help all of them reap the benefits of their collaborations.

 

I have recently returned from Arkansas, where I attended the directors meeting for Project Pericles. Hosted by Jay Barth, a faculty member at Hendrix College, the meeting gave me a chance to learn from directors at colleges and universities like and unlike Bates. It is always interesting to see and hear about other learning environments, especially ones that share our goal of fostering civic learning. We are very proud of how we help to prepare students to become effective citizens in our work at the Harward Center, but we are always ready to learn new ways to fulfill our mission.

 

We welcome your news and feedback. Please drop us a line or drop in if you are on campus.

 

Best wishes,

Georgia Nigro

Interim Director 

 

New Initiative: Tree Street Youth
Submitted by Holly Lasagna, Associate Director, Community-Based Learning Program
Tree Street Youth is a brand new organization that evolved out of the Trinity Jubilee Center's after-school program. Located at their new site, only a 1/2 mile from the Bates College campus in downtown Lewiston, directly across the street from Longley School, the program began as a vibrant summer program serving 70 students in the second through fifth grades and currently serves between 120-150 youth in grades K-12 daily at their after-school program Monday through Friday. Students receive homework help, tutoring, safe-space mentoring, and the opportunity to participate in enrichment programs such as dance, step, cooking, art, and college prep.

Tree Street is also the host to over 100 Bates College community-based learning students and volunteers. According to Tree Street founder Julia Sleeper '08, "Tree Street could not function if it were not for our amazing Bates students. They serve as tutors, helpers, advice givers, supervisors, enrichment teachers, and perhaps most importantly, motivators to help youth develop a vision for their futures. Tree Street is as much theirs as it is the kids'."

For more information on Tree Street Youth, check them out on facebook or visit their website: tree-street-youth.org.
Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative: A Visit from Linda Silka
Submitted by Laura Sewall, Director, Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and Shortridge Coastal Center

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships hosted a "Public Works in Progress" luncheon with Dr. Linda Silka on October 6th. Dr. Silka is the director of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center and Professor of Economics at the University of Maine Orono. Silka is also a member of Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI)-along with more than 50 other faculty from institutions of higher education across Maine, including Bev Johnson and Lynne Lewis from Bates College.

 

Based at the University of Maine, SSI was recently awarded $20 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to generate solutions to a variety of sustainability-related problems in and beyond Maine. More specifically, the purpose of Maine's SSI is to produce and link knowledge to actions that meet human needs while also preserving the planet's life support system, and to transform our collective capacity to address social and environmental challenges while also benefiting Maine's economy.  

 

Dr. Silka's presentation provided an overview of current SSI efforts and examples of linking knowledge generation to local concerns. With a PhD in Psychology, Silka also offered insight into the social dimensions of successful collaborations between community-based practitioners and academicians. Perhaps most fundamentally, she encouraged participants to "keep looking for opportunities to learn together."

Student Perspective: Project SHIFA
Submitted by Jake Kaplove '12, Bonner Leader

Somali youth face significant challenges in the public school environment related to their behavioral and academic success.  Many experienced war and violence at a young age and continue to wrestle with acculturative and resettlement stress. Project SHIFA is a school-based program that seeks to address the mental health needs of Somali youth and their families in a culturally appropriate way.  It does this through parent outreach and education around mental illness, school-based youth groups, and individual student therapy sessions. The program will be implemented with 5th and 6th graders in several Lewiston/Auburn (L/A) public schools, including Park Avenue Elementary School in Auburn, where my research is focused.   

 

My role in Project SHIFA is to assess the behaviors and academic engagement of the Somali youth at Park Avenue before they participate in the school-based groups.  Ultimately, this research will provide evidence about how effective the program is in improving students' overall school performance, as well as the ways in which it can better serve the needs of the students and their families.  

2011-2012 Student Volunteer Fellows
Submitted by Marty Deschaines, Assistant Director, Community Volunteerism and Student Leadership Development
The Harward Center Student Volunteer Fellows serve for one year in leadership positions at community sites.  They work with community partners and Harward Center staff to develop programming and to recruit, train and schedule other students as volunteers.  They also participate in training workshops and manage the volunteer grant account.  Fellows this year are:

Katie Ailes '14: Katie is the Fellow for the Lewiston Public Library After-School Program.  The program provides academic support and mentoring to middle- and high-school youth.

Erik Barth '12: Erik is serving as the Campus Outreach Coordinator.  He has worked over the years with Habitat for Humanity.  In his role, he plans a monthly one-time volunteer event that is open to all students and helps to raise the visibility of community service opportunities.

Lorena Bustamante '12:  Lorena oversees the America Reads America Counts tutors who work in the public schools.  She also coordinates Project StoryBoost, a reading program that serves second graders in a local school.

Emily Diepenbrock '14 and Lucy O'Keefe '12: Emily and Lucy coordinate the Hillview After-School Program, which provides homework help for elementary and middle-school youth who are residents of Lewiston Housing Authority's Hillview Family Development.

Molly Huffaker '14: Molly is the Fellow at Blake Street Towers, a Lewiston Housing Authority residence for elderly and younger disabled.  Molly involves volunteers in activities that help decrease resident isolation.

Tra La '14: Tra coordinates the Longley Mentoring Program, matching Bates students with children at Longley Elementary School.

Elana Leopold '12: Elana connects volunteers to opportunities around various food-related issues.  She works with Good Shepherd Food Bank, the soup kitchen at Trinity Jubilee Center, the Nutrition Center, and Lots to Gardens.

Course Focus: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Equality in American Education
Submitted by Dr. Mara Tieken, Assistant Professor of Education and Holly Lasagna, Associate Director, Community-Based Learning Program
Bates students enrolled in Dr. Mara Tieken's Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Equality in American Education are initiating a new oral history project in collaboration with Museum L/A.  The goal of the project is for students to understand the ethnic, cultural and economic factors that have affected local education historically.  Bates students are interviewing residents who attended local parish schools in Lewiston over the past 20 to 50 years.  Students will collect the oral histories of ten alumni of Lewiston's Catholic parish schools, all first generation French Canadian or Irish immigrants.  These oral histories, the first effort to collect narratives focused on Lewiston's parish schools, will play a critical role in helping Bates students understand Lewiston's political dynamics and its current educational system. Students will also have the opportunity to draw parallels between the experiences of these French Canadian and Irish immigrants and those of Lewiston's most recent immigrants-Somali and Somali Bantu families. The oral histories will create the basis for a new oral history project in collaboration with Museum L/A. This collection of interviews will be built upon in the future and will add to the rich oral history projects that Bates and the Museum have created over the past ten years.
Spotlight on Literacy: Project Storyboost
Submitted by Ellen Alcorn, Assistant Director, Community-Based Learning Program and Director, Bonner Leader Program

This program, developed by researchers at the University of Southern Maine in the mid-1990s, is designed to help children gain literacy skills in early elementary school. This year, a group of eight Bates tutors, led by Student Volunteer Fellow Lorena Bustamente, is reading each week with first-graders at Montello Elementary School. An important part of the program is to assess the progress of children as they participate in the program. The idea behind Project Storyboost (PSB) is that children who have been exposed to rich children's literature between the ages of 0-5 come to school with important pre-literacy skills, including an understanding of basic story grammar (for instance that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end) and a grasp of some of the principles of reading, such as that in our language printed words are read from left to right. Children who have not been exposed to reading before they reach elementary school are at a critical disadvantage. With PSB, readers work one-on-one with kindergarteners and first-graders for two hours every week, reading classic stories and encouraging children to retell them in an effort to help fill in the literacy gaps. After each session, readers record information about the child's level of engagement (defined by behaviors such as asking questions, laughing, making predictions and comparisons, noticing print, and chanting along). Readers also record a child's retelling efforts, taking note of things such as how many details children use, how much prompting they need, whether they act out story events, whether they use language from the story, and whether they refer to dialogue. While we have used the PSB model in individual classrooms in the past, this is the first time we have conducted a PSB program in a particular school with such a heavy emphasis on assessment. Our goal is to continue to build on this model at Montello School, and help in that school's efforts to increase the literacy outcomes of their students.

2011 Civic Forum Series
Submitted by Peggy Rotundo, Director, Strategic and Policy Initiatives
Each fall the Harward Center sponsors a Civic Forum series which brings to campus public leaders, advocates, scholars, activists and policy experts to discuss issues of importance to the Bates community, to Maine and beyond. The 2011 series has been a particularly exciting one.

In collaboration with the Environmental Studies Program, the Harward Center brought Bowdoin Professors Matthew Klingle and Michael Kolster to Bates
to present their collaborative project which explores the hidden past and neglected present of the Androscoggin River through the combination of photography, oral history, archival research and creative non-fiction writing. Students taking the capstone ES seminar which focuses this year on the Androscoggin River had dinner with Professors Klingle and Kolster before the presentation, which was well attended by Maine residents from all over the State.

The second event in the series featured a panel of prominent Social Entrepreneurs and was developed in conjunction with the student Social Entrepreneurs Club. The panel featured Peter Murray, co-founder and president of the Center for Progressive Leadership; Bethany Robertson, co-founder and former executive director of the I DO Foundation; Jonathan Rosenthal, co-founder of Just Works Consulting and of the U.S's first fair trade coffee company; and Elizabeth Stefanski, Chief Market Maker for Business Innovation Factory. Students had the opportunity to attend a training that Jonathan Rosenthal provided and to have dinner with the panelists.

The third event featured best selling author, Jeff Sharlet, who talked about his current project which analyzes the anti-Islamic rhetoric in the Oslo killer's manifesto and the growing virulence of anti-Islamic activism. His talk was entitled "The Killer in Me: Reading the Oslo Manifesto's Sources."

As part of the Civic Forum series, the Harward Center worked with Psychology Professor Michael Sargent to create a seminar for faculty and community leaders entitled Sanctity, Emotion and Policy. The seminar featured the work of Dr. David Pizarro of the Cornell University Psychology Department and focused on the implications of his work to public policy.

As in the past, several of the talks in the series were rebroadcast as part of Maine Public Radio's "Speaking in Maine" series.

What Are Our Students Saying?
"The social entrepreneurs workshop and panel presentation was a remarkable way to gain a wealth of knowledge about this new phenomena of doing 'good' business. With the Occupy Movement spreading around the world, people have become increasingly skeptical about the role and existence of businesses in our society, and doing 'good' business almost seems like a contradiction. From the various experienced and accomplished social entrepreneurs present at the panel, we were able to learn about finding an alternative method of running a business - a method in which social responsibility is at the core of the enterprise, rather than financial profit.

To quote one of my favorite speakers of the night, Peter Murray: "Social entrepreneurship is not about thinking inside or outside the box.  It's about creating your own box."  Thank you to the Harward Center and all the speakers for this event!"
- Suraj Karmacharya '14, Bonner Leader

Support our Bonner Leader Program!
Bates is actively seeking funds to support its Bonner Leader Program.  If you have questions, or would like to support the Bonner Leader Program, please contact Ellen Alcorn at the Harward Center at 207-786-8235 or Matt Hanson in the Office of Advancement at 207-755-5988.

For more information about the Bonner Leader Program at Bates, please click here to view a short video (note that you will be redirected to the Bates College channel on Vimeo).
Questions?
Please contact Kristen Cloutier or visit us online.