This year’s William Stringfellow Awards for Justice and Peace will be presented to Kate Doria, a Bates College senior active in community service, and Outright L/A, a sex and gender support group. An awards ceremony and potluck supper will be held at 6 p.m. Sunday, March 14, in the Benjamin Mays Center, Bates College, 95 Russell St.

The ceremony is open to the public. For more information, please contact 207-786-8272 or this aberard@bates.edu.

The Office of the Multifaith Chaplain at Bates celebrates the 10th anniversary of the William Stringfellow Awards for Peace and Justice this year. The program includes a presentation by former Stringfellow recipients highlighting the work they have done and insights developed since receiving the award.

The awards recognize people or organizations that have dedicated their lives and work to the promotion of justice and peace, particularly through a courageous and sustained commitment to redressing systemic causes of violence and social injustice.

Doria’s award follows years of community service in Lewiston and beyond. This resident of Middlebury, Vt., traces her interest in good works to childhood. She recalls watching her parents, who were market gardeners, share vegetables with neighbors and senior citizens at church.

“They encouraged me to be generous and share everything I had with others,” she says.

Doria has been involved with Lewiston’s Trinity Jubilee Center for a year and a half, first as a tutor in the afterschool program and later as a coordinator of that program, recruiting other Bates students to serve as homework helpers with Lewiston youth. Also in Lewiston, she has worked with the Lewiston High School Teen Parenting Center and Lots to Gardens.

“I like to focus on an attitude of sharing, because it evokes a sense of mutuality,” Doria says. “Just as I show a student how to find the area of a triangle” in her afterschool work at Trinity, “the student teaches me new things, too.”

Her overseas service work outside the United States has included volunteering at summer camps and nonprofits in Romania and Uganda. Doria is majoring in an interdisciplinary program that she designed to explore the reciprocal relationship between the environment and human behavior.

At the March 14 event, previous Stringfellow recipients include Lots to Gardens, represented by Ari Rosenberg ’06 , youth programs coordinator of this St. Mary’s Health Systems program; the Downtown Education Collaborative, represented by Erin Reed ’08; the Maine People’s Alliance, represented by immigration and federal issues organizer Ben Chin ’07; and Margot Fine ’03, a social justice educator

Outright L/A has worked since 1996 to create affirming environments for youth, ages 22 and under, who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or questioning. Dedicated to a philosophy of collaboration that encourages young people to be involved with every aspect of the program, the organization provides social, cultural and educational events that include weekly drop-ins, gay-straight alliance projects at local high schools, and training in intersecting oppressions and increasing safety for LGBTQ youth.

William Stringfellow, a member of the Bates class of 1949, is known as a formidable critic of the social, military and economic policies of our country and as a tireless advocate for racial and social justice — justice, he insisted, that could be realized only if it were pursued spiritually.

His career of activism can be traced to his junior year at Bates, when he organized a sit-in at a local Maine restaurant that refused to serve people of color. It was his first foray into social activism, and he never looked back. A gay white lawyer, he lived and practiced law in Harlem a decade before the “war on poverty.”

Stringfellow’s experiences there deepened both his legal and religious thought and shaped the message of his widely influential books, pleading the sustaining relevance of a universal ethic of human rights.

Bates College has been named to the 2009 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction. This is the highest federal recognition available to a college for its commitment to volunteerism, service-learning and civic engagement.

This honor recognizes Bates for a multitude of effective programs that seek to sustain relationships between the college and the Lewiston-Auburn community.Bates is one of 115 colleges and universities named to the Distinction List and 621 schools named as honor roll members. Honorees are chosen based on, in part, the scope and innovation of service projects, percentage of student participation in service activities, incentives for service and the extent to which the school offers academic service-learning courses.

The Corporation for National and Community Service oversees the honor roll in collaboration with the federal departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Campus Compact and the American Council on Education.

“I’m not surprised that Bates has been named to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, but I am delighted that our work has been recognized,” says Georgia Nigro, a psychology professor at Bates and interim director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, which coordinates college-community initiatives.

“Bates students, staff and faculty at the Harward Center work collaboratively and creatively with many local and global community partners. I see Bates people tackling pressing social needs every day.”

The center partners with more than 125 community organizations, from schools and cultural institutions to nonprofit organizations. Students may apply for short- and long-term grants to pursue community-based research and work-study.

Each year one-third of Bates students take community-based learning courses that integrate community projects with academic learning. Each year, two-thirds of Bates students work in the community, mentoring schoolchildren, planting community gardens, supporting seniors in assisted living or monitoring invasive species.

“I have always been a strong believer in community service and giving back in order to learn about one’s surroundings,” says senior Krystina Zaykowski of Brooklyn, N.Y., coordinator of the Longley School Mentoring initiative. “There is more to the world than college, and you can learn about that through community service.”

During the past three academic years, the number of students participating in community-based learning increased by more than 26 percent, and the number of community partners increased by 40 percent.

Bates’ Community Volunteerism and Student Leadership Development Program helps students find volunteer opportunities at public schools and social service agencies. A group of students called Student Volunteer Fellows fill key leadership roles, organizing volunteer programs with each fellow responsible for a different initiative.

For example, in-school mentoring programs allow Bates students to work with children in the Lewiston-Auburn public school system. Mentors annually contribute roughly 2,300 hours of service, visiting their mentees weekly throughout the academic year at the child’s school for an hour at a time.

The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that leads President Obama’s national call-to-service initiative, United We Serve, and engages more than 5 million Americans in service through its Senior Corps, AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America programs.

During her first year as a Bates runner, Isabel Alexander ’09 always sprinted clear of her teammates. Usually that’s a sign of great talent. But Alexander was doing it during warmups.

Apparently unaware of the potential for showing up her teammates, Alexander seemed to have just one speed — top.

Running ahead during warmups is “usually something that might really annoy your teammates,” says head coach Jay Hartshorn. “But she would get away with it because she’s so sweet and nice and fun and caring. People sort of said, ‘Oh, that’s just Izzy.’”

Heading into the outdoor season, Alexander is already one of the best female runners in Bates history. Her athletic résumé includes three All-America honors in three events — the indoor distance medley relay, the indoor 800-meter run, and the outdoor 400-meter hurdles — as well as two NESCAC championships, four New England Division III titles, and last year’s Bates Female Athlete of the Year award.

“She’s different from anyone I’ve ever coached,” says Hartshorn. Alexander’s laid-back persona masks incredible intensity that’s “only obvious in that she never misses a practice, and she’s the first one there and the last to leave. When I go home for the night I have to tell her, ‘OK, track’s over.’”

As a first-year, Alexander had a teammate who was a role model in terms of work ethic: Keelin Godsey ’06, the Bates thrower nonpareil who won 16 All-America awards and two NCAA titles.

“I think he’s the toughest person I’ve ever met,” Alexander says. “Just knowing how much he practiced, how hard he worked, how good he was. He’s definitely a good person to look to if you want a great athlete in all senses of the word.”

Alexander’s name now dots the team’s record books, too: six indoor marks and three outdoor marks bear her name, and she’s among the top five on Bates’ all-time performance lists in eight other events. She doesn’t exactly bask in her achievements, however.

For example, as a sophomore competing at the NCAA Outdoor Championships, she was one of nine athletes to make the finals of the 400-meter hurdles. The top eight would earn coveted All-America honors, but Alexander finished dead last. Yet this race is one of Alexander’s best memories.

“Some of my favorite races, in retrospect, have been the bad ones,” she says. “Having to walk away as that one person not up on the podium was special, in a way, because then there’s that extra motivation: I don’t want to be that last person again.”

Even when she established herself as an elite Division III athlete in some events (like the 400 hurdles and the 800), it didn’t change her desire to compete in events less suited to her, such as the shot put in the heptathlon or running cross country all four years. “I think it’s important to try and do things that you’re not as good at,” she says. “Dealing with frustrations not only keeps you humble, but I think it makes you more of a complete athlete and person.”

So it’s no surprise, then, that Alexander seems to be “plugged into everything” at Bates, says Kevin McHugh, director of athletics. With men’s soccer and lacrosse player Nate Kellogg ’09, Alexander coordinated the first Bates Field Day last spring, a much-hailed event that brought together an estimated 200 local children to campus for a day of serious game-playing with about 100 Bates student-athletes.

“Izzy has been really focused in terms of getting other athletes involved in community service,” McHugh says. “She seems to have the inherent feeling that that’s an obligation as student-athletes and people.”

The second of four children of Matthew and Pamela Alexander of Harvard, Mass., Alexander is a double major in Spanish and psychology with a 3.7-plus GPA. Like her classmates, she will be thrust into the real world come Commencement on May 31. But at the moment she admits to being preoccupied with track, not the future. “I’ve been having such a good time with this, and I have such a passion for the sport. Maybe it’s an underlying obsession, I don’t know.”

She has even bought into Hartshorn’s advice that going all out all the time, like during those warmups, isn’t always the most pragmatic approach, not only because of the risk of injury but because she wants to be a great teammate, too.

“I think we’re a good team, a good group of people,” she says. “I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing than what I’m doing with these people.”

Alexander pauses, perhaps trying to remember a day when she didn’t want to be on a track. She remembers last year’s first outdoor meet at Tufts, when wind chills hovered around 20 degrees, and “they were scraping ice off the pits for the steeplechase.”

Giving herself a reality check, she remembers that day, and others. “I ask myself: ‘Is there anywhere in the world that I’d rather be, or something else that I’d rather be doing right now?’ The answer has always been, ‘No.’”

By Andy Walter, photograph By Phyllis Graber Jensen

The awards were presented recently at the MCC annual conference in Portland. Joanne DeSanto Iennaco, a member of the nursing faculty at St. Joseph’s College, received the other award.

“The award winners have shown initiative and creativity in service-learning and in advocating for service-learning on and off their campuses,” MCC director Liz McCabe Parks said.

MCC is a coalition of colleges and universities established to encourage and enhance student participation in community and public service and to integrate community service as a valued learning element of undergraduate education. MCC fosters service-learning partnerships that build on strengths of communities and higher education institutions to address significant social and environmental problems.

Shortly after Nigro arrived in Lewiston to teach at Bates in 1983, she began working with community practitioners and college students on community research projects related to her interests in child development. This work evolved into a course she now teaches at Bates on action research.

Prior to the beginning of the course each year, Nigro convenes a workshop for community partners addressing the steps necessary to convert an idea into a research question. The students in her class work closely on these research questions with their community partners.

Nigro has given talks on service-learning to faculty, college trustees and members of the community. She also has organized conferences on teacher research and serves on a national committee that makes recommendations on research in the service-learning field.

A graduate of Brown University with a degree in linguistics, Nigro received an M.S. in psychology from Yale University and a Ph.D in psychology from Cornell University, where she was an instructor before coming to Bates.