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.

Sarah Davis '10 (center) with NASAP growers at the Lewiston Farmers' Market.

If soup makes the soldier, as Napoleon Bonaparte said, it does a pretty good job shaping students, too.

Issues around food have an unusual teaching potential, a power rooted in one simple fact: everybody eats. And its branches reach out to nearly every corner of the human endeavor.

At Bates, the topic of food tends to invoke “issues of stewardship and sustainability, writ large,” says Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. “And poverty and social justice, because there’s no escaping the fact that food is huge in terms of social inequity.”

That scope holds true for the community activities, both volunteer and academically driven, that the Harward Center funds and coordinates year-round.

For instance, this past summer Sarah Davis ’10 worked for a Maine-based nonprofit, administering the Lewiston Farmers’ Market and helping immigrants learn the ways of American farming.

Meanwhile, Ariel Garfinkel ’08 taught kids in Lewiston where food comes from and how to cook it. Also working with youth was Andie Bisceglia ’09, who spent her summer at the Hillview apartments running a program for Lots to Gardens — an agency, founded by Kirsten Walter ’00, that uses gardening projects to strengthen community and support local young people.

For all three, the summer work illuminated the studies that awaited them when autumn came around. In her Harward-funded position with the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project, Davis guided farmers from Somalia and Guatemala in getting their produce to market. “I learned so much about the people that I worked with,” she says.

The work gave her “a first-hand perspective on the idea of difference” — a perspective valuable to her self-designed major exploring issues of difference and conflict in a context of social justice.

As a vehicle for teaching, food is distinctively useful as an exemplar across disciplines. “Pedagogy functions on the assumption that we start where people are and push them to someplace new,” Bartel says. “And everyone can start where they are with food. So pedagogically, it’s really powerful.”

All the more so given today’s mass critique of the food-industrial system. “Food and sustainable agriculture are perfect examples of readily identifiable areas where ordinary citizens can actually do a fair amount of research,” Bartel adds.

“There’s a lot of good information out there,” she says. “People can move from problem identification to problem solving, to living in a set of commitments that promote sustainable answers. And that, right there, is the model of what we think liberal education is doing in the world.”

“I came to Bates just wanting to be an environmental studies major,” but not knowing how many directions that might take her in, says Bisceglia. “There’s just so many options. And I think farming and local food combine them all.”

By Doug Hubley, photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen