Action Program of the Year
Charisse DelVecchio – Springfield College
Charisse developed the SEAT (Social justice, Equity, Accountability, Transformation) at the Table Week.
SEAT at the Table is a free conference of educational experiences across media, pedagogies, and practices, dedicated to deconstructing oppressive systems and transforming our community toward equity for all. The Inaugural SEAT at the Table Week spanned eight days during October 2020 and featured 40 sessions designed and facilitated by over 60 diverse individuals from our community and beyond. SEAT at the Table was inspired by current events, student feedback, and an interest in decolonizing education by liberating teachers and learners and validating activism as scholarship.
SEAT at the Table Week is organized by a unified body of volunteer community members from multiple schools of thought and cultural backgrounds, who worked collaboratively to share governance and responsibility of educating our community on topics related to social justice, identity, power, privilege, positionality, and radical community care. During the week, attendees learned across disciplines and from multiple perspectives.
SEAT at the Table was designed to be unique from traditional conferences in three ways in order to promote equity and inclusion. First, SEAT at the Table was entirely cost free and accessible to members within and outside of our community. Second, SEAT at the Table did not make judgements about expertise or require a high level of research or scholarship by session facilitators. All session proposals were accepted, and organizers met with students and those new to presenting to support them in developing their sessions. This was done to avoid academic gatekeeping and empower individuals to share their constructed knowledge. Third, SEAT at the Table would be dialogue focused to remove power imbalances, cultivate brave spaces, and encourage accountability and transformation in educational spaces.
Over 2,000 people from around the country and outside the US joined the inaugural SEAT at the Table Week. Sessions covered issues including White privilege, classism, racism, colorism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, health and healthcare equity and access, ableism, accessibility, capitalism, the “N” word, stereotypes, dehumanization, community interventions, higher education, indigenous rights, and art. Sessions, on average, included 80 attendees each. Sessions were made available via YouTube following the event. It also should be noted that this programs success was supported by Springfield College’s Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, her support made SEAT at the Table Possible!
Link to the Youtube event found here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYE9e1uoCwRJPpRUxj2BeyexICHB22tdm
John Sarvey Administrator of the Year
Nicole Lora – St. Anselm College
The John Sarvey Administrator of the Year Award goes to Nicole, Nickie, Lora. Nickie currently serves at the Director of the Meelia Center at St. Anselm College, a position she started in July 2020 in the midst of the summer shut down. Her tireless work to refit dozens of Meelia’s community partnerships for remote engagement has been extraordinary, and yet it was just the latest example of Nickie’s impact on the field of campus-community engagement and student community leadership since she was a freshman at Saint Anselm.
When Nickie arrived at college in the fall of 2002, Saint Anselm College was already a force in higher education’s movement into community as indicated by the college’s inclusion in Princeton Review’s Colleges with a Conscience: 81 Great Schools with Outstanding Community Involvement published just three years after her arrival on campus. Still, Nickie wasted no time in pushing Meelia to more fully appreciate the potential of student leaders. While Meelia had engaged student leaders in managing community partnerships for years, freshman students always began their journey into community as Office Assistants where they supported the work of student Partnership Coordinators. As an incoming freshman Nickie strongly advocated for a coordinator position. While she accepted the Office Assistant position that was offered, she did so with a smile that said, “we’ll see.” By her second semester freshman year she was the Partnership Coordinator for Head Start, and never again would capable freshmen be denied access to Meelia’s Coordinator positions.
By Nickie’s senior year, she had become the Student Assistant Director of Meelia, where she helped to strengthen the structures to train and support student leaders. After she graduated in 2006 Nickie went to work for an outreach program for teens experiencing homelessness, and she quickly became a manager, and later a representative on a national coalition addressing homelessness. She was also an excellent supervisor for Meelia’s service-learners who were assigned to her. Nickie returned to Meelia in 2013 with an MSW and a well-developed set of skills in dialogue facilitation, leadership development, and community collaboration. Again, while Meelia had recently received the Carnegie Classification for both Community Partnerships and Integrating Service into the Curriculum, Nickie wasted no time in strengthening the training and support provided to community engaged learners, student leaders, service-learning faculty, and community partners.
Some of Nickie’s greatest accomplishments as Meelia’s Associate Director were the development of a student–led dialogue series on important social and campus issues, and the total revamping of a Meelia’s Impact Fellows Program, an initiative to engage Saint Anselm’s students of color in leadership positions in the community and at Meelia. Over the past five years as the nation and colleges struggled to understand and respond to issues of racial and social justice, Nickie was supporting students as they facilitated dialogues about these social justice issues. Additionally, as Manchester’s large refugee and immigrant community felt the strain from negative national policies and more overt racism, Nickie helped to engage a large and well prepared team of Impact Fellows to work alongside youth from diverse backgrounds as mentors, tutors and models of caring and determined college students.
All of the professional growth and development Nicke has amassed through extensive community collaboration was put to the test when Covid-19 shut down Saint Anselm’s in-person engagement in March of 2020. At a time when nearly one quarter of Saint Anselm’s student body was engaged in community each week, the withdrawal of Meelia’s volunteers and community engaged learners was a major blow to the city’s ability to respond to large and growing human needs. Meelia immediately partnered with the Manchester School District to launch the Remote Tutoring Program to match Saint Anselm student tutors with K-12 students who were thrust into remote learning with little preparation. While Nickie had help in developing the initiative, it was her tremendous ability to manage and delegate the endless details with partners in community and on campus that allowed the program to succeed.
During the summer of 2020, usually a less hectic time for campus engagement centers, Nickie worked tirelessly to reconfigure Meelia’s extensive in-person engagement into remote engagement. Nickie helped to define a wide range of remote engagement opportunities with many of Meelia’s community partners. She then prepared Meelia’s student leaders and engaged faculty for the transition to remote involvement. Her outstanding efforts in fall 2020 resulted in 290 students engaged at 32 sites in activities that included: on-line work with veterans to help them tell their personal narratives through “My Life, My Story,” and to stimulate their minds through “Music and Memory” programs run by the VA Medical Center; building strong relationships with retired nuns through weekly calls and Memory Box conversations; and running Access Academy where Saint Anselm student instructors taught courses in an after-school educational program for Manchester high school students who identify with groups that are typically underrepresented in higher education.
In fall 2020 Nickie also managed the evolution of the Remote Tutoring Program into the Remote Learning Collaborative which saw over 80 Saint Anselm students support 144 K-12 learners. This was the largest single initiative in Meelia’s 30 year history, and it continued to support K-12 learners even through Saint Anselm’s extended winter break. Building on that tremendous success, this spring the Collaborative is expected to engage 150 Saint Anselm students in support of 250 K-12 Manchester students across 10 public schools.
As Nickie finishes out her first year as the Director in spring 2021, she oversees the growth of the Remote Learning Collaborative, serves on a number of campus committees dealing with the challenges facing colleges in a global pandemic, and continues to manage the expansion of remote learning opportunities for Saint Anselm volunteers, community engaged learners, and college faculty. Three additional agencies have been added, all of them non-profits serving Manchester’s refugee and immigrant students and families.
In the face of all of these changes and challenges, Nicklie has continued Meelia’s long tradition of supporting other NH colleges and universities through Campus Compact for New Hampshire. While the title of Director is fairly new for Nickie, she has been a leader in the effective administration of campus community engagement for nearly two decades. She is an amazing resource to Saint Anselm College, the Manchester community, and higher education’s community aspirations.
Nickie’s nominator noted, “Perhaps what is most amazing is that, without a doubt, Nickie’s best is yet to come.”
Student of the Year
Seerat Chawla – UCLA
The 2021 Student of the Year is Seerat Chawla. Seerat is a passionate advocate, ethical service educator, and volunteer leader. Through her three years at UCLA, she has put time and energy into diverse service endeavors and set an example for students on campus about sustainable, ethical service. Seerat is passionate about housing insecurity and homelessness, especially on college campuses. Seeing how her friends were affected by the rising tuition costs and rents, Seerat joined Bruin Shelter her freshman year. Bruin Shelter is the first homeless shelter for college students run by college students in the nation. Over the course of her second year, in addition to being a full-time student and other responsibilities, Seerat helped run the shelter for fellow peers facing homelessness and housing insecurity through overnight shifts. She always shared memorable moments of her shifts and looked forward to spending time with residents, regardless of how busy the week was going. Continuing her service and advocacy for increased visibility around student housing insecurity, Seerat now serves as the Finance Director for Bruin Shelter. In her first quarter alone, Seerat applied and raised over $17,000 for shelter operations and remote support for students facing homelessness in these unprecedented times. Seerat is always looking for ways to improve the conversation around student homelessness, attending Zoom panels, discussions, and meetings with administration, professors and leaders, and students alike. Seerat is also interested in mental health and access to care as a student in the life sciences and public health and has found tangible means to innovate change in these areas. To begin with, she currently serves all ten UC campuses as the UC Global Health Institute Women’s Health and Gender Empowerment ambassador, sparking conversation on how to make rape kits more accessible on these campuses and how to reduce intimate partner violence. Additionally, she is a mental health coach as part of the Grand Depression Challenge, supporting members of the greater Los Angeles area through virtual coaching sessions. Finally, Seerat hopes to change the narrative around access to mental health, especially for vulnerable communities, and thus, conducts research on the role of intersectionality in the treatment of PTSD in adolescent sexual and racial minority patients.
Beyond her individual service interests and pursuits, Seerat is truly a leader and committed to ethical service. She serves as the Service Education Director for UCLA’s Community Service Commission, the largest student-run, student-initiated service organization in the nation. As a leader on campus overseeing thirty service projects, Seerat educates students and administration on ethical service principles and how to incorporate these concepts into tangible service pursuits. She is even presenting a workshop at IMPACT, introducing these practices to the larger community of student advocates, leaders, and volunteers. Here is an example of Seerat’s efforts to make ethical service more prevalent on UCLA’s campus as a panelist. I will drop a YouTube clip in the chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28GkBDBEBY&ab_channel=UCLAVolunteerCenter
Seerat is a committed leader in service and a life-long learner. She always strives to engage in work that amplifies the voices of service recipients in the pursuit of justice and supports fellow students in doing the same.
Service Program of the Year
Niamh Harrop – University of Central Florida
Niamh Harrop and the Florida PIRG Students branch at the University of Central Florida are this year’s recipient of the Service Program of the Year. Niamh is the President of the Florida PIRG Students branch at the University of Central Florida. Niamh became a citizen last January and have spent all of their time in the US wishing they could be engaged in the voting process and being frustrated with people who didn’t believe their vote could make a difference and chose not to vote. When Niamh came across Florida PIRG and the work they were doing at UCF, Niamh knew this was an incredible way to engage students and help them understand the power they have to influence elections and make their voices heard.
Throughout the fall semester, Florida PIRG ran the New Voters Project on 28 campuses across the state of Florida to ensure that students in a crucial swing state were able to make their voices heard. Many of Florida’s public universities have national prominence, meaning that students from all across the country come to our schools. This year, many of those students remained in their homes due to the pandemic, and Florida PIRG worked to ensure that students all over the country were able to register to vote in their home counties and make plans to ensure they could get out to vote safely. Overall, interns and volunteers with Florida PIRG students managed to reach 180,000 students through emails, texts, phone calls, and push notifications!
Florida PIRG Students was also extremely successful in building a diverse coalition of students in order to ensure they helped every student find their voice. On our campuses, they worked with Democrats and Republicans, cultural groups, student athletes, fraternities and sororities, Pre-Med and Pre-Law groups, and all kinds of other organizations to help represent every student and make sure they didn’t leave anyone behind. Additionally, they partnered with NAACP Youth and College Division to reach as many students as possible.
Through our work, they were able to find many students who did not know they were eligible to vote or believed their registration made them ineligible. During the last week of voting, one student checked their status with a Florida PIRG volunteer, realized they were an active voter, and made plans to go out to vote the next day! After Florida’s voter registration website crashed, a Florida PIRG organizer worked with another student, Kamille, to ensure that she was able to get registered, walking her through every step on the phone when the registration deadline was extended! In such an abnormal year, these stories were not uncommon, as many individuals needed assistance in making a plan to vote from a distance or showing up to the polls safely. The work that Florida PIRG Students did to help students adapt to an unprecedented election made sure that students were able to make their voices heard.
Action Program of the Year
Bee green Group – Hobart and William Smith Colleges
The Action Program of the Year Award is being awarded to a group of students from Hobart and William Smith Colleges called the Bee Green Group. Their energy, passion, and hard work resulted in their campus becoming a more sustainable place. A group of 5 students took the action necessary to successfully carry out a project that converted turf grass to pollinator patches in two separate areas of campus.
The students volunteered their time and labor to create the pollinator patches that provide a service to their campus and a service to the pollinators. These projects were not just about providing labor. The students proposed and justified several locations to campus stakeholders such as Grounds Department, Communications Office, and Student Government. Through this process they learned how to engage with different campus departments and different personalities as well as how to use feedback to find compromises and come up with the final solution. This helped the students develop intangible skills and understand the steps necessary to make change on campus and in their communities.
Further, they researched and developed a list of native plants that are used by a variety of pollinators and then narrowed it down based on what plants work well for the different sites (soil type, sun exposure, moisture levels, etc..). To help support local businesses, the students purchased starter plants from a local company instead of ordering online. Lastly, they recruited and motivated other students to get involved and help with the site preparing and planting.