Feature
Brian Peterson, one of the founding members of Students Today Leaders Forever and a four-year participant on the Pay It Forward Tour, helps clean up along the banks of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.
Making a difference
U students are helping to change the world...while they're still in school
By Rick Moore
From M, summer 2007
Brian Lucero sits at a campus bagel joint in mid-May with a grin
the length of the nearby Scholars Walk. He may always be this
cheerful, but the end of finals a day earlier is likely a
contributing factor. Lucero graduated in December with a bachelor's
degree in civil engineering and a minor in mathematics, and this
spring he tacked on minors in Spanish studies and Asian languages
and literatures. He received the Paul A. Cartwright/Institute of
Technology (IT) Alumni Society award in recognition of his service
to IT and the University. Over the past two years, Lucero has done
construction and engineering relief work in Costa Rica and Pakistan
(part of his involvement with the organization Engineers Without
Borders) and participated in a senior civil engineering project
aimed at bringing clean water to a village in Ghana. Closer to
home, he has provided translation services for low-income Spanish
speakers for their tax returns and helped tutor Spanish-speaking
inner city schoolchildren.
In a time of heightened emphasis on the
University's vast research endeavors, it's vital to remember how
seriously the U takes its public and community engagement
mission.
Despite the breadth of his travels, Lucero is not an anomaly.
Across the University's campuses, students are engaged in community
service projects great and small---from one-time cleanups and
weeklong spring-break service trips to regular tutoring sessions
and volunteer efforts in far-off countries. Tallying students'
community service can be a bit like counting the waves on a windy
day at Lake Mille Lacs. Not only is it a monumental task, the waves
keep moving. But students like Lucero are a good place to start. A
self-proclaimed average student through his first two years of
college, Lucero says his work overseas gave him motivation to
finish school and helped him to see how engineering can better the
world. "It's cool to see how you can apply that knowledge to
improve the lives of other people," he says.
Beyond research
In a time of heightened emphasis on the University's vast research
endeavors, it's vital to remember how seriously the U takes its
public and community engagement mission. Public engagement is a
twist on what has traditionally been called "outreach." Outreach
was more of a one-way street, with U experts going out into the
community to impart their knowledge. Public engagement is a two-way
street where U students, staff, and faculty give of their time and
talents--as per the community's needs--and often receive as much as
they give. It's an exchange of information and inspiration. The
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has included
the University of Minnesota as one of 76 colleges and universities
nationwide in its new "Community Engagement" classification. And
earlier this spring, the U staged its first-ever Public Engagement
Day to showcase the many ways the University connects with
communities. For some students juggling busy class and work
schedules, making a difference means giving up their free time.
Four years ago, a group of Twin Cities campus freshmen founded the
group Students Today Leaders Forever (STLF) and planned a spring
break trip called the Pay It Forward Tour, where students travel
across the country, stop in a different city each night, and
perform a community service project each day. In 2004 one bus with
43 students traveled to Washington, D.C. STLF now has 11 chapters
throughout the Midwest; this year, 15 buses carrying some 600
students made spring break journeys. For other students, public
engagement has become part of their studies and is integrated into
the curriculum on all the U's campuses. In this case, it is known
as "service-learning"--a teaching methodology that incorporates
community service projects into traditional classes as a way for
students to gain a deeper understanding of the course objectives. A
composition class, for example, may ask its students to volunteer
regularly at a homeless shelter and to then use that experience as
inspiration for their writing. According to Laurel Hirt,
service-learning and community involvement director at the U's
Career and Community Learning Center (CCLC), in 2006 there were
1,988 students participating in 63 courses that offered
service-learning on the Twin Cities campus, up from 1,357 students
and 55 courses in 2005. The Morris campus is experiencing similar
growth. "We do somewhere between 20 and 30 classes a year,
depending on the year," says Argie Manolis, UMM's director of
service-learning since 2003. "It really has grown a lot in the last
three years, and we plan to continue growing the program." Two
Morris students who graduated this spring, Joe Coyle and Corina
Bernstein, created a unique directed study experience with the help
of their French adviser and service-learning funding. Through a
series of workshops, they gave residents of Divine House (which
teaches independent living skills to people with cognitive or
developmental disabilities) photography instruction and cameras, so
that they could create artistic photo collages. "We just felt like
it would be great to have something like that in place--an outlet
for creative expression," says Coyle, who is heading to Baton
Rouge, Louisiana, this summer to work in the Teach For America
program. Public engagement is becoming a part of graduate
education, as well. Katie Peacock graduated from the University of
Minnesota, Duluth in 2001 and now works with the CCLC. Two years
ago, she enrolled part-time in the master's degree program in
public policy at the Humphrey Institute, only to find there wasn't
enough "public" in public policy. "I entered public policy with a
complete desire to use it to make our communities better," Peacock
says. But after finding the core curriculum too statistical and
analytical, she and a group of students got together to address the
question, "How can we hold on to the things that made us want to
come here in the first place?" she says. The result is CHANCE, a
yearlong curriculum that will expand civic engagement among
Humphrey Institute students, staff, and faculty and build
sustainable relationships with the neighboring Cedar-Riverside
community.
A lasting impact
Occasionally, community involvement by University of Minnesota
students creates an unexpected legacy. Witness the Pay it Forward
spring break tours, which have grown in size every year and someday
may be limited only by the availability of buses. Or the annual
Fill the Bus event. This clothing drive, launched four years ago by
U graduate Surbhi Madia and John Barber, has chugged along without
losing momentum, filling multiple buses with winter clothing for
the neediest of Minnesotans. And there's the work of Rebecca
Mitchell (profiled in the winter 2007
M), who graduated
this spring after completing a semester-long internship in Egypt
through an A.I. Johnson Scholarship. Her work there involved
research on the Life Wrap, a device designed to reduce the loss of
blood--and ultimately women's lives--from obstetric hemorrhage.
Mitchell was one of the U's 20 Community Engagement Scholars, who
integrate extensive community involvement throughout their
undergraduate careers, logging 400 hours of community engagement, 8
credits of service-learning coursework, a half dozen reflections,
and an Integrative Community Engagement Project. As part of the
program, she continued her work for Student Project Africa Network
(SPAN), the nonprofit organization she created to connect students
to service organizations in Africa. She now plans to take a year
off--before attending medical school--to raise more funds for SPAN
and ensure its viability and growth into the future. Aside from any
legacy Brian Lucero might be leaving, he can't imagine a future
without volunteering. He hopes to stay involved with Engineering
Without Borders in developing countries and "continue using my
engineering background to brainstorm ideas, even if I'm not
physically there." He says his previous work has shown him how
advantaged he is, and he figures his blessings come with an
inherent opportunity to give back. "It's a two-part thing--it's a
blessing-slash-responsibility to go out and do things for other
people," he says.