Summer 2003 Feature

Impact on Campus

by Robert E. Shea, Ph.D.
Director of Faculty and Leadership Curriculum Development
Center for Inclusive Leadership and Social Responsibility

The Brown Foundation’s $3 million grant to Pine Manor College to enhance education for inclusive leadership and social responsibility challenges the College to raise $1 million in matching funds each year from 2003– 2005, in support of the College’s mission “to prepare women for inclusive leadership and social responsibility in their workplaces, families, and communities.” By successfully meeting the match requirements for the first year, the College has taken important steps toward the goal of building and expanding our learning community.

Several of the most successful Brown Grant initiatives to date have involved expanding upon existing programming, such as service-learning and community-based learning opportunities. The College offered eight service-learning courses in 2002–2003, six more than the previous year. Service-learning efforts included student research projects conducted on behalf of Dearborn Middle School, Healthcare Dimensions Hospice, and the Cape Verdean Mentoring Group. These research projects were developed and executed as part of a community-based research focus in our Psychology and Social and Political Systems Programs. In May, students in our research courses hosted a conference at which they shared the results of the research projects with their community partners and members of the Pine Manor community.

Pine Manor students were also involved in several mentoring and tutoring programs this year, including our continued work with the Brookline schools and a new initiative developed by Dr. Mary Connor and students from our Education Program. In addition to our ongoing After Hours U. Program (headed by Whitney Retallic, Director of Youth and Student Programming in the Center for ilsr), psychology students working with Dr. Michele Ramirez provided tutoring to Brookline middle school students throughout the year. Dr. Connor’s students met twice a month with students in Lawrence, Mass, to provide tutoring and assistance with college application preparation. The Brown Grant will help in the development of new service-learning opportunities over the next several years.

In addition to course-based community learning opportunities, the PMC Community Service Committee continued to be very active this year. The group remained committed to many of the projects that it has worked on over the last several years, such as the annual Hunger Clean Up sponsored by the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness (PMC set institutional marks this year for fundraising and participation in this event). Moreover, the Brown Grant has helped find ways of integrating community service projects into the curriculum and fostered student reflection on the value of service. Examples of such integration include the debut of community service days for first- and second-year students in Portfolio Learning Seminars, which are designed to ready students for their sophomore portfolios and encourage student reflection. Each first-year group worked together to make blankets that were donated to Elders Living At Home, an agency that works with elderly homeless people in the Greater Boston area. Second-year portfolio groups helped build a playground for children at Second Step (an agency that provides transitional housing for women and children seeking to escape domestic abuse). As a result of the success of these service days, two of the first- year portfolio groups will be organized around a community service theme in the 2003–2004 academic year.

Another successful area that has reaped the benefits of expansion from the Brown Grant has been the Leadership Retreats. Each year, first-year students are taken off campus for a weekend retreat at which they participate in activities designed to familiarize them with some of the principles of inclusive leadership and social responsibility. This year we had an unprecedented level of faculty and staff cooperation with and attendance at the retreats, which has demonstrated the importance of curricular and co-curricular integration and collaboration. Further, we have recognized the need to extend the retreat experiences beyond the first year and have developed a plan to offer retreat experiences to junior and senior class women that will feature leadership activities relevant to their level of educational development.

One of our target areas for the Brown Grant was to help the College provide more enriching opportunities for students in intercollegiate athletics. Toward this end, the Athletic Program began a more focused attempt to systematize the principles of inclusive leadership and social responsibility for all of its teams and participants. Beginning with the participation of student-athletes Bianca Craigwell and Julie Petrarca, along with Cross-Country Head Coach Bill Stargard, in a Division III Regional Leadership Conference, Pine Manor athletes and coaches have been busy developing an action plan aimed at increasing the diversity of athletes, coaches, and athletic administrators. The development of a Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) formed under NCAA guidelines has, since February 2003, honed and implemented aspects of the action plan.