In this week’s blog post, we direct your attention to the , which features a wonderful post about the college’s participation in this year’s Dempsey Challenge.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Dempsey Challenge is an annual fundraising event organized by the Dempsey Center in Lewiston that provides comprehensive and free cancer support services to patients and their families.  Every September, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students, faculty, and staff participate as runners, cyclists and volunteers, raising funds and doing whatever needs to be done to help make the event a smashing success.

For the second time in three years, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was awarded the coveted College Cup for the highest fundraising total at the event.

GO BOBCATS!

In this week’s blog post we lift up about an exciting community-engaged research collaboration between one of our longtime community partners, Fowsia Musse of Maine Community Integration, and Harward Center Faculty Fellow, Assistant Professor of Psychology Yun Garrison. The two have been working together for several years to develop a theory of Somali refugee women’s intergenerational healing and growth. As part of that process, they recently collaborated with artist Won Kyoung on Ka Bogso (Be Healed) –a visual art display that depicts the five dimensions of Musse’s theory of healing. 

We hope you enjoy this story of how art and shared experiences brought these three women of color together, and that you’ll check out the exhibit when it finds its home in downtown Lewiston.

UPDATE: Check out of the event, compiled by Professor Garrison. The event was, as one attendee described, “a precious moment of Beloved Community — people of all stripes coming together with art, music, and food to recognize the journey of struggle and resilience undertaken by refugee women in our midst.” 

In light of the upcoming election in November, we are pleased to share that the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge (ALL IN) has recognized ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College for its nonpartisan democratic engagement efforts that fostered top levels of student voter engagement in the 2022 midterm elections. 

In the recently announced ALL IN awards, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was recognized as the top achiever in Maine and the NESCAC for both voter registration and voter turnout. Specifically, we received these accolades:

• 2022 Maine Campus Voting Challenge Highest Voting Rate: 4-year Institution
• 2022 Maine Campus Voting Challenge Highest Registration Rate: 4-year Institution
• 2022 NESCAC Votes Highest Voting Rate
• 2022 NESCAC Votes Highest Registration Rate

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ also earned a Platinum Seal from ALL IN based on our 2022 campus voting rate from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement () report from Tufts University.

Democratic engagement at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is led by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes team, supported by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes is an award-winning, nonpartisan, student-led voting initiative designed to reach all eligible ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students to make them aware of their right to vote and to support them in the process of exercising that right. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes team fosters nonpartisan student learning and voting – whether that happens in local, state, or national elections, in students’ home states or in their new hometown of Lewiston, Maine. 

Currently, the 2024 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes team is “all in” for campus-wide participation in our democracy through voter registration and engagement. Led by two student co-coordinators, Ethan Chan ‘25 and Tammy Namangale ‘27, the team is fully mobilized for maximum student participation in this year’s election. Here’s what Ethan and Tammy had to say about the recent recognition bestowed on ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes: “We are very proud of the work ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes did in 2022, as well as the work the team continues to do this year. It is apparent that our ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community has a strong culture of civic engagement, and we think the fact that these efforts are student-led is a big factor in our success. It is great to be recognized for that!”

Congratulations to Ethan, Tammy, and all the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes students for their extraordinary work, both past and present!

Click here for more information on ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes and their 2024 election engagement efforts.

As a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student, Rodney Galvao, class of 2014, majored in Rhetoric and minored in Religious Studies and Education. His passion for community service began during his early years as a participant in SquashBusters, a youth development program that combines academic support, squash, and community service. SquashBusters strives to bring out the best in its students and support their life journey – a mission that resonated deeply with Rodney and inspired his own path. The organization instilled in Rodney a love for giving back, which continued throughout his educational journey.

After high school, Rodney’s mentor at SquashBusters encouraged him to apply for the Bonner Leader Program at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, a program that aligned with his desire to pursue community service at the college level. The Bonner Program meant a lot to Rodney, providing him with a community within ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ that he could lean on for support. It involved much more than just community service. Similar to SquashBusters, the Bonner Program opened many doors for him. As a Bonner Leader, Rodney dedicated countless hours to Tree Street Youth in downtown Lewiston, volunteered at Lewiston Middle School, and helped at the local YWCA. He also spent his summers supporting Lewiston Squash Camp as he taught the game of squash to kids from Lewiston.

Rodney is a strong believer in giving back to the community that shaped him. After college, he returned to work at SquashBusters, the program that provided him with the guidance and encouragement to attend ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. Now, after more than a decade with the organization, Rodney serves as the CEO of SquashBusters, where he oversees the programs in Boston, Lawrence, and Providence, helping to ensure that today’s young people have the same transformative opportunities that shaped his own journey. 

Rodney’s Harward Center fans and other ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ mentors are so proud of him! For more information, check out from SquashBusters about Rodney’s appointment as CEO.

Our hearts grieve deeply for Lewiston in the wake of the recent tragedy. Like many others, we continue to discern how best to support our neighbors at this difficult time. One thing we heard from the wider community was a desire not to “cancel” Halloween.

So, in partnership with the City of Lewiston and with collaborators from across the campus, we were able to provide a safe and fun Halloween experience via a community trick-or-treat event on campus last Tuesday night. Our colleagues in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Communications and Marketing Office wrote a lovely story about it, which we’re passing along in this week’s blog post.

Among the many reasons Professor Anelise Hanson Shrout (Digital and Computational Studies) was recently awarded this year’s Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence by Maine Campus Compact is her enthusiasm and creativity in helping her students engage creatively with the past. As a digital historian, professor Shrout’s courses focus on how digital technology can build and strengthen civic identities and relationships, giving students tools for collaborating with others to solve real-world problems and advance social justice. Whether developing tutorials to help survivors of domestic violence hide their online footprints, using data analysis methods to illuminate the relationship between ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, Lewiston’s mills, and the U.S. slave economy, or producing digital archives of a local museum’s Indigenous collections, students in her classes become citizen problem-solvers who work with each other and with members of the off-campus community to implement technological design processes that meet local needs. 

Among the more than two dozen community-engaged learning courses offered by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty members this past spring, one was professor Shrout’s “Public History in the Digital Age,” where students not only learned about public history but became public historians themselves, conducting archival research and using digital tools to tell the stories of some of those buried in Lewiston’s Riverside Cemetery. Visitors to the cemetery, which is situated along a popular walking path on the banks of the Androscoggin River, can now use their phones to listen to the stories of some of the Civil War veterans, immigrants, and Maine industrial workers buried there. Learn more by enjoying Freddie Wright’s wonderful article in the recent ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ News.Ìý

For those who haven’t heard, we want to share the fabulous news that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student Aaliyah Moore ’24 has been awarded a prestigious Truman Fellowship. Aaliyah has been a transformative leader at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, including at the Harward Center, and we are beyond proud of her.

Check out this story about Aaliyah’s accomplishments by our colleagues in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Communications and Marketing Office.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student published last week that we are proud to share in this week’s blog post. It’s about the great work of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Votes, a non-partisan, student-run initiative of the Harward Center that is taking the lead in preparing the campus for the midterm election on November 8th. 

Lucy Sherman ’23, Santa Monica, CA

My summer fellowship with LA Arts provided an authentic insight into the community where I go to school and study, and it showed me how artistic and vibrant the Twin Cities are. As a summer intern I got to speak to leaders of the Maine Arts Commission, board members of LA Arts, Lewiston Public Library, and highly accomplished artists around Maine. I will never forget the first LA Art Walk I attended. . . The town of Lewiston was alive, bumping with music, and embellished with provocative artwork on every corner. I was in attendance for the inauguration of three new public art commissions in downtown Lewiston and Auburn, which included comments by each city’s mayor, among others. One of the featured artists, stone-carver Hugh Lassen, invited me to visit his studio in Cherryfield, Maine, so I look forward to learning and writing about his body of work in the near future. Another part of my summer work with LA Arts was curating two exhibitions for the River Walk storyboards in downtown Auburn. The first exhibit, during July, highlighted student work from a local art studio, while the October exhibit will feature work from Museum-LA. I was happy to be able to experience the effects of public art commissions since I am interested in learning more about art in the public sphere and the interrelations of public sculpture within communities and spaces. 

Truthfully, I did not know what to expect from this internship. I anticipated learning about local artists and somehow linking their work to the city of Lewiston/Auburn for public exhibition. Interestingly, the position took a youthful direction, with most events focused on integrating children and families into the arts. I learned that there is a strong group of arts-loving community members in the city who work hard to form connections and bonds with local venues and stores. I also learned that the organization is very open to input from people not associated with LA Arts, and they happily accept new ideas and collaborations. This internship was meaningful to me because it gave me insight into the inner workings of the city and municipal relationships to public art commissions and community arts. These are things that I would like to continue studying and thinking about in the spaces around me.

Isabelle Mueller ’23, Bernardsville, NJ

This summer, I worked as a Cooperative Development and Marketing intern with New Roots Cooperative Farm in Lewiston. Founded by four Somali Bantu farmers, New Roots seeks to support and give back to the local community, give farmers access to markets, and allow for the farmers to provide for their families. I assisted farmers with planting, weeding, harvesting, washing/peeling, and selling produce at markets around Maine. At the markets, I helped farmers handle currency and transactions, stay organized, and communicate with customers. 

On the marketing side, I managed the Instagram and Facebook pages for New Roots, and worked on a variety of projects like designing new banners, getting a sign installed at the farm, creating reusable price tags, and writing weekly blog posts with farm updates, recipe inspiration, and photos from my time working alongside the farmers. 

I expected to learn more about the business and development side of New Roots, and I hope to get more exposure to that dimension if I volunteer in the future. Nevertheless, I was able to strengthen my communication skills across language and culture barriers, become more involved in the Lewiston community, and form valuable relationships with my supervisors and the farmers who made the experience truly special. 

One of the highlights of working with New Roots this summer was the opportunity to share lunch with the farmers and get to know them on a deeper level. Working under sun in high temperatures was challenging at times, and sitting in the shade with the farmers and chatting about our lives and families was a great way to break up the day. 

The work I did at New Roots was often independent, like weeding in the fields or cleaning vegetables at the washing station. The more time I worked on my own, the more I valued the time that I was able to spend with the other farmers.

Another highlight of the experience was joining the farmers at markets in York and Gorham. New Roots works to give farmers the opportunity to not only sell produce and provide for their families, but also give back to the community. It was common for the same customers to come back week after week, excited to tell the farmers how great their produce was and to share the recipes they cooked using New Roots vegetables. In moments like these, the farmers were always beaming with pride and were excited to recommend new vegetables and recipes, and to genuinely thank customers for their support. This was one of my favorite parts of the internship, and it was fulfilling to be there for the entire process: planting, growing, packaging, and selling the produce.

Building community.  One partnership at a time.