Community Engagement News

Concurrent Session Presenters Include Faculty, Students, and Community Partners

The featured presenters are, L–R, Dr. John Saltmarsh, professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts Boston; Dr. Melissa Quan, director of the Center for Social Impact at Fairfield University; Dr. Tim Eatman, dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community at Rutgers University–Newark; and Dr. April Khadijah Inniss, director of community-engaged research at King Boston.

All arrangements are in place for this Wednesday’s Community Engagement Symposium, a virtual event featuring nationally acclaimed community-engaged scholars.

The event will include a morning workshop, concurrent session presentations, and a special presentation in the afternoon.

Dr. John Saltmarsh, professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Dr. Melissa Quan, director of the Center for Social Impact at Fairfield University, will conduct the workshop on “Epistemic Justice in Practice: Implications for Community Partnerships and Student Learning.”

Dr. Timothy Eatman, dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community at Rutgers University–Newark, will lead the special presentation titled “Orienting Campus–Community Engagement Towards Reparations.” His co-presenters will be Dr. April Khadijah Inniss, director of community-engaged research at King Boston, and Dr. Saltmarsh.

A nonprofit organization, King Boston is working closely with the City of Boston to create a memorial and programs about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

Dr. Saltmarsh is a consulting scholar for the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement. He served as director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) from 2005 to 2016. Previously, he was director of the National Program on Integrating Service with Academic Study at Campus Compact.

Dr. Eatman is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) and the National Advisory Committee for the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement. From 2012 to 2017, he was the faculty co-director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.

Dr. Quan served as interim executive director of Connecticut Campus Compact in 2008–2009 and later as a research fellow with Campus Compact’s Community-Engaged Professionals project. Several of her publications have focused on professional development within the field of higher education community engagement, institutional change, and community-engaged teaching and learning.

Dr. Inniss’s research background includes work in both academia and industry—work consisting of projects that examined racial and ethnic health disparities, and that explored the impact of media exposures on adult and child health. For five years, she was the director of research and evaluation at The Message, a Boston-based, youth-facing media literacy startup, and she has extensive experience as a freelance research analyst at other organizations.

The 50-minute concurrent presentations by faculty, students, and community partners are slated for Sessions II and III. Faculty and student presenters will come not only from Barry but also from the University of Miami and Miami Dade College.

The theme of Barry’s Eighth Annual Community Engagement Symposium is “Effectively Balancing Community Impact with Student Learning Outcomes.” The event will consist of four sessions, the first beginning at 9 a.m., the second at 11 a.m., the third at noon, and the fourth at 1:30 p.m.

Students, faculty, staff, and community partners are urged to register and to attend the event.

The symposium is organized annually by the Center for Community Service Initiatives (CCSI), an administrative unit of the Division of Academic Affairs. This event supports the sustained integration of personal and social responsibility objectives into the undergraduate curriculum at Barry. Personal and social responsibility was the theme of the university’s 2014 Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP).

Community Engagement Poster Exhibition Being Staged in Thompson Hall

Last year, Barry Service Corps Fellow Martina Muñoz Chalan took home the first prize for her poster titled “Building Capacity to Support Barry University’s Partnership with Atelye Thevenet Artisan Cooperative.” This year’s Community Engagement Poster Exhibition, like last year’s, is being staged in Thompson Hall.

Posters presented as part of Barry’s Eighth Annual Community Engagement Symposium are being exhibited in the Salvaneschi Commons, Thompson Hall. The Poster Exhibition is scheduled for March 28–April 8.

Undergraduates who submitted posters are competing for prizes. Members of Barry’s Community Advisory Committee are judging the submissions on four criteria: content, relevance, visual presentation, and audio presentation.

The first prize will be an 11.6-inch Acer Chromebook; the second prize: a digital air fryer; the third prize: a Litra Glow Premium LED Streaming Light. Prize winners will be announced during the closing session of the symposium this Wednesday.

For further information, contact Dr. Heather Johnson Desiral, poster coordinator, at qep@barry.edu or 305-981-8196.

Students Support Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program

Barry Service Corps Fellows and other students have voiced their support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) Fair Food Program.

CIW representatives came to campus recently to promote the program and were pleased with the response from students.

“Barry University has supported our work for many years,” said Uriel Zelaya Perez, a CIW leader. “We like to work with Barry students.”

Zelaya Perez and Leonel Perez held a meeting with a group of Barry Service Corps (BSC) Fellows and representatives of the Center for Community Service Initiatives (CCSI). A few days later, Lupe Gonzalo and Zelaya Perez, together with BSC Fellows, made a presentation to the Student Government Association.

This Saturday (April 2), farmworkers and hundreds of Floridians are expected to gather for a “March to End Modern Slavery in the Fields” in Palm Beach. A representative group from Barry will attend the event.

Zelaya Perez was a member of a team of CIW farmworker leaders and Alliance for Fair Food organizers who made presentations and engaged in solidarity-building in the South Florida region. One of two teams settled in the Miami area while the other has been stationed in smaller cities near the march location in Palm Beach.

The team in the Miami area educated and mobilized students from colleges and universities, including Barry University and the University of Miami, a CIW report said. According to the report, the team worked to solidify college students’ “commitment to the ever-growing Wendy’s Boycott.”

The team also engaged with several area congregations, including Miami Shores Presbyterian and First United Methodist Church of Miami. 

“Quite the hype has begun building up around the major action across the Magic City that there will be at least two buses leaving from Miami to transport participants to the march in Palm Beach on April 2,” the CIW report said.

New Nonprofit Organization Offers Mentoring Opportunity to College Students

A new nonprofit organization is seeking college student volunteers for its mentoring program in high schools.

The mission of Mentoring America Corp. is “to help high school students in underfunded public high schools reach their academic post-secondary goals,” says Brianna Parsons, director of communications. “Current high school students in Miami public high schools will be paired with a current college student with similar prospective goals and interests as the mentor.”

Parsons explained that mentors will provide individualized college application assistance. They will answer questions about college applications, read over supplements and essays with students, conduct mock interviews, and help with applications for financial aid.

The Mentoring America program includes complimentary standardized test preparation and materials as well as internships through which students can gain experience and knowledge in their prospective career fields.

GivePulse is the community engagement platform that supports service-learning courses at Barry.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AWARDS: This year’s Community Engagement Awards will be an in-person event on April 12. Two community partners are among the award winners.

Community Engagement News is a publication of the Center for Community Service Initiatives.

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