Maryville College

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Community Partnerships Spotlight:

• Martin Luther King Jr. Center, Alcoa, TN   

              The Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Alcoa, TN, has been a long time community partner and popular placement among MC Bonner Scholars.  Under the leadership of Sissy Ferguson, the MLK Center Director, and Bonner Scholar Morgan Goodman, this site reached a whole new level of excellence this year.  With added structure and innovative new programs, attendance in the after school program grew.  Parents have reported that grades, especially in the area of mathematics, have risen as students take advantage of the one on one academic mentorship provided by MC Students.  We are also happy to report the opening of a brand new "Adventure Trail" geered towards elementary aged students has recently opened up near the center.  Read more about the new adventure trail here.  

• Haven House 

        Haven House's mission is to save and change lives in Blount, Monroe and the surrounding counties through the intervention and prevention of domestic violence by offering 24 hour shelter and crisis hotline, support services, at-risk youth programs and community awareness. Maryville College students are involved in many differentent types of advocacy programming at Haven House including emergency shelter management, court advocacy work, case management, and the development and implementation of children and teen prevention programs in local schools.  Recently Haven House went through a leadership transition and we are especially proud at how well our students assisted in this process. 

Student Development:

• Meeting Structure: The MC Bonner Scholar Program meeting structure can be broken up into three categories: All Bonner Gatherings, Class Meetings, and one-on-one meetings.  
• All Bonner Gatherings
• First Monday of Every Month 
• All Bonners Required to Attend
• Community Fund Requests, Bonner Business Reports, Reports from various service sites/reflections, followed by small group committee meetings as needed 
• Class Meetings
• First year class meets weekly to learn about assigned issue topics leading into their first year trip experience
• upper classes meet monthly and as needed to plan advocacy and action surrounding their assigned issues.
• One-on-one meetings
• Each Bonner meets at the beginning of every semester to discuss goals and strategy around their roadmap progress and academic achievement.   

•   Student Leadership: This year has been a restructurting  year for student leadership.  This year we had great student leadership from Raeann Bray as our senior intern and many of our students showed great leadership at the various sites and through our service clubs and organizations.  During the spring retreat, we imagined what a broader campus leadership structure might look like.  We have decided that In the fall we will have an application process for class representatives and committee chairs, who will organize Bonner events and who will serve as liaisons to the wider campus. One student representative will be the liaison for international students, many of whom have a service requirement with their study abroad program. Another will serve as a liaison to student organizations, all of which have to do service as a condition of receiving money from the Student Government Association.  We are working on job descriptions for each new position, and we believe that this more defined structure will help us move to the next level of engagement, not only for our program but for the whole campus (Anne Mckee).

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• Roadmap to Advocacy -  Each month, they or a student or another partner from on- or off-campus would offer a training on the “Road to Advocacy.”  These are designed to help students move from awareness about issues, to understanding root causes, to understanding how to impact political systems, to organizing for change.  Each Bonner student has a minimum requirement of trainings to attend over the semester, and they each have notebooks in which to create a portfolio of experiences.  This new system helps us keep up with our training offerings and has helped the students see the value of what they are gaining. Examples of the trainings offered this year:
• Bystander Behavior Training (Maryville College Diversity Task Force)
• Media Relations Training (MC Office of Communications)
• Cultural Competancy Workshop (Maryville Global Citizens Organization)
• Leadership for Social Change Panel Discussion (National Organizer Alliance)
• Recruiting and Volunteer Management (MC Office of Community Engagement) 
• Bringing Environmental Sustainability Home To Blount County (League of Women Voters) 

Cornerstone Activities:

• First Year Trip:  Having studied child advocacy issues all year, we closed out the year with a fruitful trip to Washington, DC, where the Pilgrimage arranged for us several days of service work, much of it engaged with children.  A side-note on this trip was that instead of driving college vans to DC, as we had in the past, we took advantage of a new commercial bus line between Knoxville and DC, the Megabus, which both cut down on the cost and the stress of transportation, as well as, we hope, reduced the environmental impact of our trip.      

• Senior Capstone Projects: Every Senior at Maryville College must complete and undergraduate research thesis in order to graduate.  We have been pleased that many of our Bonner Scholars have used this as an opportunity to do work around social justice issues.  For example, this year Kamran Hakiman used his senior thesis is an opportunity to study community building and educational theory stemming from his work with the Magdalene Carny Baha'i Centers.  In addition to a Senior Thesis, each Bonner Senior gives a "Senior Legacy" speech at the Bonner Spring Retreat. Finally, at the end of the year the Junior Class takes interviews each senior about their experience and present on the seniors accomplishments at the Bonner end of the year banquet.     

Campus-wide Collaboration:

          Year of the Child  

•   Through the Year of the Child programming, we collaborated with faculty members on a “Bringing Theory to Practice” grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. .  From this grant we were able to support learning and community engagement around child advocacy, particularly with the New Hope Child Advocacy Center, a longtime and strong community partner.  Some of the YEAR OF THE CHILD events and activities included: 
• Service Learing: Fall courses in child welfare and child development featured service learning components that engaged students in academic study, child advocacy and assistance with campus and community activities for Year fo the Child
• Conference on Women and Children:   ON October 11 - 12 at MC, the child advocacy partnership collaborated with Lindsey Wilson College to host a regional conference for students, academics and community members entitled, "Examining Trauma and Resilience in Women in Children". 
• New Hope 5k Run and Fun Walk:  Fundraiser and Issue awareness event at the Maryville City Greenbelt Pavilion as part of New Hope's "Ask me why I'm..." campaign.   

Serve 2.0:

 Serve 2.0 was put on the back burner this year due to a bit of tech fatigue among our students.  We do have many students handling blogs and website information for their individual service sites, but as a program we fell behind.   In our planning for next year, we have discussed creating videos for the purposes of larger campus engagement in service.  We hope these "service site commercials" will encourage non-bonner students to engage in service.  Over all, this was a rebuilding year for our serve 2.0 initiatives. Stay tuned for an awesome 2011 - 2012 resurrection of serve 2.0 at Maryville College.