Through luncheon programs, service days, seminars, and more, the Center for Outreach, Volunteerism, and Education continues to contribute to the community.

COVE Brown Bags
COVE Brown Bags are open to all students, staff, and faculty, and are a means by which COVE teams seek to increase knowledge and activism on issues related to their service work in the community. These luncheons take place weekly in the COVE lounge, and highlight a wide array of topic areas. This year, we hosted 23 events.

9/11 Day of Service
Last fall, the COVE joined the national network of more than one million Americans who serve their local communities in remembrance of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The event encourages people campuswide to volunteer in the community as a means of paying tribute to the victims and heroes of 9/11.

Through our service, we remember the remarkable way that our nation rose up in unity and service following the tragedy of the attacks. Last September, more than 45 students, staff, and faculty participated in the afternoon of service contributing 140 hours of service to six local community organizations.

Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Events
We think Martin Luther King Jr. Day should be a “day on,” not a “day off.” Our goal is to bring people of various ages and backgrounds together to move our local community and nation closer to the “beloved community” that King envisioned.

This year, we organized a number of events to honor the legacy of Dr. King. On January 26, we joined the national commemoration of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by hosting an MLK afternoon of service. Our students served at various community sites in Hamilton, Earlville, Sherburne, Morrisville, Madison, and Utica. This year, more than 48 volunteers worked at eight community organizations, combining for 150 total service hours.

Finding Money for Social Change Grant-Writing Class
In its 13th year, the 12-week, certificate-based grant-writing course brought together campus community visionaries, grant-writing experts, and local nonprofit leaders to deliver weekly lectures to 42 Colgate students and local community member participants.

At its core, the course offers insight into the architecture of a grant. Concurrent to the weekly lectures, students work in small groups to develop a project case study into a grant proposal for the nonprofit organization characterized by their case study. Utilizing this methodology, students are able to see the class theories and lessons put into practice.

High School Seminar Program
In its 58th year, the High School Seminar Program continues to use Colgate’s resources to benefit the region by introducing area high school students to college-level topics that are not available at their schools. The program encourages college attendance by providing students with the opportunity to experience a taste of life on a college campus. In the 2017–18 academic year, 15 schools sent a total of 278 students to participate over the 4 sessions of the High School Seminar Program. Of these 278 students, 117 attended two or more times throughout the year. Students are asked to evaluate the program at the end of each session and feedback has been very positive. Many students express how interesting the course is and how they wished they had more time. Students are asked about their plans after graduation and most have plans to continue their education at a four-year institution.

This year’s 24 courses included the following options:

• Remote Sensing: from Drones to Satellites
  Mike Loranty, assistant professor of geography
• Scrutinizing Stereotypes
  Laur Rivera, manager of the perception and action language lab
• Women’s Rights in US History
  Monica Mercado, assistant professor of history
• Genetically Modified Foods
  Priscilla Van Wynsberghe, assistant professor of biology
• Museums: What they are, stand for, can do, be, and how can one/teenager get involved?
  Anja Chavez, director of university museums
• Are we still winning the war on war? Peace and conflict in the 21st century
  Jacob Mundy, associate professor of peace and conflict studies

Salvage Program
The Max A. Shacknai COVE staff organizes an effort to repurpose items that students donate in the residence halls at the end of the academic year as they move off campus. Volunteers spent more than 400 hours collecting and sorting the items in Starr Rink for pick-up by 34 nonprofit organizations located throughout central New York. Again this year, our colleagues in Institutional Advancement dedicated over 150 hours to the effort, expanding the community investment in this critical program.

The estimated worth of all salvaged items put into the hands of people who need them amounted to $60,000. The assistance provided by this program is profound – restocking food pantry shelves at a time of year when donations are low and children are about to lose their school lunch; providing supplies – such as cleaning supplies and toiletries that folks in our community cannot purchase with SNAP benefits; furnishing transitional housing for home-insecure individuals and providing educational materials to schools and college-bound students in our community.

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Levine/Weinberg Fellowship
The COVE selects students annually for the Levine/Weinberg Endowed Summer Fellowship. This fellowship provides highly qualified students — interested in pursuing a career in community and/or public work — with summer internship funding in the field of direct community service. This year’s recipients are:

Cynthia Melendez ’19 is a double major in educational studies and Latin American studies. She interned with ESL teaching program at the Tandana Foundation in Ecuador this summer, building on her participation in the COVE/Lampert trip with Tandana in January and her semester-abroad experience in Chile this spring studying comparative education and social change. One of Melendez’s short-term goals for this experience is to be able to compare and contrast rural education in Chile to rural education in Ecuador, while also looking at the ways in which social movements and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) have emerged to advance intercultural education in both countries. She believes that being able to make this comparison will be beneficial to her career and academic pursuits. Melendez is excited about the opportunity to both gain hands‐on teaching experience within the formal classroom as well as a better understanding of how nonprofits are managed and run. She eagerly returned to Tandana because its mission is not to “help the poor,” impose a developmentalist worldview, or institute any particular religion in a community, but rather to create and nurture real, responsible, and reciprocal relationships among people of different cultures, so that both counterparts can learn from and share with one another.

Melendez is an OUS (Office of Undergraduate Studies) scholar from a single-parent immigrant family from Guatemala, who has utilized the opportunities at Colgate to inform her intellectual, personal, and academic journeys. Having the support of the Levine-Weinberg Fellowship allows her to focus on her professional future in international education and social change sectors, providing her with the opportunity to grow her skill set to be a changemaker after Colgate.

Mary Bryce ’19 is an English literature major, who is in the teacher prep program at Colgate. Mary is from a small town in Maine with few internships for future teachers. She previously worked as youth mentor at an agricultural learning center that works with the local school district to provide experiential learning programs for their students. She loves this center and has continued to work in experiential learning as a staff member of Colgate Outdoor Education. To combine these experiences and goals, she came up with the idea of developing her own program at the center, the Roberts Farm Agricultural Learning Center, to gain experience in both teaching and curriculum planning.

The internship at Roberts Farm consists of planning and preparing programming for two three‐week sessions with groups of 10 to 12 seventh- and eighth-graders. She prepares curricula based on the students and their needs, incorporating adaptation and flexibility of content and methodology. The experiential nature of the center lends itself to hands on, problem-based learning through farm and land trust work. This experience delivers skills in problem solving in the classroom and creativity in lesson planning.

In preparing for the internship, Mary wrote, “I hope to someday be a teacher. To be able to do all of this direct, hands‐on teaching work will be invaluable to me. Students at this stage in the teacher preparation track often do not get to experience teaching directly. More often, they will be observing or working as teachers’ aids at best. While what I learn in the classroom and during teaching observations is important, I feel that nothing can really prepare you for working with students and teaching better than actually doing it. Often, becoming a great teacher comes simply from experience, and the sooner I can start building that experience, the better prepared and the better teacher I will be. In the Colgate Education department, I have also learned about the importance of being able to work with different students, students from varying backgrounds, and different learning styles at a single time. Working at Roberts Farm — because it will help me with problem solving, creativity in the classroom, and lesson planning — will be a great opportunity to gain these experiences. Overall, working at Roberts Farm will help to put me on track to becoming the best teacher I can be.”

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