Heifer Canada and Heifer Senegal: A Sabbatical for Professor Dorn Van Dommelen

Dorn Van Dommelen has worked with Heifer International for about 5 years now to incorporate service-learning into a course confronting global issues of poverty and sustainability (GEOG/INTL 101), and he designed his sabbatical to enrich that work. With that in mind, he organized trips to Saskatchewan, Senegal, and Heifer International (HI) headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas with two objectives:
1) To help HI with their new program development working with colleges and universities that they are calling "College Cornerstones" - UAA students have been a part of that already; and
2) Visit the two countries for about 2 weeks each for a closer, more intimate look at their HI programs.

In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Van Dommelen visited the Harvest Moon Local Food Initiative and the Riverside Market Garden. The Harvest Moon Initiative is a group of small family businesses that have joined together out of a concern about being edged out by large agri-business. They've combined forces to support the school, restaurant, etc. in their community by taking them over, and they pool the food they grow and network with local food buyers in the city of Winnipeg. Each week, they take turns delivering the produce by van.

The Riverside Market Garden is located on the Flying Dust First Nations Reservation, and like many reservations, there is a great deal of poverty and unemployment. Elders brought 20-40 year-olds together and set aside 12-20 acres of land (land is often leased out to non-native farmers) to grow potatoes, greens, crucifers, corn, tomatoes, berries, etc. The group sells locally to native and non-native community, and their cash crop, potatoes is sold through a middle man for larger stores. The objective is to produce sustainable jobs locally plus provide better nutrition through eating locally grown food. The project is not yet economically viable and depends upon a relationship with the Canadian government to keep workers on unemployment in this training program.Van Dommelen said, "Heifer Canada's staff was extremely welcoming to me . . . they viewed my visit as an opportunity to hear constructive criticism from an outsider. . . In the end, I am convinced that a visit by an outsider seems to give country staff an opportunity to reflect on their own work and to view their work as someone with a critical eye would see their work."

The trip to Senegal in early November was to the city of Chess, about 40 miles from Dakar. Chess, (pop. about 400,000), is a former colonial city fallen into disrepair with a lot of extreme poverty. It was a different experience in that only a couple of hundred Westerners are seen in the entire city and then only in the western hotels. This was a site that insisted that Van Dommelen bring something to contribute if he wanted to come for the experience, and he worked with the site director, Gustave, who was trained as a sociologist. Gustave enlisted his aid in writing a project concept focused on youth education, and Van Dommelen translated a proposal based on a pilot project Gustave is currently running, teaching schoolchildren about the value of sustainable development. In this role, Van Dommelen was able to act as a culture broker between the Senegal office and HI headquarters.
HI has projects in Senegal in Dadack, Baback, and Diarre, mostly consisting of sheep and re-foresting.
The villages also depend upon a cash crop of peanuts, but all food is consumed locally, as Senegal is in food deficit and has to import food just to feed its citizens. Some villages also grow millet for local consumption. One of the interests of the Senegal office is to study rural-urban migration that disrupts the local projects when people start to run out of food and go hungry in-between crops. Then the elders call people together and send those selected to go and work in the city to send money back for the rest.
Van Dommelen has gotten busy this spring since returning from the one semester sabbatical but wants to hold onto the new ideas he's brought back with him. When asked how he thinks it will impact his teaching, Van Dommelen replied, "In Senegal especially, I got to see things that I didn't expect; I saw the depths of problems and the difficulty of overcoming issues up close. In Canada, I saw things that didn't always work well, and it's given me the ability to critically view projects that I'm teaching about."

Van Dommelen hopes to pursue opportunities both for students to travel for field courses in one or both countries in the future. He also wants to pursue research opportunities with HI projects in Canada and/or Senegal. He has already written a "mini case study" that he's using in a course he's teaching this spring on Global Population Issues. The implications for Alaska Native issues linked to the First Nations issues occurs as a mutually beneficial opportunity to Van Dommelen, and an opportunity for external funding to support student engagement activities and faculty research.

End of the Semester Celebration for Smart Start at Lucy Cuddy

"Farming to the Rempels isn't just a job - it's a way of life!" That was one student's comment, Cheltze Booker, attending a luncheon put on by her class at the Lucy Cuddy Center late this fall. Professor Shannon Gramse's Smart Start class had a CCEL minigrant this semester to address critical community needs for local food in the rich subsistence culture in Alaska and to inform others about the benefits of locally produced foods. Their activities culminated in a luncheon that involved UAA's Culinary Arts, Hospitality & Restaurant Management, Dietetics & Nutrition, and the Rempel Family Farm.

Following a hearty lunch that used some of the vegetables from the Rempel farm, students from the class came to the microphone to talk about what they had learned from the readings, their work on the farm through class trips, and the class discussions to incorporate their experiences and the academic reading. Voa Totua spoke about how much food she realized there is in the land of Alaska and how much we can do for ourselves - without relying on industrial food. Becca Arman spoke about the term she learned through reading Michael Pollen - "industrial organic - a fake kind of fresh!" For Arlene Ferrer, the learning that stood out was how government politics have controlled farmers' plans and how the plans are carried out for farming. And Chris Hess empathized with farmers who, having been brough up in a farming way of life, are forced to cash out. Hess shared, "It was an amazing experience to see former farmland that had been turned into suburbs . . . an eye-opener to see the impact . . . not that growth and development isn't important, but just because we can, doesn't mean that we should.

The Rempels attended with their four children, all of whom are home-schooled. Professor Gramse will be presenting his work with the Smart Start class as a part of our informal Faculty Breakfast Colloquia in the spring.

Take Wing Alaska - A Documentary Project with Paola Banchero

Paola Banchero, Associate Professor of Journalism & Public Communications at UAA has been working with Take Wing Alaska for months now on a program that brings high school youth from rural Alaska to UAA three times during their junior and senior years. Take Wing, a program of the Alaska Humanities Forum, has an objective to familiarize rural students with what's possible in their futures, the transition challenges and the resources they can draw from to be successful in higher education. Banchero set out to document the students' experiences in a way that would support the program for marketing, outreach, and fundraising. Take Wing focuses on Yupik heritage in the Yukon area so far and begins in the sophomore year to ease that transition. Students come for nearly two weeks for an immersion experience. They return in their second year with a chosen adult, their "community sponsor." A third visit in March of their senior years is also shared with their community sponsors, and the first cohort of 25 students will graduate from high school in May-June.

Not all students will attend UAA, but Take Wing seeks to have students complete some form of post-secondary education, college or Job Corps, and return to the community to contribute - perhaps not by living there but to consciously contribute back to their communities. Banchero began production March 20, 2010 with a mini-grant from CCEL to tell the story of that pathway from high school to higher education success. Two student assistants helped her to gather video during the 4 days that the rural high schoolers visited the campus. Difficulties arose when they lost all of that video material in an "end of the year" department clearance of their servers, and they gamely started over!
Banchero told an audience at the Faculty Breakfast Colloquium in November what she had learned in the process. Number one is having a deep appreciation of the challenges to rural Alaska Native youth; other take-aways include learning about post-production headaches, the differences between writing and video production, and what she might have asked for in a mini-grant! Next steps include revising, polishing, distributing the documentary piece and beginning to think about a longer production piece.

The experience has encouraged Banchero to reach out to students more and to strive to understand what they are dealing with that might not be immediately visible. Some of the goals for Alaska Native students through this process include the ability to thrive in multiple cultures, to nurture and celebrate their personal identifications, to master life skills and build positive social networks, and to demystify post-secondary education.

Dr. Marie Lowe is an Assistant Professor of Applied Anthropology. Working in the Institute for Social and Economic Research, she knew that she wanted to do more as a service project. "It was a way for me to apply what I've learned from youth research and especially first-generation college students," Lowe told us in a presentation to faculty, staff and students during the CCEL Faculty Colloquia Breakfast Series. She created a program that she called "UAA Transitions" as a peer mentoring program for UAA students and at-risk Anchorage High School students and piloted the program for three semesters. UAA Transitions is a college readiness program for would-be first generation students who are now still in high school.

Lowe describes the program as an "innovative experiential leadership model," following the lead of a program pioneered by the Anchorage School District. Rooted in a social emotional learning approach, the attention to "soft skills," not academic skills but skills essential to student surviving well in life, the model has been found to be effective with high-risk students. Brian Greg, a miliary school liaison with ASD, started a program for students with parents in the military and then integrated and expanded the student participation within the school district. Lowe and Greg together adapted the model to bring high school students here to campus, recruiting UAA students to be mentors.

The program includes 1 1/2 days of leadership training for UAA students, followed by 3 on-campus activity days over the semester that include the UAA mentors and the high school students together: Challenge Day, Campus Event Day, and a Finale in which UAA students prepare and execute problem-solving initiatives at the end of the semester. "We provide UAA students with tools, and the idea is they take control of the program. The high school students see the university through the eyes of the college students and it engages them much more quickly," Lowe said.

Lowe thinks the program has been successful, but the level of commitment from UAA students has been mixed. Initially the participation of UAA students was more white, middle-class, but a focus on diversity and recruiting has helped, and the number of young men participating has increased. UAA Transitions has received support from John Dede to provide tuition waivers for student mentors, CCEL minigrant to support the program, and through the Adventure Leadership program to engage some of their students as mentors. A future possibility will place UAA Transitions in the Honors College with a more consistent budget and placements for 10 UAA students as mentors in a program that they will call ELECT - Engagement, Leadership, Empowerment, Connection, Transformation. Lowe would like to do more grant-writing for the program in the future.

Theatre History on Display

Assistant Professor Gabrielle Barnett (Liberal Studies) presented her newest creative activity project that she titled "Out of the Box and Onto the Walls" with Out North Theatre. The project arose from a conversation with Out North's artistic director, Scott Turner Schofield. Schoefield first came to Out North as a touring performance artist himself several years ago. At that time he saw Barnett's work on a prior exhibit with Out North, the "Sweet Sixteen" exhibit. He was impressed by the work done by local artists. As the current Director, Scott donated materials for archiving to the Consortium Library's Special Collections, which became the focus of the current project. Together Schofield and Barnett developed a permanent exhibit that marks the relevance of Out North's first 25 years, locally and nationally.

Barnett began working with Out North in 2009 when she received a "We the People" grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum. That grant was to help preserve, organize, and catalogue both print and video materials. Barnett also curated a temporary exhibit of "Under 30" materials a the theatre to coincide with the 16th anniversary of the Under 30 series. Barnett summarized her passion about working with the theatre in saying, "Out North is an organization with a history of stirring up controversy in pursuit of its mission of producing work by and for underserved, and often marginalized, peoples in the state of Alaska."

A new semester, a new beginning

Although summer is far from over, some of us have already turned our thoughts to fall and the beginning of a new semester at UAA!  The summer has been filled with conferences and new ideas for the Center for Community Engagement & Learning, from our Civic Engagement Certificate program, one of approximately 70 majors, minors, and certificates now across the country to community partnerships and how to have our work with communities be reciprocal and mutually beneficial -- not to mention making a meaningful difference in addressing the real issues facing communities here in Anchorage and across the state of Alaska. 

What's coming up for fall?  We'll have a new AmeriCorps VISTA joining us at the end of August, Kris Katkus, who is originally from Chugiak and returning to Alaska after 5 years in Oregon.  Kris completed his Bachelor's degree and then worked for a year in a Retention program through Washington/Oregon States Campus Compact, assisting at-risk college students to stay and complete their degrees.  He will work with the ENGAGE Social Issues Liaison student leaders and coordinate this project.  Check out our progress so far at http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/engage/engage_social_issues/index.cfm, but visit us throughout the next semester as we add more content and connect the networks of people and organizations who address these issues on an everyday basis.  Here we also tell the stories of UAA and community partnerships who are already making a difference in these areas.

We are sponsoring a new program together with the College of Education and the Department of Human Services for incoming students at UAA who are coming from foster care.  Campus Connections will be a resource through regular meetings and individualized services to mentor new freshmen who may not have the resources that they need to be successful in making the transition in this first year to managing everything at the University.  We expect to hire an additional AmeriCorps VISTA to manage this program, and we will be supervising two graduate interns from Counseling Education to provide individual mentoring.  Professors Jim Powell from the College of Education and Mike Sobocinski, Human Services Program, together with Ayeesha Hankins (Guidance 150)  met with the incoming students in July at their Educational Conference here at UAA that was arranged by DHS.

The office is gearing up, and I am off to spend at week in Klukwan as a part of the Educator's Cross-Cultural Immersion Program, sponsored by Take Wing Alaska.  I am privileged and honored to be a part of this experience and look forward to sharing it with you in a future posting!  I've been in Alaska and at UAA for exactly one year.  I love it, and I have a lot to learn! 

ProCreativity Project with Sharman Haley & Joy Mapaye

Sharman Haley, Professor, ISER, and Joy Mapaye, Assistant Professor, Journalism & Public Communications, worked together for three years to put together a project that would address youth development with a vulnerable population of young women who became pregnant in their teens and to create media that would be used in teen pregnancy prevention. Earlier efforts with the Rasmusson Foundation and the Alaska State Arts Foundation became false starts that didn't seem to "get off the ground," and they started from scratch with the funding from CCEL to begin anew. "The grant from CCEL made it happen," Sharman told a group of faculty and staff at the April 13th Breakfast Colloquium, "it put us over the hurdle." The grant made it possible for them to pay for child care and to pay the film director, Betsy Douds. Betsy and Joy Mapaye taught the first 1 credit course in the Spring of 2010, giving students high school or college credit to learn story craft and film production to make short biographical films of their experiences as pregnant or parenting teens. In Fall 2010 the course was repeated at Crossroads Secondary School.

Ten of these young filmmakers had the opportunity to show their work at a January 29th premiere at Out North Theater, and they were joined by family and community members who came to see and discuss the films. Sharman and Joy, along with Betsy Douds, hope to continue the project to create a documentary that will be used for teen pregnancy prevention efforts aimed at middle school students locally. Sharman showed the faculty audience several film clips produced by a range of teenagers who were telling their stories. Some were more cautionary than others, as one teen mother emphasized the changes in her body and her social life, both unwelcome, even though she loved the baby. Some of the films emphasized the amount of care and the unanticipated demands of parenthood, while others reflected upon their interrupted adolescence, their dependence upon their own parents, and the unsurety about next steps in education, career, and lost opportunities.

Alice Friend and Sharman Haley produced a brief evaluation of the project. They emphasized that participants came from every walk of life and a diverse group of ethnicities, "highlighting the need for community wide support to tackle this problem." They stressed that "multiple participants agreed that if they regretted anything, it was the loss of their own childhood . . . unequivocal in their love for their child, however, stated that they wished they had delayed motherhood so as to enjoy their own youth." One goal of Sharman Haley's was to help the young women develop their voice and to be pro-active. The evaluation stated "the experience of documenting their journey into motherhood appeared to have given participants an intentional space to reflect upon their lives. They were the masters of their own story and were given complete control over how they portray their decisions."

The ProCreativity Project was a partnership between Out North Contemporary Art House, the UAA Department of Journalism and Public Communications, Crossroads Secondary School, Planned Parenthood, supported with grants from the UAA Center for Community Engagement & Learning, the Alaska Association of School Boards Initiative for Community Engagement, product donations from Best Buy, and individual donors.