In the wake of the appearance of H1N1 flu cases at Bates, some community partners have expressed understandable concern about Bates students doing community work in the Lewiston-Auburn community.  The College has responded proactively to illness on campus, isolating students who show symptoms of flu-like illness and actively educating students, faculty, and staff about the need for vigilant hygiene and self-monitoring.  We at the Harward Center continue to come to work every day with confidence.

Harward Center staff have already reached out to our most active partnership sites to address their concerns.  Our partners work with many constituencies, and our students perform many kinds of work.  Some partners, including the Lewiston and Auburn public schools, have decided to temporarily cease having Bates students work on site.  Others have decided to maintain student work, while asking students to remain vigilant about their health and hygiene.  We are committed to being guided by our partners’ concerns, and we are eager to work with partners to help them make the decision that seems right to them.

Meanwhile we ask all Bates students, faculty, and staff doing work in community settings to be vigilant in using best hygienic practices and to err on the side of caution if they show any signs of illness or have been exposed to illness.  Please be especially careful if the community work involves children, the elderly, or other vulnerable populations.

The panel will seek to clarify the pros, cons and points of confusion and contention in the policy debate over climate change. The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

Panelists are Ted Koffman, executive director of Maine Audubon and former chair of the Natural Resources Committee of the Maine Legislature;Pete Didisheim, advocacy director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine;Melissa Carey, climate change policy specialist with the Environmental Defense Fund;and Tom Tietenberg, Mitchell Family Professor Emeritus of Economics at Colby College, where he taught environmental and natural resource economics.

Climate change is an issue of longstanding interest and concern at Bates. This year, the college asked its 470 arriving first-year students to join together in taking action on carbon emissions and climate change. They were given suggested summer reading related to the topic, and the annual orientation period included a presentation by Franke James, an artist known for her environmental activism.

In October, the first-years and other Bates students will take part in the International Day of Climate Action sponsored by the advocacy organization 350.org.

The Civic Forum is an interactive lively series that invites the audience to wrestle with and explore civic, political and policy issues significant to the Bates community, Maine and beyond.

The Harward Center leads Bates’ efforts in community involvement, including programs in service-learning, community volunteerism and environmental stewardship. The center works with community partners to meet community needs and, in the process, to integrate civic engagement with the Bates educational experience.

About Bates College

Bates College is widely regarded as one of the finest U.S. liberal arts colleges. Alumni frequently cite the capacities they developed at Bates for critical assessment, analysis, expression, aesthetic sensibility and independent thought. About 40 percent of students participate in career internships, and more than two-thirds of recent graduates enroll in graduate study within 10 years after graduation.

Bates was founded in 1855 by Maine abolitionists, and Bates graduates have always included men and women from diverse racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Scobey suggests that colleges launch campus-based news operations, staffed professionally but also offering training and mentoring to students. Focusing on local issues, such news operations could “catalyze new forms of journalistic education…more organically connected to liberal learning, writing pedagogy and student engagement in public affairs,” Scobey writes. “They might serve as a much-needed laboratory for the civic journalism movement.”

Scobey is the Harward Professor of Community Partnerships and director of the Harward Center.

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Bates College graduate’s documentary about a citizen response to a controversial construction proposal in Lewiston will be screened at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 25, in Bates College’s Pettengill Hall, Keck Classroom (G52), 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Presented by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, the screening of “Neighbor by Neighbor: Mobilizing an Invisible Community in Lewiston, Maine” is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

Created by Craig Saddlemire, a Lewiston resident and member of the Bates class of 2005, the film follows the response to the 2004 Heritage Initiative, the city of Lewiston’s plan to build a four-lane boulevard through a low-income downtown neighborhood. The project would have displaced 850 residents and destroyed playgrounds, vegetable gardens and historic buildings.

Residents of the neighborhood, supported by Bates student organizations, organized the Visible Community Initiative and halted the construction project.

Saddlemire became involved with the project when members of the Visible Community wanted raw video footage to serve as a record of the group.

The film documents a significant period in Lewiston’s history, depicting how the town dealt with urban revitalization during a depressed economy. It provides not only a record of the work of the Visible Community, but also a visual chronicle of changes in the neighborhood through the past five years.

“Once I started videotaping for the group, I never stopped,” says Saddlemire, who now has his own film production company, Round Point Movies. “This movie documents how hard some of the residents downtown have worked to make good lives for themselves in this neighborhood, and how much a misguided development plan can affect their lives.”

After his senior year at Bates, Saddlemire settled in downtown Lewiston and took a more active role in the initiative. The idea for a documentary developed when the Visible Community applied for a grant from the Self-Development of People Fund to develop a master plan for downtown Lewiston, created by the residents.

The group used grant money to document the planning process and edit other footage into a comprehensive history of the work the Visible Community had done.

After the Heritage Initiative was defeated, the organization lobbied to replace a closed city park, held demonstrations and eventually authored its own master plan for downtown Lewiston.

“Through the film, current students will be able to see how Bates students played a supportive role to the downtown residents, who in turn really impacted the Bates students that were involved,” says Saddlemire. The Visible Community, he says, effectively brought town and gown closer.

“The film demonstrates that there’s a lot to learn about the world beyond academia, and you can do that by just stepping off campus,” says Saddlemire. “People have misconceptions about downtown Lewiston, and I think seeing the people in this film tell their story will make people who hold those misperceptions think twice.”

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships leads Bates’ efforts in community involvement, including programs in service-learning, community volunteerism and environmental stewardship. The center works with community partners to meet community needs and, in the process, to integrate civic engagement with the Bates educational experience.

-Becca Chacko ’10, Office of Communications and Media Relations

Theodore Sutherland, a sophomore from Accra, Ghana; Rachel Kurzius, a junior from Ridgewood, N.J.; Marshall Hatch, a junior from Chicago; and Emily Grady, a junior from Littleton, Mass., offer a presentation titled “Why November 4 Matters: Student Voices on the Stakes of the Presidential Election” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 22, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public free of charge. For more information, please contact Kristen Cloutier at the Harward Center, at 207-786-6202.

“We are excited to be sponsoring this student panel on the presidential election,” says Harward Center director David Scobey. “Our Civic Forum series presents advocates and activists on important civic and political issues, and the voices of students and young voters could not be more important in this campaign.”

The discussion is not intended as a back-and-forth debate among the candidates’ supporters, Scobey says, but instead a chance to hear students speak for themselves on the stakes of this historic election.

The panel represents a variety of backgrounds and political interests. “I’m eager to hear the panelists’ thoughts and take part in the wider conversation they’ll spark with the audience,” says Scobey.

The forum is a lively series that invites the audience to explore civic, political and policy issues significant to the Bates community, Maine and beyond.

The Harward Center leads Bates’ efforts in community involvement, including programs in service-learning, community volunteerism and environmental stewardship. The center works with community partners to meet community needs and, in the process, to integrate civic engagement with the Bates educational experience.

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships inaugurates its 2008-09 Civic Forum series with a talk by a leading scholar-activist on democratic renewal and civic engagement. Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University delivers a lecture titled What Happens on November 5? Activating Citizenship (No Matter Who Wins) at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 24, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. The event is open to the public free of charge.

The forum is a lively series that invites the audience to wrestle with and explore civic, political and policy issues of significance to the Bates community, Maine and beyond.  For more information, please contact Kristen Cloutier at the Harward Center, at 207-786-6202.

Levine serves as research director of Tufts’ Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. A graduate of Yale and Oxford, where he held a Rhodes Scholarship, Levine is both a distinguished political theorist and a leader of the civic engagement movement. He served as deputy director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal during the Clinton administration.

Levine is the author of The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (Tufts, 2007), the forthcoming Forging Citizens: Policy for Youth Civic Engagement and several other books on philosophy and politics, as well as a novel.

The Harward Center leads Bates’ efforts in community involvement, including programs in service-learning, community volunteerism and environmental stewardship. The center works with community partners to meet community needs and, in the process, to integrate civic engagement with the Bates educational experience.

For the seventh year, a team of Bates College students is coordinating a program that matches fellow students with volunteer opportunities in the Lewiston-Auburn region.

The seven Student Volunteer Fellows at Bates during the 2008-09 academic year are seniors Jessica Adelman of Waban, Mass.; Hiu Man Christine Chiu of Hong Kong; Anne Fischer of Far Hills, N.J.; Erin Gilligan of Windham; Julie Miller-Hendry of Bedford, Mass.; and sophomores Chelsea Pennucci of Mamaroneck, N.Y. and Diane Saunders of Durham, N.C.

The Student Volunteer Fellows support the volunteer program run by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, a center designed to weave together campus and community for the enrichment of both liberal education and public life.

The Fellows coordinate volunteer projects for Bates students, with each Fellow responsible for a partnership with a particular community program. The Fellows help structure the Bates Volunteerism Program as a whole, they recruit and coordinate volunteers, and they participate in the various volunteer activities themselves.

Opportunities for volunteer work involve hundreds of Bates students every semester in projects ranging from Make-a-Difference Day to efforts with local youth like the Longley School Mentoring program.

Volunteering “is a way for me to connect with the community that I live in,” Miller-Hendry says. “Bates is lucky enough to have a wonderful program through the Harward Center that is committed to working with the community partners to really benefit both the students and the residents of Lewiston.”

Miller-Hendry coordinates the Bates volunteer program at Blake Street Towers, a public housing complex for residents who are elderly or disabled. Adelman works with the Hillview Afterschool Program, a Bates-run program at the Hillview Apartments community housing facility that provides homework help, games and activities for children.

Chiu facilitates Bates’ involvement with Lewiston Adult Education through the Lewiston Adult Learning Center and the College Transition Program, while Fischer works with the Longley School mentoring program. Gilligan coordinates the Montello School Reading Club and the America Reads and America Counts programs for Lewiston children.

Pennucci works with the Trinity Jubilee Center, recruiting Bates students to volunteer in the soup kitchen. Saunders coordinates group volunteer programs for Bates clubs and teams looking to make a difference in our communities.

“I strongly believe that what is important is not to force students to do community service, but instead make it clear that community service is not one specific thing,” Miller-Hendry says. “There are so many opportunities, from mentoring children to building houses to playing bingo with the elderly. Our goal as Student Volunteer Fellows is to make these opportunities as easy as possible for students.”

As a student volunteer fellow at the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, Nate Kellogg ’09 coordinates volunteer activities for Bates sports teams and clubs. He recruited the women’s soccer team to dress as characters for a children’s Halloween festival in Lewiston, for example, and got some a cappella groups to perform for local elderly citizens. “I play soccer and lacrosse, and I’ve found this is a great way to combine athletics and volunteerism,” he says.

Kellog says that a course he took, “The Public Work of Academics,” taught by Anna Bartel of the Harward Center, has been critical in helping him do better volunteer work, clarifying the dynamics and making the relationship most effective between the organizations offering help and the community partners receiving it. As part of the course, he helped teach English-Language Learners, many of them Somali immigrants, at Lewiston Middle School.

“I also wrote a paper examining the undergraduate thesis as a form of public scholarship,” Kellogg says. “I looked at two examples – ‘Teach for America, ‘ which came out of Wendy Kopp’s thesis at Princeton, and ‘Lots to Gardens,’ which Kirsten Walter ’00 started as part of her environmental studies thesis here at Bates. I’m now thinking deeply about my own senior thesis. For the moment, I’m split between two topics: revealing the Harward Center’s important role in the college’s public image or demonstrating how greater support of athletics at Bates would benefit the institution as a whole.”

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships has awarded three Publicly Engaged Academic Project grants to Bates faculty members, the first of two rounds of awards for 2007-08. These “PEAP” grants are designed to offer faculty and staff significant support for publicly engaged teaching, research, cultural and other community projects. In the current round, three faculty-led projects received grants totaling $11,223.

“The diversity of the projects funded by these grants underscores the creativity with which Bates faculty link public engagement to their teaching, research and artistic work,” noted David Scobey, director of the Harward Center. “These grants fund work in dance, cultural studies and environmental research. The range of publicly engaged academic work represented in these grants is impressive.”

The three PEAP recipients and their proposals are:

• Myron Beasley, visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies and African American studies, for “What Androscoggin County Eats,” a Short Term course that will investigate local foodways across different cultural communities and stage a “performative meal” at the Bates Mill in partnership with Museum L-A;

• Carol Dilley, assistant professor of dance, for “FAB: Franco-American Bates Dance Showcase,” a regional dance showcase co-produced by the Bates dance program and the Franco-American Heritage Center, including Bates student dancers and leading Maine choreographers and presenters;

• Mike Retelle, professor of geology, for “An Environmental Archive of Seawall Beach,” which will pair Bates students and Midcoast conservation advocates to monitor and research the historical effects of climate and tidal changes on beach, dune and salt marsh ecosystems at the beach near Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area.

“It’s exciting that these projects not only connect faculty with community partners, but also involve Bates students in important public work,” Scobey said. “I’m proud that the PEAP grants can support such innovative parts of the Bates education.”

The Harward Center has offered the second round of PEAP grants for this year. New proposals are due on April 18. For more information, please visit the Harward Center website, or contact David Scobey.

For the second year in a row, the Corporation for National and Community Service named Bates College to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction for exemplary service efforts and service to disadvantaged youth.

“I am delighted that, for the second consecutive year, Bates has been recognized nationally for our accomplishments in community service and community-based learning,” said David Scobey, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Professor of Community Partnerships.

“Being selected as a distinguished college on the President’s Honor Roll is a tribute to the hundreds of Bates students, faculty and staff who place community service at the heart of our educational endeavor. The Harward Center applauds their commitment and celebrates this honor,” Scobey said.

Launched in 2006, the Community Service Honor Roll is the highest federal recognition a school can receive for its commitment to service-learning and civic engagement. Honorees for the award were chosen based on a series of factors including scope and innovativeness 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.

Some of the collaborative efforts that best exemplify the work that Bates is doing include partnerships with the Lewiston Public School System and Lewiston Housing Authority, and “collaboratories” that include the Downtown Educational Collaborative and Y.A.D.A. (Youth + Adults + Dialogue = Action).

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 was extended through the 2005 formation of the Harward Center, which now houses the Service-Learning Program.

“College students like those at Bates College are tackling the toughest problems in America, demonstrating their compassion, commitment and creativity by serving as mentors, tutors, health workers and even engineers,” said David Eisner, chief executive officer of the corporation. “They represent a renewed spirit of civic engagement fostered by outstanding leadership on caring campuses.”

Overall, the Community Service Honor Roll awarded six schools with Presidential Awards. In addition, four schools were honored with Special Achievement Awards, 127 as Honor Roll with Distinction members and 391 schools as Honor Roll members.  In total, 528 schools were recognized.  See the full list at www.nationalservice.gov/honorroll.

More than a third of colleges and universities in the United States offer service-learning courses as part of their curriculum. Chosen by the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction in 2006 and 2007 and honored by the Carnegie Foundation in 2007 for community engagement, Bates is featured in “The Guide to Service-Learning College and Universities.” Published in 2007 by Beyond the Books, the guide profiles some of the nation’s most engaged institutions of higher learning.

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.” Bates is one of only three New England liberal arts colleges to receive this classification. Unlike the foundation’s other classifications that rely on national data, this is an “elective” classification — institutions chose to participate by submitting required documentation.

“We’re one of three liberal arts colleges in New England to hold this institutional classification,” says Anna Bartel, associate director for the Harward Center, “and it indicates a level of college-wide commitment to community engagement that is foundational to our identity.”