Maine College Forges Community Ties Through Students’ Service Work

By ELIZABETH SCHWINN

Hispanic farm workers in the small city of Lewiston, Me., needed health care but were

not using the local clinic, its doctor discovered. She assumed the language barrier was one problem, but she didn’t speak Spanish, and she couldn’t afford to hire anyone who did.

But the doctor, Anne Brown, had an unusual resource: the local college’s Center for Service-Learning, which matches students with nonprofit groups that need volunteers.

Within weeks of filing her request, Dr. Brown heard from Jenny Blau, a student who offered to help out at the clinic, as well as to make phone calls and go door-to-door to tell farm workers about the new health service and answer their questions — in Spanish.

“She’s been my right hand,” says Dr. Brown.

The partnership gave Dr. Brown the trained help she needed, while Ms. Blau got some real-life experience related to her Spanish studies. It also enabled Bates College, a small liberal-arts school located 30 miles north of Portland, to form another link with its hometown.

As colleges have increasingly incorporated community-service projects into their missions, Bates has been one of the leaders in such efforts, offering its students a range of incentives to get involved in charity work, including course credit, administrative support, special housing accommodations, and money.

“They’re going way beyond student volunteering,” says Elizabeth Hollander, executive director of Campus Compact, a coalition of colleges and universities that encourages community service.

Bates has made service learning — volunteer work done for academic credit — a cornerstone of its curriculum, creating a center to coordinate for-credit volunteer programs five years ago. Last year, students provided 59,381 hours of service to 139 nonprofit groups and government agencies.

“The number of service hours students put in increases every year, and more students are participating,” says James Carignan, dean of the college. He says about half of the college’s 1,600 students do volunteer work for credit, and about a third of the faculty include a service component in their courses.

Mr. Carignan, for example, requires students in his class on American slavery to volunteer at a homeless shelter, public housing project, or local school so that they can “understand, up close, the feeling of being marginalized, and the consequences of stereotyping.”

Other examples of service-learning projects include work by Peter Beeson, a geology major, to develop a computerized “smart map” of the local area. Lewiston firefighters now use the computer program to help them determine the fastest route to a burning building, as well as a building’s size, the closest fire hydrant, and whether that hydrant can provide enough water to douse the flames.

Two students who served as interns with the area Chamber of Commerce helped develop a proposal that persuaded Forum Francophone des Affairs, a nonprofit group that promotes trade and culture between French-speaking countries and the United States, to locate its American headquarters in Lewiston, which is home to thousands of people of French-Canadian descent.

Many students from the education department spend time each year volunteering with a nearby charity called Androscoggin Head Start and Child Care.

A Special Dormitory

Beyond college credit, the college also promotes student service through a “community service hall,” which this year has rooms for nine students who share a special interest in volunteer work. Jessica Young, who graduated in May, brought a black Labrador retriever to live in last year’s service-learning hall while she trained it as a seeing-eye dog for a charity that helps the blind.

Students who live in the hall often organize projects, such as a clothing drive for local charities, in addition to their individual volunteer efforts.

Sometimes Bates provides students with financial incentives to help charities. It awarded some two dozen awards of up to $300 each per project and stipends of up to $2,500 to 12 students working for nonprofit groups or government agencies.

Cody Weber, a Russian-studies major who graduated in 1999, received money from the college to cover his living expenses for a summer in Moscow while he volunteered with an AIDS-awareness group at the end of his junior year abroad.

“Without that money, I would not have been able to stay,” says Mr. Weber.

After graduation, Mr. Weber decided to put his international and nonprofit experiences to work in Lewiston, working for the local chapter of Vermont-based Project Harmony, a nonprofit group that arranges international exchange trips. Mr. Weber helps set up trips for people coming from or going to the former Soviet Union.

In addition to the community-service grants, Bates dedicates a portion of its federal work-study funds to pay students to work for charities in the student’s hometown or elsewhere during the summer. Last year’s work-study jobs included a Boston women’s center and homeless shelter that provides job counseling, child care, and other services; a Portland, Ore., environmental group that promotes the use of bicycles instead of cars; and a Boys and Girls Club in Redwood City, Calif.

The participating charities pay a quarter of the student’s summer income, while the college and federal government pay the rest. “All colleges could be doing this,” says Peggy Rotundo, assistant director of Bates’s service-learning center.

Getting Off Campus

The emphasis on community service is driven at least in part by the college’s desire to improve its ties with surrounding residents and organizations. Bates, which consistently ranks among the top liberal-arts colleges in the country, was criticized a decade ago by the local newspaper for being “an island.”

The local Chamber of Commerce president, Chip Morrison, says that when he came to Lewiston 22 years ago, the only time he saw a Bates student was when one wanted to interview him for a paper. “The difference between then and now is night and day,” he says. “Now they’re volunteering in the schools, in the hospitals. They’re everywhere.”

But not everyone has been as enthusiastic about Bates’s and other colleges’ recent emphasis on community service, particularly their efforts to incorporate volunteer projects into course work. Some critics have questioned the academic value of such work.

For charities, it can be difficult to mesh the work they need done with the research goals of the students. Often charities need administrative help, someone to make phone calls or photocopies.

Nancy Bullett, co-director of the AIDS Coalition of Lewiston-Auburn, says she has occasionally turned down some student projects because she didn’t have the money to support them or the staff time or energy to oversee them. “It has to work for us,” she says. “We’ve learned we can say no.”

Still, Ms. Bullett says, in most cases student volunteers have provided much-needed help. One student, for example, called all of the high schools that received the charity’s annual mailing on programs for homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual youths. The charity previously had not been able to spare an employee’s time to follow up after the brochures were sent.

Long-Term Changes

Bates College hopes that its students will continue to serve charities long after they graduate.

But it is still too early to say what long-term difference the community-service programs might make. The college plans to keep track of students over time to see whether, for example, more students decide to pursue careers at nonprofit groups than in the past. As of 1996, slightly less than 5 percent of all graduates worked for nonprofit organizations.

Students might also contribute in other ways. Ms. Rotundo of the service-learning center predicts that, 10 years or more after graduating, students may “be more involved, give to United Way, or be politically active” on social issues.

She adds: “One hopes the students become more involved in trying to change the world.”