Reflections of a Bates-Morse Mountain Gatekeeper

  • Summer is in full bloom at the Bates–Morse Mountain Conservation Area.  What a great season summer in Maine is.  Even the hardiest of all residents would agree that this time of year makes up for all the long harsh months of winter.  With summer’s arrival, people from all over flock like migrating birds to be surrounded in what many would say is the state’s most valuable resource – its natural beauty.

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At A Glance: Engaging Students with the Community

  • The Harward Center for Community Partnerships offers students the opportunity to engage with community partners through:

    Service-Learning: Academically connected community-based work that includes courses, research, thesis, and independent study;

    Fellowships/Community Work-Study: Paid employment that includes work with non-profit agencies;

    Volunteerism: Student-led community engagement activities that are not tied to a course and are unpaid. These are one-time, short-term or ongoing activities supported by the Student Volunteer Fellows.

Kudos

  • A plan by three Bates College students to offer Tanzanian street children a survival alternative to a pervasive sex-for-food trade has won a $10,000 award from the 100 Projects for Peace program.

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Faculty Profile

  • In April 2007, Lee Abrahamsen was one of three Maine college educators to receive the consortium's Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence (named for Bates President Emeritus Harward).

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National Recognition

  • The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently selected Bates College for its new Community Engagement Classification, created to recognize colleges and universities that have institutionalized community engagement in their endeavors.

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    The Harward Center


    Dear Friends,

    Welcome to the website of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates College!

    Our home community of Lewiston, Maine, has long been a city of weavers, a place where bedspreads, woolens, and other textiles were made.  It is an inspiring image for our work here at the Harward Center.  Our mission is to weave together campus and community for the enrichment of both liberal education and public life.  We seek to weave the resources of a liberal-arts college into the fabric of our community, addressing social problems and contributing to cultural life in a spirit of collaboration.  We seek to weave the resources and concerns of our community into the Bates educational experience and onto the Bates campus.   And in the process, we seek to educate students who can themselves weave together their learning, personal growth, ethical values, and public action for the common good.

    In pursuit of these goals, we work with students, faculty, staff, and community partners from both the local Lewiston-Auburn community and beyond.  The Harward Center supports service-learning and community-based research as part of the Bates curriculum.  We sponsor diverse volunteer and work-study opportunities.  We offer grants and other support to students, faculty, academic departments, Bates staff, and community partners.  We oversee the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, a 600-acre environmental reserve on the Maine coast.  We hold discussion groups, forums, and other events where campus, community, and national voices come together to discuss, analyze, and deepen the practice of community partnership and academic civic engagement.

    This website is a guide to who we are, what we do, and what we stand for.  It gives information about our events, activities, and grant programs; it is full of photographs and stories, sidebars and slideshows, offering you a flesh-and-blood sense of community engagement at Bates.  Come explore, whether you are on campus or from away.  And after you browse online, come visit our home at 161-163 Wood Street.  Bring your ideas.

    David Scobey