In May, Colgate community members traveled to Puerto Rico for a week devoted to hurricane relief. The group performed service work at Plenitud, a nonprofit educational farm and learning center located in the mountains of western Puerto Rico near a town called Las Marias. Associate Professor of English and Africana and Latin American Studies Kezia Page and Andrew Fagon, executive director for risk management and legal affairs, led the group of 10 undergraduates, composed mostly of students enrolled in CORE Caribbean or Introduction to Caribbean Studies.

The 2017 hurricane season was one of the most destructive on record, and it left much of the Caribbean devastated. In late summer of last year, a concerned group of Colgate faculty and staff with ties to the Caribbean met to coordinate hurricane relief efforts.

“We were not alone in our desire to help; there were student-led initiatives as well as a program out of the Office of International Student Services,” said Page. The group met with Krista Saleet, director of the Max A. Shacknai Center for Outreach, Volunteerism, and Education (COVE), and developed the idea of a service trip to Puerto Rico. Provost and Dean of the Faculty Tracey Hucks provided grant funding for the project.

Throughout their stay at Plenitud, the group learned about bioconstruction, permaculture and sustainable farming. “We planted, harvested, weeded, mulched, cleaned, and assisted in building,” Page said. “We also started a garden at a preschool in Las Marias.”

Up and out of their tents at 6 a.m. every day, the team helped build earthbag structures, which are resilient to floods and hurricanes. Bags of soil or sand are layered on top of each other, reinforced with barbed wire, and then covered in adobe or concrete.

In the afternoon they gathered to enjoy cultural experiences such as African bomba, a traditional Puerto Rican form of call and response dancing, and share a meal of local cuisine. They took classes on ecology and enjoyed the natural environment. Saleet said it was “about paying honor to the community they were in.”

“The people we met, the work we did, and the journeys we took not only bonded us closer as a group, but also granted each of us a more intimate relationship with serving and helping others,” said Molly Adelman ’21. “The trip was truly remarkable in every facet.”

Hucks has arranged funding for two more service trips devoted to hurricane relief. Danny Barreto, assistant professor of LGBTQ studies, will lead the next group in May 2019.

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The 100m radio telescope at Green Bank Radio Astronomy Observatory

In support of Colgate’s strategic plan, the Max A. Shacknai COVE announced the availability of new course development grants that promote civic education in the curriculum in 2014. These grants aim to provide faculty with the resources to offer students immediate opportunities to apply classroom learning to support or enhance the work of social change agencies.

Mike Loranty, associate professor of geography, was awarded the course development grant this year to support his Environmental Geography (GEOG 131) course. GEOG 131 is an introductory physical geography course focused on understanding the Earth as a system. The course examines atmospheric processes, hydrology, geomorphology, and biological dynamics on a global scale. Loranty partnered with Experience Learning, a nonprofit experiential education organization located in Circleville, W. Va., with two campuses: one at Spruce Knob (the highest point in West Virginia), and a second campus recently acquired near Sweetwater Farm. The trip included eight students. Jeff Bary, associate professor of astronomy and physics, joined the trip. Bary is a native of West Virginia and has a keen interest in Appalachian social and environmental issues.

Assembling the weather station at Sweetwater Farm

At Spruce Knob, the group conducted aerial surveys of the property using drones, practiced map and compass skills to orienteer to the top of Spruce Knob, performed a stream survey, and went through a mile-long cave. At Sweetwater Farm, they helped with invasive species removal, planted a small garden, installed a weather station, and performed several forest surveys to help with a maple sugaring operation that is being developed there. They also explored the logging history of West Virginia and visited the nearby National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), where they saw a talk by Colgate alumnus Michael Lam ’11.

The drone mapping and orienteering activities provided students with hands-on experience relating to general cartography principles and technologies introduced early in the course. They also observed the elevational gradients in ecosystems on the way up Spruce Knob, and saw karst topography firsthand. The stream study connected to their study of hydrology and ecosystems health. One of their in-class assignments was to examine hydrology data from a US Geological Survey stream gauge, and they were able to visit the gauge where the data had come from on the Shaver’s Fork of the Cheat River. In class, Loranty also included new readings that described the logging history of West Virginia to help students understand how humans have shaped landscapes that we often consider pristine. The visit to Cass as well as the only two remaining tracts of old-growth forest in the state allowed students to see these effects firsthand.

Moving forward, Loranty would love to continue this trip, and hopefully build on it. He sees possibilities to expand it to include additional time to visit parts of the state where active resource extraction is occurring in order to highlight ongoing issues related to environmental and social justice. He and Bary have plans to attend the Appalachian Studies Conference next spring to learn more about regional issues and explore how they can build this into a more robust long-term partnership. Their hope is to expand this to be a modular trip capable of being linked with multiple courses.

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Now in our second year of a partnership with the Lampert Institute for Civic and Global Affairs, we have sent three groups of students to the Tandana Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Ecuador. This year’s trips occurred in January and May and were funded by a combination of COVE, Lampert, and Karelsie Foundation grant money.

In January 2018, a group of 10 Colgate students and two co-directors, Danny Barreto (LGBTQ Studies) and his partner Paul Humphrey, a professor of Spanish at Monmouth University and specialist on Afro-Latin American religions, participated in a two-week service-learning trip to Otavalo, Ecuador. They stayed in the small, agrarian community of Muenala, approximately an hour outside of the city. The theme of the trip, in keeping with wider campus programming for 2017–18, was “Spiritual Ecologies,” which allowed for learning about the ways in which sustainability, foodways, and traditional spiritual beliefs are mutually informed in this community. They also supported the community of Muenala in renovating and expanding their casa comunal (community center), of which there is increased use since the recent closing of the local school.

Barreto wrote of the experience, “In Muenala, the group worked alongside community members towards the completion of their building project. We were delegated the less-skilled tasks of shoveling, mixing cement, filling potholes, and moving supplies. The most important part of this project was working in a traditional organization known as a minga, in which communities work in shifts on a project of communal importance. This afforded us time with community members beyond the host families that students stayed with, and allowed for sustained collaboration and conversation over the two weeks.

“On most afternoons, the organizers from Tandana had prepared a series of cultural events closely related with the theme of our trip. Within the first couple of days of arrival in Muenala, we were offered a physical and spiritual cleansing to welcome us to the sacred land, which was performed by a traditional healer who explained a number of local customs. Later in the trip, we were taken to Pakarinka, a cultural collective dedicated to the preservation of local Kichwa customs, where we were informed about local farming habits, herbal medicines grown on the property and participated in spiritual and medical rituals, such as diagnosing and healing ills using plants, eggs, and guinea pigs. While there, we prepared and ate a meal cooked in the ground using hot volcanic rocks, a tradition known as pachamanka, which is usually reserved for the four major holidays in Kichwa culture that coincide with the equinoxes and solstices. Midway between these two visits, we were given a class in the Kichwa language as well as Kichwa cosmovisión or worldview. After each of these and other events, there was time for reflection led by the co-directors and Tandana staff. Importantly, the structure of the program allowed for continued learning and increasingly complex conversations about the interactions between spirituality and ecology, both in Highland Ecuador and other areas of the world with which the students were familiar.

“Colgate hired a local director and photographer, Alberto Muenala, to serve as a photographer on the work site for two days. On one of those evenings, we arranged a screening of Killa, the first Kichwa-language film, for the students and community at the casa comunal, which allowed us to share our experiences and perspectives with the community. Their excitement upon seeing their culture and language represented positively on screen, as well as their comments on the usual racist stereotypes of Kichwa people and culture that circulate in Ecuador, were useful for helping students understand the film, and confirmed for us that hiring a local photographer was the appropriate thing to do. While we inevitably learned so much from them when compared with the little labor we could give, this time with the community allowed for more equitable and meaningful mutual exchange that is key to successful service-learning experiences.

“Not only did this trip allow the students to form deep relations with the community of Muenala and staff of Tandana, it also allowed them to form a close community with each other. The 10 students were drawn from a range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, class years, and majors. This experience allowed them to not only challenge stereotypes about service learning, indigenous communities, and rural societies, but also about each other, which led to interesting conversations about the nature of community on campus and how we might reimagine social relations at home. In addition to these new insights, leaving the classroom and engaging in this service-learning trip allowed us to think in innovative and complex ways about how knowledge is created and transmitted, the relationship between place and identity, and who gets to create and impart knowledge. Given the conversations and reflections during those two weeks, there is clear reason to believe this experience will have an ongoing impact on the students’ coursework, career paths and social relationships during their remaining time at Colgate and beyond.

“The next trip is occurring as I write this and is being led by Cory Duclos, director of the Keck Language Center and Pilar Mejía-Barrera, senior lecturer in Spanish. The current trip’s theme is Agency, Movements and Identities in Otavalo, Ecuador. Nine students are participating. We look forward to a long, positive partnership in Otavalo.”

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The numbers aren’t good. In the last midterm election, a mere 7 percent of Colgate students voted according to a survey out of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. Heading into a midterm election of critical importance, we are committed to helping students feel knowledgeable, engaged, and empowered to express their voice about issues that matter to them on all sides of the political spectrum. Through a full campus initiative funded by President Casey’s office and advised by faculty with deep political expertise, we have hired four summer student interns to gather information on student voter motivations and absentee ballot processes to put resources in the right places to reach and engage our students. The effort will continue through the fall and into the future as we partner with a national civic engagement organization to link our efforts regionally and nationally to have greater impact.

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Maggie McDonnell’19 working at Hamilton Central School

The partnership between the Max A Shacknai COVE and the Upstate Institute started in 2015. This year we provided paid internships to federal work study–eligible students leading to lasting community outcomes and offering students who may not have the option to volunteer time at a nonprofit organization the opportunity to gain professional and leadership skills. Seven students worked with five community organizations: Partnership for Community Development (PCD), Village of Hamilton, Community Action Partnership, Hamilton Central School, and Arts at the Palace. This program allowed students interested in gaining a deeper experience in nonprofit administration gain hands-on, in-depth work in the local community. Projects provided capacity-building assistance to the organizations with which we partnered. One student helped to compile and analyze data from client satisfaction surveys, while another streamlined the organization’s website to increase communication with clients. Students working with the other organizations provided data analysis and technology assistance to increase communication and evidence-based decision-making for their organizations. We saw several win-win outcomes to this program in the first year and aim to continue to grow the program in future years to offer more internships with community outcomes.

Maggie McDonnell ’19 worked with Hamilton Central School to streamline their website. “Most rewarding of the experience so far has been the realization that while the tasks seem small at the moment, they all add up to keeping the parents and students accurately informed, and thus prove to be more significant than they seem,” she said.

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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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Every ninety-eight seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. One in five American women and one in seventy-one American men will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime. And one in three American women and one in six American men will experience some sort of sexual violence at some point in their lifetime. These statistics are deeply upsetting, and yet, they are a reality for far too many people.

Thankfully, awareness and recognition of sexual assault has been steadily growing since the turn of the century. As of 2001, the month of April has been officially deemed as Sexual Assault Awareness Month. It is an annual campaign to raise public awareness about sexual assault and educate communities and individuals on how to prevent sexual violence. This is a time where people of all genders, sexualities, and backgrounds are invited to learn, reflect, and hopefully act on the unfortunately pervasive issues of sexual assault.

Here at Colgate, some great efforts and initiatives have been made for the most recent Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Many of these efforts are thanks to The Network, a sexual assault and domestic violence awareness group run out of the Max A. Shacknai Center for Outreach, Volunteerism, and Education. In addition to hosting its usual weekly meetings, this past month The Network has hosted lectures focusing on issues like survivor support and off-campus resources. The Network also put together a powerful Take Back the Night March followed by a Speak Out for survivors of sexual violence. In total, approximately twenty different events were held across Colgate’s campus in recognition of Sexual Assault Awareness Month hosted by The Network, Haven, the Women’s Studies Department, and the Chapel.

The events in honor of this important month all share a general theme and all aim to perpetuate a general set of values. Sexual assault and general sexual violence are things we at Colgate seek to combat through education, advocacy, and fervent support of survivors. We are constantly seeking to better our efforts and better ourselves, and this past month has been a purposeful illustration of that.

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Written by Oneida Shushe ’19

I landed in Boston very sleep deprived and hungry, not knowing what to expect of the 2017 Newman Civic Fellows National Conference. As I walked into the hotel lobby, I immediately made eye contact with welcoming faces. I stepped into a small group and asked everyone if they were also there for the conference, although I already knew the answer from the confidence, diversity, professionalism, and anticipation in the space. We exchanged names, schools, hometowns, majors, and projects as we made our way through the Boston metro system. When we arrived at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, there were about 200 critical-thinking, change-making, and initiative-taking young people in one room, each of them chosen as representatives from their universities. I was determined to learn as much as I could from them.

We were introduced to the president of Campus Compact and to each other. Initially, this was overwhelming, but as the program continued, I felt like the people around me could easily be my classmates. We bonded over our courses of study and our interests in social issues. One Newman Civic Fellow I met told me about her research in algal blooms, and I shared my research in biophysics. One fellow shared his devotion to building schools and promoting literacy in his home country of Nepal; I listened and asked questions to see if I could learn something to improve my project promoting oral health in Albania. I was refreshed by the diversity of backgrounds, identities, majors, and social justice areas represented in the group.

Important conversations about how to affect change began with a panel of public problems solvers in Boston. The most inspiring speaker for me was Adam John Foss, the founder and president of Prosecutor Impact—an organization promoting better outcomes for those affected by the US criminal justice system and institutionalized racism. Adam highlighted the single most important theme of the conference: individuals are affected in every dimension of life based on how aspects of their identity—like race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability—give them more or less power. The purpose of social justice work and civic engagement is to recognize and fight against these power imbalances. I am interested in addressing such injustices in the health field, but Adam’s message is also relevant to issues regarding the environment, education, gender, and every other issue area.

To close the first day, we shared our projects in conversations over dinner. I was inspired by peers working for gender equality, access to health and education across the world and against racism and other oppressive forces. One fellow was working on making feminine products more freely available at her school and advocating for the rights of vulnerable elderly people, another student was fighting for food security in affected communities, and yet another shared his efforts to make his school a more sustainable institution.

Day 2 of the conference was just as packed and enriching. We were all sworn in as senators representing different states and political parties at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. Some students—including me—were randomly assigned a political party and set of values which did not represent their real views. By putting us in the shoes of someone with different beliefs, this exercise helped build empathy and understanding. Together, we passed a responsible law about food and farming and saw how difficult but rewarding it can be to work together as Democrats and Republicans from across the United States.

After years of watching TED talks online and being inspired by them, the conference also gave me an opportunity to be an enchanted audience member in a TEDx event. I sat next to fellow peers and listened to talented speakers share their insights about self-growth, political empathy, and ideas on privilege and race. The President of Campus Compact, Dr. Andrew Seligsohn, spoke eloquently and personally about the importance of being politically empathetic and the role of civic engagement at this historical point in time.

For me, this conference was an invaluable experience. I made connections (emotional, intellectual, professional) with students from across the country who share similar goals. I felt honored to be grouped with such smart scholars and community activists. On top of schoolwork, the students in attendance make time to encourage positive change in the world. Their stories affirmed for me that one doesn’t need to wait and earn a special university degree in order to show how deeply one cares about their community. The passion and care for the aforementioned issues was palpable in each session throughout the program.

Even though spending two days on little sleep with people who challenged me to think critically and act compassionately was exhausting, I returned home recharged. I will use the connections and lessons I gained from the conference to promote social justice by working on issues around oral health, and women and children’s health. The conference instilled in me what it means to take responsible and equitable action in a community. While we all took separate paths out of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, the connections I made there have put me in a better place to be civically engaged in an educated and evolving way. For this, I am genuinely grateful.

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Every single minute, up to twenty individuals in the United States may be abused by an intimate partner. That amounts to a staggering ten million victims of domestic violence each year. And many of these innocent people may not survive their abuse. Here, in the state of New York, domestic violence is legally defined as “a pattern of coercive tactics, which can include physical, psychological, sexual, economic and emotional abuse, perpetrated by one person against an adult intimate partner, with the goal of establishing and maintaining power and control over the victim.” The reality of domestic violence or abuse is one endured by people in all walks of life, in various forms and capacities. Each story matters, and each deserves acknowledgment and remembrance. And each victim deserves help.

Since 1987, October has been officially recognized as Domestic Violence Awareness Month, a time during which we should mourn those who have died because of domestic violence, celebrate those who have survived, and connect with those who work to end it. Since its establishment, this movement has steadily gained momentum, helping to educate, heal, and catalyze deeply important discussion. Here at Colgate, The Network, a COVE team dedicated to supporting survivors of interpersonal violence and sexual assault, has sponsored two events to highlight the issues of domestic violence during this crucial month. The student group also put up a powerful statistical display on the quad to promote awareness.

On October 16, The Network invited Jennifer K. Enriquez, a public health educator and survivor, to campus. She shared her own unique story of interpersonal violence as both a child and an adult, and she began a conversation regarding abuse of all kinds, from sexual to physical to psychological to economic. Ms. Henriquez encouraged students and faculty to think critically about domestic violence, its roots, its victims, and its horrifying repercussions. And this meaningful, albeit difficult, dialogue should not be forgotten any time soon.

In light of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, perhaps the most important role that members of the Colgate community can play is that of the advocate. The advocate for safe and healthy relationships. The advocate for victim support in every form. The advocate for rightful prosecution and punishment of abusers. The advocate for learning and for listening and for dialogue. No single individual or team has the means or the power to put an end to the atrocious phenomenon that is domestic violence. But we all have the capacity to mourn, celebrate, connect, and advocate.

By Rebecca O’Neill

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