This multimedia presentation features what has become a dynamic tradition at Bates: the annual Mount David Summit, held this year on April 3. An eagerly anticipated presentation of student scholarship, service-learning and creative work, the summit unfurls a panorama of the rich life of the student mind at Bates. Produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Maine’s judicial branch of government has recognized Bates College for volunteer work performed in the state’s courts.

At a recent Lewiston District Court ceremony, Maine Chief Justice Leigh Saufley presented the college with the Outstanding Volunteer of the Year Award, honoring work done by the Bates College Service-Learning Program and the departments of psychology and sociology. Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, accompanied by Peggy Rotundo, director of strategic and policy initiatives for the college’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships, accepted the recognition.

Since summer 2003, Bates students have volunteered throughout the academic year in the Lewiston District Court. Bates students, said Justice Saufley, have worked in the courtroom making electronic recordings, assisting in legal research and participating in case management. All of these duties have helped judges, magistrates and clerks of the court system, Saufley said.

District Court Judge John Beliveau has led the Lewiston District Court’s efforts to find meaningful work experiences for the students. “The program has been an excellent example of the cooperative relationships that can be forged for the mutual benefit of the students and the court system,” Beliveau said.

“Bates students have benefited significantly from this working relationship,” President Hansen said. She cited the credit hours earned for their work at the court and their enjoyment of field experiences that can be directly applied to their course work. Some students, she said, have used the court experience as a basis for their senior theses on topics such as children in foster care, the child protective system and the relationship between parental substance abuse and harm to children.

During her presentation to Bates, Saufley also recognized Rotundo, a Maine state senator, for her efforts in developing an appreciation for the important role of the courts in the community. Rotundo has fostered the bond between the Judicial Branch and the Legislature while supporting the relationship between Bates and the Lewiston District Court.

The Outstanding Volunteer Award is presented each year to that person or program that, in a volunteer capacity, assists the Judicial Branch in fulfilling its mission of administering justice by providing an accessible, efficient and impartial system of dispute resolution.

The Downtown Education Collaborative (DEC), a local partnership of seven academic and community institutions, will open a new storefront education center at 219 Lisbon St. in January 2008. DEC’s mission is to pursue education partnerships in and with Lewiston’s downtown residential community. Its members include the four colleges of the Lewiston-Auburn area — Andover College, Bates College, Central Maine Community College and the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College — as well as the Lewiston Public Library, Lewiston Adult Education and Empower Lewiston.

For two years, the partners met together to plan an initiative that would bring their resources to the downtown community, work collaboratively with community partners and one another, create a downtown space that could help to build community capacity, and get the four “Colleges of the Androscoggin” working together.

“Can you imagine it?” said Karl Trautman, the representative of Central Maine Community College about the DEC coalition. “With the opening of our new center, we will have the opportunity to offer team-taught service-learning classes where students from all of our colleges can work together with community partners to meet community needs. I can envision clinics and internships, community research projects, open space for downtown community meetings and drop-in services. I think DEC enables all of us to work with the downtown community in ways that none could do separately.”

“We think that this model of inter-college cooperation mixed with community partnership represents something new in American higher education and something new for Lewiston-Auburn,” said Michelle Vazquez Jacobus of USM’s Lewiston-Auburn College. “All the DEC partners were doing innovative community work, but we hadn’t figured out how to do it together. We had a thousand dots, but we weren’t connecting them. Now we can envision all kinds of important projects: research into community health, computer projects that teach grass-roots groups how to use digital technologies, education programs for both new immigrants and older Mainers.”

The DEC partners are hiring a full-time administrator to direct the downtown education center and lead community-based education projects and programs. He or she will be responsible for working with the DEC collaborators and other community partners to organize education projects, oversee programs offered at the center and open the center to community events and initiatives. The launch and staffing of the center are made possible, in part, with a three-year, $132,000 grant from the Jessie B. Cox Charitable Trust to the Bates College Harward Center for Community Partnerships for the support of the whole DEC coalition.

“DEC is committed to a vision of community education that is collaborative, empowering, and place-based. That is why we needed a space right in downtown Lewiston,” said Christine Lashua, the representative of Andover College in the collaborative. “The Cox Trust grant enables DEC to open and staff such a center.” The Cox Trust funding will be administered by the Harward Center, but the downtown center and its director will be responsible to the whole seven-member collaborative.

“We want the downtown center at 219 Lisbon St. to be at once a home and a crossroads, a place where educators and community partners can work together in new ways,” said David Scobey, the director of Bates’ Harward Center for Community Partnerships. “We think that everyone – the downtown community, our students, and our institutions – can benefit from DEC.”

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships joins several local agencies serving teens and young adults in launching Youth + Adults + Dialogue = Action, or YADA, an intergenerational project that will bring together more than 100 community members to discuss how to make Lewiston-Auburn a better place for youth.

A series of four dialogues for small groups will be co-facilitated by a young person and an adult. The goal of the two-hour dialogues is to develop action steps to be implemented collaboratively by young people and adults to make L-A  more youth-friendly, says YADA steering committee member Holly Lasagna, assistant director of service learning for the Harward Center. Including young people in the discussions is key to the effort.

The first YADA dialogue kicks off at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, in the Lewiston Public Library, 200 Main St. The remaining dates are Nov. 1, 8 and 15. The Harward Center hosted a Sept. 29 facilitator training session at Bates College, where 30 teenagers and adults worked on skills to use in upcoming dialogues.

“I was blown away by the response of those who attended,” Lasagna said. “Everyone was very engaged, and it was exciting to witness the adult-youth partnership that evolved. If their interaction is any indication of how the community dialogues will go, I believe this will be a very meaningful experience for all involved.”

In April 2006, several local agencies working with teens and young adults convened a group of community members to discuss ways to make Lewiston-Auburn a more youth-friendly and youth-empowered place. Although the group made some strides, they realized there were no young people sitting at the table. After careful consideration, much research and meaningful interaction with local youth, the consortium decided to initiate a “study circles project.”

Those interested in participating in the dialogues may contact YADA steering committee chairman Larry Marcoux of the United Way of Androscoggin County at 207-795-4000 or this lmarcoux@unitedwayandro.org.

In addition to Bates College, members of the YADA steering committee include the United Way of Androscoggin County, the city of Lewiston, the Lewiston Public Library, TD Banknorth, New Beginnings, Lots to Gardens, THRIVE, local public schools, ACE/Youthbuild, YWCA, community businesses and young people.

Word about YADA is circulating nationally. Read about the project on DemocracySpace, where community organizers and public officials connect online to share news, views and ideas, or on the Study Circles Resource Center site, featuring a report about YADA by the Lewiston Sun Journal.

Five students who conducted international research with the support of Phillips Fellowships from Bates present their research in October. Presentations begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, and Monday, Oct. 15, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

They are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-753-6952.

Three Phillips Fellows are featured in the Oct. 10 event.

A senior biochemistry major from St. Catherine, Jamaica, Shawna-Kaye Lester’s presentation is titled “Movement of Jah People.” Lester participated in a dance project with the Ndere Troupe, first in New York and then in the troupe’s hometown of Kampala, Uganda. There she was able to observe the dance styles of the African diaspora as they relate to African traditions and Uganda’s newest refugee populations.

Two seniors present “Addressing the Cycle of Poverty Through Education in Cambodia.” Anthony Begon is a resident of Peabody, Mass., double-majoring in political science and African American studies. Political science major Ross Van Horn hails from Highland Park, N.J. The pair will discuss their work with the nongovernmental organization Globalteer, teaching English to children in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and the practical perspective on human rights challenges in Southeast Asia the experience provided.

At 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 15, two senior Phillips Fellows describe their research.

An African American studies major from Brooklyn, N.Y., Leeanne Cunningham presents “Racism, Discrimination and Prejudice of African Descendents in Brazil.” Cunningham will recount her visits to several “quilombos,” Brazilian communities founded by escaped slaves, as she explored how the communities have evolved in a shifting cultural context.

A physics major from Bansbari, Nepal, Suresh Rana presents “Exploring Bangladeshi Communities to Understand Cross-cultural Perspectives and Religious Interpretations of Cancer and Cancer Treatment.” Rana visited various sites in Bangladesh to investigate access to cancer treatment and compare approaches by different cultures and religions.

Phillips Student Fellowships at Bates support students who design exceptional international or cross-cultural projects focusing on research, service-learning, career exploration or a combination of the three.

The Phillips Student Fellowships, Phillips Faculty Fellowships and Phillips Professorships at Bates are part of the Phillips Endowment Program, an initiative of awards, honors and opportunities funded by a $9 million endowment bequest made to the college in 1999 by Charles F. Phillips, fourth president of Bates, and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips.

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.”

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.

In another honor, the Corporation for National and Community Service has named Bates to the first President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll  for distinguished community service, a recognition of extraordinary volunteer efforts by the school and its students to serve local neighborhoods.

Bates is one of 62 schools, out of 76 recognized, to receive the Carnegie Foundation’s classification for community engagement under both “Curricular Engagement” and “Outreach and Partnerships.” Unlike the foundation’s other classifications that rely on national data, this is an “elective” classification — institutions chose to participate by submitting required documentation.

The Carnegie classification recognizes the particular strengths of Bates’ collaboration with the community: the breadth and depth of partnerships; the variety of models; the longevity and innovation of partnerships; and the variety of campus partners involved. Some of the collaborative efforts that best exemplify the work that Bates is doing include partnerships with the Lewiston Public School System, Maine State Government, Lewiston Housing Authority, Museum L/A Oral History Project and Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary.

The Harward Center maintains partnerships, many spanning a decade or more, with more than 120 community organizations. This community work was nurtured early on through the Bates Center for Service-Learning, established in 1995 as one of the first of its kind. The commitment to community partnerships has been extended through the 2005 formation of the Harward Center, which now houses the Service-Learning Program.

“I am delighted, but not surprised, that both the Carnegie Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service saw fit to recognize Bates’ accomplishments in community engagement and public service,” says David Scobey, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Professor of Community Partnerships.

It’s especially gratifying, says Scobey, that the Carnegie Foundation has named Bates as a “community engaged institution” under both the possible headings of community partnerships and curriculum. “We have worked hard to make civic engagement a means of public benefit and educational innovation,” Scobey says. “It’s wonderful that both achievements were recognized.”

Led by Anna Sims Bartel, the associate director of the Harward Center, the staff spent much of the summer gathering a wealth of information about community projects, partnerships, volunteer programs, summer programs, work study and funding commitments.

“Many people know, for example, about Bates dining services’ commitment to local sustainable practices; many know about our green energy commitments; many know about the Service-Learning Program or the Bates Morse-Mountain Conservation Area,” Bartel says. “But few of us have had the opportunity to see it all together at once, to understand the scope and scale of our work in and with the community. It’s fairly staggering.”

By making its case for national recognition, Scobey says, “we also unearthed parts of our history of community engagement that will enrich and inspire the future work of the Harward Center. These honors are the culmination of many years of creativity and hard work by Bates staff, students and faculty — literally hundreds of individuals.”

“But they are also the result of the generosity and staying power of our community partners,” adds Scobey. “The Harward Center is lucky to reap the benefits of many years of collaboration, and we are grateful to everyone who made possible these honors.”

Carnegie Foundation President Lee S. Shulman points out that the colleges and universities selected for this elective classification provide examples for other schools “around teaching and learning and around research agendas that benefit from collaborative relationships. Funding new and better ways to connect with their communities should be a high priority for higher education institutions today.”

Bates was one of 140 institutions of higher education recognized for distinguished service among the nearly 500 schools named to the President’s Honor Roll. Schools receiving distinguished service recognition provided exceptional community service over the past year, contributing their time, resources, energy, skills — and intellect — to serve America. As an honor roll recipient, Bates was also one of a handful of institutions commended for using more than 20 percent (23.19 %) of its federal work-study funds for community service.

The President’s Higher Education Community Honor Roll is co-sponsored by the Corporation for National and Community Service, the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, USA Freedom Corps and the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation. The recognition is presented in cooperation with Campus Compact, a national coalition of nearly 1,000 college and university presidents, and supported by all the major national higher education associations.

The popular annual art exhibit by students from Lewiston Middle School returns to the college Museum of Art next month. The exhibit will open with a reception at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 6, and run through March 21.

If past years are any indication, about 100 seventh- and eighth-graders will each show a piece of art in the exhibit. Media will include drawing and painting, masks, ceramics, mosaics, prints and sculpture. Some students may also show work, either animated pieces or drawings, created on laptop computers supplied through the Maine Learning Technology Initiative.

The benefits of this exhibit will go beyond providing the students with a venue for their work. It will also afford an inside view of museum procedures, explains Kate Cargile, one of the school’s two art teachers. “It’s a good experience for them to learn not only to make art, but ways that different people can participate in the art world,” Cargile says.

The annual exhibit is one aspect of an ongoing relationship between the middle school and the college. Bates’ Adopt-a-School Program is administered by the Center for Service-Learning, which engages students and faculty with community service in a variety of ways. Bates’ involvement has also supported the middle school library and provided a breakfast for students graduating to Lewiston High School, among other projects.

For more information about the museum, please call 207-786-6158.

A $1.7 million gift to endow the new Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Center for Community Partnerships was announced Friday in a dedication ceremony on the Bates College Quad.

The gift was raised from members of the board of trustees, former trustees, parents of students, alumni, faculty and staff.

“At the core of Bates’ tradition lies a commitment to serve society,” said trustee James L. Moody. “The Harward Center for Community Partnerships will provide new opportunities for Bates faculty and students to learn through civic engagement, and for the Lewiston-Auburn community to benefit from true collaborations with Bates.”

Moody said the Harward Center will be located on the Bates campus and eventually will consolidate the existing assortment of Bates-community programs under one roof, with a director that reports to the dean of faculty. The trustees’ Committee on College and External Relations will provide support and oversight. The center will open in 2002-03.

The keynote speaker for the dedication was former U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford, chairman of America’s Promise, an organization founded by Secretary of State Colin Powell to build character and raise aspirations of the nation’s youth. Wofford described President Harward as “a man of ideas, but ideas that must be turned into action.” He described the Center for Service-Learning set up during the Harward presidency as a national model, and he lauded the extension of this concept through creation of the comprehensive center.

Bates College announced the creation of a new center for community partnerships last November to bring together service-learning and applied research in the community interest and to create a permanent structure for partnering with community projects. The naming and dedication Friday honors a primary legacy of the Harward presidency: a commitment to community engagement by Bates College, according to Jill N. Reich, vice president for academic affairs.

“The Harward Center for Community Partnerships will become the college’s focal point for all partnerships with the community,” Reich said. “It will become the organizational home of Bates College’s highly effective and nationally recognized service-learning program. More than that, it is being organized as an academic program, in the heart of the institution, which underscores the commitment of the Bates College Board of Trustees to an enduring relationship between campus and community.”

Reich noted that the many existing relationships created through LA Excels and the Center for Service-Learning will remain operative. Eventually, the center will offer a single point of contact, making it easier for community members to approach the college with new ideas for relationships that have academic value and mutual benefit. The college plans to hire a director for the Harward Center during the next year.

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships will consolidate existing and new programs, current and future collaborations, personnel and resources.

* The center will enhance Bates’ focus on and support to service-learning. Service-learning at Bates goes beyond traditional volunteerism by incorporating community service into academic course work. Since 1995, more than half of the Bates student body has engaged in service-learning projects, while more than a third of the faculty has included a service component in their courses. In the year ending May 2001, Bates students participated in 53,547 hours of service in the local community. Bates’ service-learning program involves nearly 150 community agencies and institutions.

* The center will provide an ongoing institutional structure and resource for collaborations with the community, including LA Excels. A community-based strategic alliance founded in 1998, LA Excels is composed of colleges, schools, hospitals, municipal governments, arts organizations and businesses that work together to create a shared vision of excellence in community development. After two conventions involving more than 1,000 local citizens, LA Excels decided to champion plans that no single entity could accomplish, including: the development of a performing arts center, a community arts learning center, and a museum devoted to the area’s industrial and social heritage. It also supports an LA conference center, neighborhood housing improvements, green corridors and bicycle pathways linking the two cities, and projects to increase educational aspirations of local schoolchildren.

* The center will align and support research projects by students and faculty that have application in the community — research that brings external support that otherwise would not occur. Examples include a student who developed a Geographical Information System for Lewiston and Auburn and saved the municipalities nearly $200,000 in labor and consultants’ fees. Another gave 34 students from Lewiston’s Longley Elementary School a chance to conduct hands-on science experiments with four Bates professors.

Significant grant support from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provide resources that enable these college and community collaborations.

The Bates College Board of Trustees voted to create the center and authorized a search for its first director at its meeting last October. During board discussion, Trustees Chair Burton Harris, among others, noted the importance of a lasting partnership between campus and community. “The fences, physical and metaphorical, have come down,” Harris said. “The college and its partner, the community, now have a direct, a sustainable, and a mutually-reinforcing relationship.

“The establishment of this center, one of the most significant steps taken by the college, will assure the Lewiston-Auburn community that, as partners now and in the future, both the college and the community can reinforce their strengths, their mutually beneficial interactions and their missions of excellence.”

Eight Bates students each are working on these two service-learning projects and will present their findings at town meetings open to the public.

The student presentation to the Turner Dam Committee will be made at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 7, at the Turner Town Office. The student presentation concerning the middle school will be made before the Sabbatus School Committee at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 8, in the Sabbatus Elementary School.

During summer 1999, Hodgkin distributed a request for proposals to city and town managers and school superintendents in Androscoggin County. From the responses, he selected two projects based on what he thought would interest students as well as offer the potential for contributing to local decision-making.