Professor of Sociology Emily Kane. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Maine Campus Compact will honor two members of the Bates College community, a member of the sociology faculty and a senior from Brunswick, for their commitment to public involvement.

A consortium of Maine schools dedicated to advancing the civic mission of higher education, MCC will present the Donald Harward Award for Faculty Service-Learning Excellence to Professor of Sociology Emily Kane of Auburn. Kane, who structures much of her coursework around community-engaged research, is one of three faculty members at Maine schools to receive this year’s award.

Kimberly Sullivan ’13. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Kimberly Sullivan, a senior psychology major who co-founded the Tree Street Youth Center, a youth outreach program in Lewiston, is among six students at Maine colleges honored with the Heart and Soul Award, recognizing exemplary civic engagement.

Kane, Sullivan and the other recipients will receive their awards in an April 30 ceremony in the Hall of Flags at the Maine State House, in Augusta.

• Read about Emily Kane’s community-engaged curriculum.
• Read about Kimberly Sullivan and Tree Street Youth Center.

Heart and Soul Award recipient Erik Barth ’12.

Two of the many Bates College students who routinely put into practice the college’s ideals of service through direct engagement, seniors Erik Barth and Jake Kaplove have been recognized statewide for their contributions to the Lewiston-Auburn community.

Maine Campus Compact, a statewide consortium of higher educational institutions, honored Barth, Kaplove and four other Maine students with the Heart and Soul Award in an April 20 ceremony at Bates.

Now in its 11th year, the award celebrates students who have achieved significant results, shown leadership and made innovative use of campus-based resources to address local needs.

Barth of Hanover, N.H., is the founding president of Bates Builds, the Bates chapter of Habitat for Humanity.

Kaplove of Novato, Calif., has been deeply involved with the Somali immigrant population both as the director of Refugee Volunteers, a student group that promotes cross-cultural exchange at the family level, and as a participant in a local branch of Project SHIFA (Supporting the Health of Immigrant Families and Adolescents), a national initiative promoting the mental health of immigrant students.

Barth

Barth, an environmental studies major, is also involved with the social service nonprofits Rebuilding Together, which repairs the homes of people unable to do so for themselves; the Trinity Jubilee Center soup kitchen; and Tree Street Youth, an organization founded by a Bates alumna that supports local youth through academics, arts and athletics.

His dedication to community service crystallized in founding Bates Builds in 2009. Since then, the chapter has grown from a few members to more than 15 regular members and many more volunteers. Fundraising events and frequent work trips have fostered an on-campus commitment to the Habitat mission, as well as mustering resources for specific projects.

“The vision and purpose of Bates closely align with the vision of our club,” Barth says. “We exist to make a difference in the lives of community members, just as Bates prepares us to become upstanding citizens with the means and inspiration to make a difference in the world.

“We provide a way for Bates students to do this that is tangible, practical and locally relevant.”

Barth expects to continue community service after Bates. “I am grateful to have been able to create a bridge for Bates students to become involved in building service projects. I’d like to continue to make and create things to benefit others.”

Heart and Soul Award recipient Jacob Kaplove ’12.

Kaplove

Kaplove, a psychology major who came to Bates because of the school’s commitment to social justice, has been heavily involved in community engagement, especially through Refugee Volunteers.

“I was curious to learn about Somali culture, I wanted to see firsthand the challenges they face and I wanted to form lasting connections with adults and children alike,” Kaplove says. “Refugee Volunteers allowed me to do all that. To this day, I still work in the same household — I feel as though they are a part of my extended family.”

Started in 2009 by Bates alumna and former Heart and Soul recipient Sarah Davis, the program helps immigrant families adapt to U.S. culture through home-based tutoring, mutually beneficial cultural exchange and fostering immigrant leadership.

“Because of this emphasis on home-based and reciprocal exchange, we have been able to bridge the divides — linguistic, cultural, educational, religious, socioeconomic — in an effort to make both groups recognize their common humanity,” explains Kaplove.

Director of Refugee Volunteers since 2010, Kaplove has expanded the organization’s membership and impact. He has worked with Bates professors to incorporate service-learning students into the program. And he has encouraged Somali community members to take important leadership roles in the project.

Kaplove is also involved with a research project to assess the effectiveness of Project SHIFA, an in-school program designed to promote the mental health of young Somali refugees; and is a Bonner Leader, member of a program that develops leadership skills for community organizers.

“I feel incredibly lucky to have spent these past four years in such a rich and vibrant community and to have learned such a great deal about myself in the process,” Kaplove says. One of several Fulbright Fellowship recipients at Bates this spring, after graduation Kaplove will travel to Argentina on the Fulbright to teach English and organize events that encourage cross-cultural learning.

The other 2012 Heart and Soul winners are Katelyn Brown of Saint Joseph’s College of Maine; Mariya Ilyas, Bowdoin College; Casey O’Malley, University of Maine at Farmington; and Dana Roberts, Colby College.

Maine Campus Compact is a coalition of 18 member campuses whose purpose is to catalyze and lead a movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education. Learn more.

A consortium of Maine schools has honored a Bates College student from Virginia and a Bates anthropology professor for their commitment to civic engagement.

The Maine Campus Compact, a statewide coalition of 18 colleges and universities, honored the pair in an April 7 ceremony at the Maine State House.

Sarah Davis, a senior from Great Falls, Va., was one of four students at Maine schools to receive the MCC’s Heart and Soul Award. During her time at Bates, she has led or taken part in programs that help integrate new immigrants and refugees into the Lewiston-Auburn community.

Elizabeth Eames, associate professor of anthropology, was one of three faculty members teaching in Maine to be honored with the Donald Harward Award for Faculty Service-Learning Excellence. The award salutes faculty who integrate community or public service into the curriculum and who work to institutionalize service-learning.

Among other endeavors, Eames has initiated research projects designed to lower the barriers that keep new immigrants from full participation in the local economy. For example, she led students to study ways that local banks can better serve Muslims, who are bound by their religion not to pay or benefit from interest payments.

Tapping the fields of sociology, anthropology and politics, Davis designed her own major at Bates, exploring how difference and inequality affect the advancement of social justice.

She espouses a deep interest “in connecting people who might initially see themselves as very different and allowing them to recognize that they’re not actually so different,” she explains, “and to realize that they can still build relationships and conduct really incredible initiatives.”

Davis was a coordinator for the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project in 2008, and is now president of the Bates Immigrant Rights Advocates, a student group.

Her own project, the Refugee Volunteer Program, works through the Lewiston/Auburn Time Bank to enable Bates students and immigrants, many of them from Somalia, to exchange services on an hour-per-hour basis. For instance, Bates students might help immigrants with English-language needs or homework. The immigrants, in return, offer cultural programs at Bates.

In the past two years Davis has recruited 33 students and 12 refugee families to the Time Bank, and matched them all with cross-cultural volunteer partners for service exchange.

“Sarah embraces all the qualities we look for in Heart and Soul Award recipients,” says Liz McCabe Park, executive director of Maine Campus Compact. The other recipients of the award are Rachel O’Brien of Unity College, Elaine Tsai of Bowdoin College and Christina Young of Southern Maine Community College.

What appeals to Davis about community involvement is the wealth of ideas and real-world perspectives that a diverse group of people can bring to an issue. “There’s tons of knowledge and wisdom that you can really only discover from actual hands-on experience and engaging with people,” she says.

Eames has been a robust and imaginative advocate for service-learning at Bates. In 2008, students in her course “Production and Reproduction” produced a widely distributed study that expanded and augmented a Maine Department of Labor report on Somali employment. In the 2009, the course worked with Androscoggin Bank and Somali immigrants to explore the requisites of Islamic banking practices.

Eames’ students have presented their results in such formal settings as bank meeting rooms and the Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce. “What I love,” says Eames, “is that, at such moments, my theoretical and geographically remote readings on alternate moral philosophies spring to life!”

Maine Campus Compact aims to lead the way in reinvigorating the public purposes and civic mission of higher education. Its participating institutions seek to transform their campuses so as to develop better-informed and proactive citizens, stronger communities and a more just democratic society.

The Donald Harward Award for Faculty Service-Learning Excellence recognizes faculty who integrate community or public service into the curriculum and who work to institutionalize service-learning. The award is named for Bates President Emeritus Donald W. Harward, a valued founder of Maine Campus Compact and former board member of national and Maine Campus Compacts.

This year’s other Harward recipients are Craig McKewen of Bowdoin College and Lorrayne Carroll of the University of Southern Maine.

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, an assistant professor of French at Bates College, is one of three Maine college professors to receive a 2009 Maine Campus Compact award for infusing public service and civic engagement into their teaching. Dauge-Roth will receive a Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence in the Maine Campus Compact’s eighth annual faculty and student awards ceremony April 16  at the Maine State Museum.
Dauge-Roth researches the Rwandan genocide of 1994, exploring personal, literary and film narratives created since Hutu extremists massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu. In the four years since he came to Bates, Dauge-Roth has fostered a correspondence between Bates students and survivors of the genocide.

During a 2006 trip to Rwanda, he established a network of genocide survivors who have corresponded in French with students in his seminar “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” to document survivors’ stories.

In 2007, Dauge-Roth’s students created the organization “Bates Students for Peace in Rwanda,” which received a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace award to support a home for street children in Rwanda. Also in 2007, Dauge-Roth assembled an international conference that brought scholars, human-rights advocates and genocide survivors to Bates to discuss the 1994 events.

Of his research into the narratives created by genocide survivors, Dauge-Roth says that “I’m examining how these authors use an aesthetic of haunting. These testimonies and documentaries find ways to haunt the reader and the viewer, so that we cannot go back to our usual business and forget about it.”

He adds, “I hope students will reflect on what it means to listen to a survivor. There’s a lot to learn from them about the ability to struggle and to live on despite horrific loss.”

In May, during Bates’ five-week Short Term, Dauge-Roth will take 13 students to Rwanda for three weeks to conduct an oral history project with members of “reconstituted families” — families made up of genocide survivors who lost their siblings and parents. One such orphan is elected as the head of the household and acts like a parental figure for the others.

The MCC’s Harward Award this year recognizes three Maine faculty members who have made public service an integral part of their teaching and have successfully advocated for civic engagement. In addition to Dauge-Roth, they are Christina Bechstein of the Maine College of Art and Nancy Ross of Unity College.

The award was named for Donald W. Harward, who retired as the sixth president of Bates College in 2002. Harward championed service-learning and other programs designed to make Bates a more active and valuable partner in the community life of Lewiston and Auburn. He is a founding president of Maine Campus Compact and former member of the board of directors of Campus Compact at the national level.

The Maine Campus Compact is a statewide coalition of college and university presidents established to encourage and enhance campus engagement in the community. The student Heart and Soul Award and the Donald Harward Faculty Award are presented annually.

- Office of Communications and Media Relations

Several years ago, students in Lee Abrahamsen’s 300-level virology course undertook a project for a hepatitis-C support group at a local hospital.

Members of the group craved information about everyday impacts the disease would have — “things like, ‘Can I share my towels with my family without infecting them?’ ” Abrahamsen explains. “The students developed this nice little booklet for them. It was a really neat project.”

That’s the kind of community orientation that won Abrahamsen, associate professor of biology, a prestigious award from the Maine Campus Compact. In April 2007, 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).

Abrahamsen’s activities in this realm, coupled with her keen interest in pedagogy in the sciences, go back at least a decade. Students in her 100-level course “Learning and Teaching Biology” developed and helped teach curricular units in nearby schools. In 2004, she collaborated with a high school biology teacher to revamp a biotechnology course in that teacher’s school. Last year, Abrahamsen’s bacteriology students worked with a local horse farm to find an effective antibiotic for an outbreak of hoof disease.

“My role is to be a facilitator and resource,” says Abrahamsen, who encourages upper-level students to propose a service-learning project in place of a non-final exam. “Students really own it. They really get into this far more than they would if I assigned a project and said, OK, here’s what you’re going to do.”

Two Bates College juniors will join six students from the University of Maine system’s Orono and Farmington campuses, and two Maine Campus Compact leaders, in New Orleans during the week of February break to work on construction projects with Habitat for Humanity. While there, Michael Wilson of Groton, Mass., and Brooke Miller of Arlington, Va., will meet with local residents who have been affected by the hurricane and will reflect on the concept of service.

“Our aim for the project,” Wilson says, “is to make connections between service and need in Louisiana and service and need in Maine, so that the five-day experience becomes part of our larger development as good citizens and friends.”

As part of their effort, Miller and Wilson hosted a series of pre-trip talks at Bates about the spirituality of service, including one by Gregory Rosenthal, Bates Class of 2005 and winner of the 2004 William Stringfellow Award for Peace and Justice, who works for a small religious-based homeless shelter in Schenectady, N.Y. Miller and Wilson plan to use observations from these preliminary discussions as a basis of comparison for what they will accomplish in New Orleans.

Upon their return to campus, the two Bates students will deliver a report to conclude the series. Their final presentation will evaluate their trip. They will consider, says Miller, “what we find spiritual in service and how we plan to live in Maine in light of the experiences we had.”

Maine Campus Compact is a coalition of 19 college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education. To support this civic mission, Campus Compact promotes community service that develops students’ citizenship skills and values, encourages partnerships between campuses and communities, and assists faculty who seek to integrate public and community engagement into their teaching and research.

Auburn resident Kathryn Graff Low, professor and chair of the Bates psychology department, was named a finalist for the Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence. The award recognizes Low’s accomplishments in service-learning, an instructional method in which students learn through involvement in service that meets a community need.

“As the lone clinician in a small, liberal arts college, I am approached frequently by both students and community agencies with proposals related to clinical services,” Low says. All of these service-learning projects involve clinical issues or health intervention, she says, but each also requires students to work with a team of community partners on critical community problems. “Optimally, students develop a sense of civic responsibility and social justice during the course by simply doing.”

The award was named for Donald W. Harward, who retired as the sixth president of Bates College in 2002. A founding president of Maine Campus Compact and a member of the Board of Directors of Campus Compact at the national level, Harward championed service-learning and other programs designed to make Bates a more active and valuable partner in the community life of Lewiston and Auburn.

Martha Deschaines ’75, manager of the Office of the Chaplain, received the Campus Civic Stewardship Award in recognition of her significant commitment to promoting and supporting civic engagement on and off campus. Deschaines, of Auburn, works with four Student Volunteer Fellows to coordinate the volunteer office. “It is inspiring for me to see how their strengths balance each other and to facilitate their leadership of the programs,” Deschaines said. “It is encouraging to know there are so many students who want to make a positive difference in the community.”

Sociology major Adrienne Eaton ’05 of Boylston, Mass., and interdisciplinary studies major Matthew Heffernan ’05 of Cranston, R.I., received the Philanthropy Innovation Learning Leadership Action Responsibility Service (PILLARS) Student Award. The award recognizes students who are pillars of their campuses and in their communities through their support of civic effort of others and through their leadership in finding solutions to community challenges.

Eaton worked for the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project in Lewiston. Grateful for the learning she gained by working with survivors of domestic violence, Eaton cited the strength and courage of those she encountered. “Often against many odds, these people have bounced back, have made new lives for themselves and have empowered me to continue this work,” she said.

Heffernan began his work as an archivist at the Lewiston Public Library in an effort to marry his passion for public service to his major in working-class studies. “The most important place my major has taken me is deeper into my own community in Lewiston,” Heffernan says, citing lessons learned about the recent influx of Somali immigrants from his study of earlier waves of immigration to the city.

Seniors Erin Bertrand of Torrington, Conn., Christopher Richards of Lee, N.H., and Jason Rafferty of Greenland, N.H., received Unsung Heroes Student Awards, given to students from each member campus who have shown a commitment to service not through leadership roles but through volunteering their time and services to address a cause.

A chemistry and environmental studies major, Bertrand joined chemistry major Richards to enhance voter registration and turnout among Bates students. Richards says the pair helped to register nearly 400 Bates students to vote, many for the first time. “I am concerned that the lack of participation, whether because of apathy or erosion of rights, is fatal to the goals and aspirations of democracy,” Bertrand said.

A neuroscience major, Rafferty is the Bates Emergency Medical Services crew chief and a member of the campus Hunger and Homelessness Committee. “I believe that by connecting with people, particularly those most in need…one gains the ability to empower others and make positive change,” Rafferty says.

Maine Campus Compact is a statewide coalition of college and university presidents established to encourage and enhance campus engagement in the community. The student Heart and Soul Award and the Donald Harward Faculty Award are presented annually.

The national Campus Compact is a national coalition of nearly 850 college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education. To support this civic mission, Campus Compact promotes community service that develops students’ citizenship skills and values, encourages partnerships between campuses and communities and assists faculty who seek to integrate public and community engagement into their teaching and research.

Dr. Phan Thi Phi Phi, one of three Vietnamese plaintiffs in a lawsuit against American chemical manufacturers, and Susan Hammond, deputy director of the New York-based Fund for Reconciliation and Development, will discuss this historic case in a lecture titled “Agent Orange: A New Vietnam War” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 3, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., Bates College.

The event, free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by Maine Campus Compact, an organization of college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education, the Bates College history department, and Women of Color at Bates.

During the Vietnam War, the United States used the chemical Agent Orange to kill trees that gave cover to the enemy and to cut food supply. Western experts believe that more than 40 million liters of the dioxin-containing Agent Orange were sprayed in Vietnam.

While Hanoi claims that as many as two million Vietnamese are thought to be suffering several health effects including cancers and immunodeficiency from Agent Orange, the U.S. federal government insists that there is no proof linking Agent Orange with any illnesses. These differences over the Agent Orange issue have been a source of contention between the two governments since they renewed diplomatic ties in 1995.

The Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange filed a lawsuit at the U.S. Federal Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. 30, 2004, against more than 30 U.S. chemical companies, seeking compensatory and punitive damages. The first hearing took place on Monday.

The New York Times has described the Agent Orange lawsuit as “an important test of the reach of American courts, drawing worldwide interest and setting off a fierce debate among international-law experts,” after the U.S. Justice Department urged the court to dismiss the suit.

Dr. Phi Phi, one of the Vietnamese plaintiffs, studied epidemiology at Hanoi University of Medicine, and has been investigating the link between rates of cancer and exposure to dioxin in Vietnam. Having served as director of Hospital No.1, a mobile facility in the heavily sprayed provinces of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai, Phi Phi believed that she was a victim of dioxin herself.

Susan Hammond has lived in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, working on projects that help build mutual understanding and respect between the United States and these three South East Asian nations. Hammond has coordinated projects that examine and address the effects of Agent Orange and unexploded ordinances. She is currently working with other organizations to develop an educational and fundraising campaign that aims to address the long-term health and ecological consequences of the use of Agent Orange, including a U.S.-wide traveling art exhibit starting in fall 2005.

Meghan Thornton, a junior interdisciplinary-studies major from Shaker Heights, Ohio, was one of six recipients of the Campus Compact’s Student Heart & Soul Award.

Aron Bell, a senior biology major from Summit, N.J., was one of six to receive honorable mention in the awards ceremony held on April 13 in the Hall of Flags at the Maine State House, Augusta.

The Student Heart & Soul Award is presented annually to undergraduates who have shown a depth and breadth of involvement in community service, service-learning and/or activism. These students have achieved significant results through involvement and have demonstrated leadership and innovation on campus and in the community.

Thornton volunteers for youth programs at the Hillview Housing Development in Lewiston. She coordinated an afterschool program, co-led a Girl Scout troop and ran a summer program for children at Hillview. She has provided tutoring, arts and crafts, field trips and other beneficial activities.  In particular, Thornton says, “I really attempted to work with the children to dispel myths and tensions that had arisen due to the new population of Somali families. I wanted them to understand that they had much to learn from one another.”

She adds, “In many ways, I think I got just as much from the children as I gave them. They taught me to take life a little less seriously and helped me realize that you need to take a moment and enjoy the simple things in life.”

Bell’s service to local youth includes teaching a weekly lesson on virology to 10th-graders as a guest tutor. He brought the students to Bates where he supervised their work on a bacteriophage lab protocol that he devised.

Bell also worked with 8th-graders to rebuild an old skateboard park in Auburn, meeting weekly with the students to discuss progress and helping them interview town officials.

The other Heart & Soul Award winners are: Mary Cameron, University of Southern Maine; Matt Crellin, Saint Joseph’s College; Casey Harris, Bangor Campus of the University of Maine at Augusta; Laurie Tranten, University of Maine at Farmington; and Elliott Wright, Bowdoin College.

The other Honorable Mentions were Susan Beane, Lewiston-Auburn College; Nicole Merryman, York County Community College; Seabren Reeves III, University of Maine at Farmington; Stephen Theriault, York County Community College; and Erica Tobey, University of Southern Maine.

Each year the Maine Campus Compact presents both the Heart & Soul Award and the Donald Harward Faculty Award, named for a former Bates College president, for service-learning excellence. The Compact is a statewide coalition of college and university presidents established to advance campus engagement in the community.

The national Campus Compact is a national coalition of nearly 850 college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education. Campus Compact promotes community service that develops students’ citizenship skills and values, encourages partnerships between campus and community, and assists faculty in integrating public and community engagement into their teaching and research.

For more information, contact Melissa Burlingame of Maine Campus Compact at 207-786-8392.