Harward Center
As a national leader, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships helps students engage with the Lewiston-Auburn community through both academics and service. Each year, about half of all Bates students take a class that connects them with our local community, and many students undertake community-engaged research projects and senior theses. Through these partnerships, students develop the valuable intellectual, ethical, and personal skills needed for a fulfilling life as a global citizen.
Community Engagement
⭐ Community Engagement
Our mission is to weave together campus and community for the enrichment of both liberal education and public life. We seek to weave the resources and concerns of our community into the Bates educational experience and onto the Bates campus. And in the process, we seek to educate students who can themselves weave together their learning, personal growth, ethical values, and public action for the common good.
In pursuit of these goals, we work with students, faculty, staff, and community partners from both the local Lewiston-Auburn community and beyond.
Community-Engaged Courses
At the Harward Center, we are glad to foster opportunities for meaningful and academically rigorous collaborations between a wide range of community partners and faculty and students across the curriculum. In a typical year at Bates, more than a quarter of the faculty include a community-engaged component in their academic courses, and about 50% of students undertake a community-engaged learning project within the context of an academic course.
Community-engaged learning can take the form of a single class project, a group activity, or an individual assignment. Some courses offer students the opportunity to gain experience in education or social justice work by spending 2-3 hours per week tutoring or offering operational support to a non-profit organization. In other cases, students conduct extensive research on an issue of importance to one of our community partners, sharing their results in presentations or reports given to the organization at the end of the semester. For example, last year a professor and her students worked with seven different local organizations to address specific needs, from mapping public art in downtown Lewiston to working with Somali Bantu families who tend vegetable gardens for subsistence and for market.
Bonner Leader Program
The Bates Bonner Leader Program, also overseen by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, is part of a national network of 80 campuses across the country. This four-year program features sustained civic learning and action, one-on-one and small-group mentoring relationships, collaborative and cross-cultural problem-solving experiences, ample opportunities for reflection and skill building, and financial support. Thanks to their sustained, four-year investment in community work, Bonner Leaders are typically highly regarded by community partners and are able to make significant contributions to the off-campus community. They also receive valuable guidance, expertise, and mentoring from community members.
Community-Engaged Research
Many opportunities for community engagement are available for students who are completing an honors thesis, thesis, or independent study. Community partners often approach us with research questions that do not fit easily within the context of a twelve-week course. The sustained attention and detailed analysis that an individual student can provide through a focused semester or year-long project can have a significant and long-lasting impact.
Examples of recent Community-Engaged Honors Theses include:
- Camden Bock, a math major and education minor, worked with the Lewiston Public School Systems to assess the effectiveness of a free, web-based math tutoring program for his study, “Mixed k-means clustering in computer adaptive learning.”
- Laurel Meyer, a psychology major, worked with two senior living facilities in Lewiston, Blake Street Towers and Montello Heights, to evaluate how residents, staff, and physical spaces contributed to conceptualizations of community (i.e., belonging) and independence (i.e., agency) in the two partner living facilities. Her project was entitled, “Conceptualizing Community: Older People’s Experiences in Independent Living Facilities.”