OUR ROOTS

The Bonner Scholar Program at Carson-Newman College is rooted a place of great natural beauty but also environmental struggle—that part of Appalachia in the Upper Tennessee Valley where heavy industry and coal-fired power plants produce some of the dirtiest air and highest rates of respiratory illness in the country, and giant machines grind through forests and mountain tops disrupting wildlife and local community life alike.  We are rooted in a place of abundant natural resources but also enduring poverty among the people—where children live in four of Tennessee’s 10 poorest counties within a 30-minute drive of campus and African-Americans experience poverty rates approaching twice the national average for all Americans.  We are rooted in a bioregion where a hiker can meditate in a remote, peaceful spot, listening to the wind, falling water, and hawk’s call, but also where nuclear bomb components are produced in a never-ending war economy.  We are rooted in a people of abiding religious faith, patriotism, and neighborliness, but also where traditions of fundamentalism and individualism predominate—with consequent resistance to social change and lack of acceptance of those who are Other in ethnicity, belief, or nationality.  We are rooted in traditions that have nurtured generations of creative folk artists who expressed themselves and preserved community through Appalachian music, art, and story-telling, but also in a culture that devalues or distorts that which is rural and organic to the region.  

This is where we do our Bonner work.  It makes it especially challenging but also especially important, even essential, that we are here.  

OUR DISTINCTIVES

So what is especially strong and/or unique about our Bonner Program?  It is our people, our programs, and our paradigm: 

•   Our students, most of whom come to us with a religious grounding that gives priority to service as a natural and necessary part of one’s life;hopefully we push them beyond their comfort zones, but the fundamental impulse to care and to serve is already there;

• Our deep connections with the bioregion through our primary community-based partnership organizations serving and empowering the poor, especially Appalachian Outreach and Clearfork Community Institute;

• Our longstanding relationships with grassroots Appalachian leaders of great wisdom and accomplishment like Marie Cirillo, Bill Nickle, and the staff at the Highlander Center, some of whom serve as Bonner Community Fellows;

• Our faculty colleagues teaching across the curriculum and in such interdisciplinary areas as social entrepreneurship, women’s studies, environment & community, and conflict & justice studies, who are true believers in the Bonner Program and serve as Bonner Faculty Fellows;

• Our newly beefed-up set of curricular requirements across all four years of study to help our Bonner Scholars experience the Bonner Student Development Model in head as well as heart;  

• Our longstanding connections with local schools and after-school programs, working to extend educational access through social/academic mentoring and tutoring programs like the Boys & Girls Club, Students Encouraging Further Education, and the Jefferson City Housing Authority;

• Our programs to reach across borders of race, belief, nationality, ability, and other differences through such programs as Films for Change, Best Buddies, and Global Outreach

• Our linking community arts and cultural history with the anti-poverty and anti-racism work we do through such programs as Trinity Performing Arts and the East Tennessee Underground Railroad Festival;

• Our advocacy for human rights and peace on both the local and global levels through such community organizations as the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and the Knoxville Interfaith Committee on Conscience & War and such campus initiatives as Women's Studies and Amnesty International;

• Our commitment to building both a sustainable campus and bioregion through such organizations as Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center, the Mossy Creek Network, C-N Recycles, and Students for Environmental Action;

• Our developing new options for Bonner service especially for juniors and seniors in public service, policy research & advocacy, voter registration & education, and social entrepreneurship;

• Our Social Entrepreneurship Incubator that provides a way to support and mentor original and creative social change work of our Bonner students;

• And perhaps most of all, our distinctive paradigm for service-learning & civic engagement informed by liberation theology, popular education, and the history of struggle and resistance to injustice in developing countries as well as our part of Southern Appalachia.  This paradigm emphasizes an understanding of systems and power, and the essential role social change plays—through community organizing, social entrepreneurship, and policy advocacy—in “helping others” in addition to individual acts of compassion.  It addresses the unintended consequence of charity in perpetuating the status quo by connecting “critical consciousness” with action for social justice.