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Archives
July 2004
Hamilton College Awarded VISTA Grant for Community Programs
Judith Owens-Manley will Direct SHINE and the Community School Cornhill Caring Community Projects
Hamilton College's Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center has received an AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) grant to hire two Hamilton graduates who will engage in two community outreach programs in Utica for the next year. Both VISTA workers will assist with projects focused on increasing the number of Hamilton students working in the community through service-learning courses, federal work-study programs and as volunteers. more...
September 2004
Students Participate in SHINE Project Training By Annie Bowler Sep. 17, 2004 Last Saturday, a group of Hamilton Students spent the day training for their new positions as student tutors. Through a program called Project SHINE, Hamilton students will find themselves all over the Central New York area this semester helping elderly immigrants and refugees with the naturalization process. Project SHINE, an acronym for Students Helping In the Naturalization of the Elderly, is designed to integrate the student's academic abilities with real-world experience. more...
Project SHINE: Bringing Service Learning to Hamilton
By Amanda Siepiola '02
After graduating from Hamilton College in 2002, I took a long and important detour through Boston and Little Rock, Arkansas on my way back to the Hill as an AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteer coordinating Project SHINE. I learned the value of community service in one's education along the way. Service learning allows students to connect the countless lectures, reading assignments, essays and statistics of academia to the reality of everyday life. Project SHINE (Students Helping in the Naturalization of Elders) comes to Hamilton this semester through a grant awarded to the Levitt Center by New York Campus Compact (NYCC), an association of fifty colleges and universities aimed to promote service learning, and active civic engagement and responsibility. Hamilton partnered with Utica College to bring Project SHINE to the Mohawk Valley, and will offer students this opportunity to connect their work in the classroom with real experiences that they may not otherwise have, by tutoring elderly refugees and immigrants in English language skills and assisting them in preparation for the U.S. citizenship exam.
For me, Project SHINE is an opportunity to come back to the community I lived in for twenty-two years, as a child growing up in Clinton and later as a student attending Hamilton. I ventured to Boston after graduation to serve as an AmeriCorps volunteer through City Year, a national service organization, currently in fifteen cities all across the United States. I initially learned the power of service learning as a City Year Corps Member, where I worked within my community to empower young people to make a difference and promote positive change. Suddenly, U.S. policy, history, economics and sociology all mattered much more to me because I witnessed and began to understand how such issues affected real people. My learning process continued when I moved to Little Rock, where I continued to be involved with City Year as a volunteer with City Year Little Rock, where I volunteered at a Boys & Girls Club and a Humane Society, and where I worked in an elementary school as a computer lab teacher, tutoring children in reading and math. I learned that positive change occurs when groups of individuals care enough to get out into the community, talk to the people, show them that they care, learn from each other and work together to make things happen. I decided that I wanted to bring what I learned about the power of community service and service learning back to Central New York.
Service learning integrates community service with academic course work to enhance understanding. Service learning is more than simply planting a tree every year on Arbor Day; it is more than serving a meal to the homeless on Thanksgiving; it is more than tutoring refugees in English two hours a week. Those activities are valuable and necessary, but service learning delves deeper. It includes a reflection about one? s experience; a dialogue about the service, its importance and the deeper issues; and a connection between academic work, the root causes of an issue, one's reaction to service, and the service itself. It is essential for young people, such as Hamilton students who will become our future leaders, to experience service learning and understand the real-life implications of what they learn in the classroom. There are two ways of "knowing" : one way is to academically and intellectually understand an issue such as immigration because one reads, writes and discusses the issue; the other way is to experientially know about immigration because one witnesses the lives of immigrants, and speaks with them, hears their stories, and learns from them. In order to be a well-rounded, compassionate citizen who truly "knows" about today's important issues and the lives of others that are unlike one's own life, service learning and a program like Project SHINE are the keys.
Project SHINE is a service learning program founded at Temple University's Center for Intergenerational Learning in 1997. It began because legal immigrants, who were not citizens, feared that welfare legislation would result in lost public benefits because of their non-citizen status. So, the focus of Project SHINE, along with building intergenerational and intercultural relationships to help break down stereotypes and promote civic engagement of young people as well as elderly immigrants, was helping older immigrants become U.S. citizens. That focus has since shifted because losing public benefits are no longer a concern to legal immigrants and refugees, resulting in decreasing enrollment in citizenship classes. Project SHINE ESL class enrollment is increasing because more immigrants and refugees view English literacy skills as more important to succeed in American society. However, Project SHINE continues to provide both ESL and citizenship classes.
Six professors, Rick Werner, Margaret Gentry, Margaret Thickstun, Jenny Irons, Judy Owens-Manley, and Susan Mason, agreed to include Project SHINE in their courses this semester. Their students may participate in Project SHINE as one of the course options, and will start their service at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, BOCES Utica ACCESS Site or Matt Apartments in Utica during the week of September 20th.
December 2004
Project SHINE Holds End-Of-Semester Celebration
Project SHINE (Students Helping in the Naturalization of Elders) culminated its inaugural semester of service on Saturday, Dec. 11, with an end-of-semester celebration held at the Vega Family Resource Center in Utica. The event celebrated the successes of 66 Hamilton College and Utica College students who volunteered more than 1,300 hours during the fall semester as a service-learning component of their academic courses to tutor older immigrants and refugees in English and help them prepare for the citizenship exam. more...
April 2005
SHINE Program Complete Its Inaugural Year
By Shin-Jung Hong Apr. 29, 2005
Project SHINE celebrated the end of its first year of service to the Utica communityOn Wednesday, April 27. Otherwise known as Students Helping in the Naturalization of Elders, SHINE is a national service-learning program that joins college students and older immigrants and refugees together. SHINE provides participants age 50 or older with an opportunity to learn English and to prepare for the U.S. citizenship exam, while simultaneously offering college students to learn about different cultures and people and to play an active role in their community. In Central New York, Hamilton College and Utica College partnered with SHINE to become its newest branch in 2004.
College student participants include volunteers, work-study students, or students who have a service-learning option in an academic course. Helping older immigrants or refugees become more actively engaged in their communities and teaching about information needed to pass the citizenship exam, Hamilton College and Utica College students have worked one-on-one with elders or in small groups two hours each week during the semester. Lessons include practicing the alphabet, introducing new vocabulary and idiom and holding conversations with an elder.
As Hamilton's SHINE Coordinator, Amanda Siepiola, explains, in citizenship classes, "students can practice the citizenship interview as a role-play exercise, help learners memorize answers to the '100 questions' asked by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and review citizenship material taught in class."
Students can either "coach" or "tutor" elders in English, focusing heavily on conversation, reading and writing. While coaches assist in ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) or in citizenship classes, tutors teach their own ESOL lessons. Whether coach or tutor, all students must participate in a mandatory training session at the beginning of the semester to understand older immigrants, gain an overview of the citizenship process and learn constructive coaching skills and tools.
Like some college students, the older immigrants or refugees are also volunteers, and therefore have a desire to learn from their coaches and tutors. Whether the elders want to gain proficiency in English in order to pass the citizenship test, to support their families, or to feel a closer connection to their community, they are willing and enthusiastic to learn. Many older immigrants or refugees in the Utica area come from countries including Vietnam, Bosnia, Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan, Iran, Burma, Somalia, Liberia and Cambodia.
With such diverse nationalities, the elders provide the students with a unique cultural and educational atmosphere. As Siepiola explains, "[the students] provide a much needed service in their community by helping the elders learn English and become naturalized, which, in turn helps them become more actively engaged in their community. In the process, the coaches learn a great deal from the intergenerational and intercultural relationship with their learners."
Siepiola further comments and hopes that "college students will learn just as much as they are teaching and that they are learning with learners." She wishes that by meeting different people and learning about other people's lives, "both students and elders will shatter stereotypes and prejudices and learn more about themselves."
The actual results of SHINE prove a successful and ever-growing program. During the fall semester of 2004, 66 Hamilton College and Utica College students participated as coaches and 7 Hamilton and Utica professors included SHINE in 9 academic course.
In addition, coaches tutored over 161 learners, 4 coaches became certified ESOL tutors through Literacy Volunteers of America and over 1,300 ESOL and citizenship tutoring hours were completed by SHINE coaches. Furthermore, 7 learners became US citizens. Combining the results of the fall semester of 2004 and the spring semester of 2005, Hamilton College and Utica College students completed more than 2,600 hours of coaching as a part of their academic courses. Moreover, 191 college students participated in SHINE throughout the academic year.
With such success, SHINE celebrated the end of its inaugural year of service to the Utica community on Wednesday, April 27, 2005. Held at four different sites, each celebratory event took place in Matt Apartments, Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR), Utica BOCES Access Site and St. Francis De Sales. Each celebration recognized coaches, tutors and the older immigrants or refugees.
While student coaches were awarded with certificates of appreciation, ESOL students and citizenship students received class photos with their individual coaches. Dominika, an elder woman from Germany who celebrated at MVRCR, explained that she started attending SHINE lessons in March and confesses that she was initially "scared to come and thought it was going to be difficult."
However, Dominika found that the student coaches and tutors "made it easy" and that she was encouraged to study on her own time. Janine Knight '05, a Hamilton student coach, expressed that "SHINE is one of my last activities at Hamilton and through the program, I've learned to appreciate the people of Utica, recognize the refugee population here, and what it takes to get citizenship."
With such positive experience from both the older and college students, all participants look forward to the next academic year and to continue to build SHINE as a national initiative.
Project SHINE-Health Literacy students' Health Fair Featured in Utica O-D
Health-care students educate refugees
Thu, Apr 14, 2005
KRISTA J. KARCH
Observer-Dispatch
UTICA -- A row of Somali Bantu women held six-inch pieces of dental floss in their henna-stained hands and squinted at Michele Bodensiek, a nursing student at Mohawk Valley Community College.
"How many people brush their teeth once a day?" Bodensiek had asked, with hearty shouts coming back in reply.
"How many people brush their teeth twice a day?" she continued, with just a few fingers tentatively lifted.
When Bodensiek pulled out a small square of floss, there were only quizzical stares.
It was an unconventional education for health-care workers and English as a Second Language students at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees this week when nursing students from MVCC and recreational therapy students from Utica College staffed the center's first health fair. The future health-care providers felt the challenges of dealing with patients from other cultures, while the students got a taste of Western health care.
"We have an increase in diverse people in our community," said Nancy Caputo, health services department head at MVCC.
"A large part of our education for students is to develop cultural awareness."
The college students staffed six stations spread around the second floor of the refugee center, with stations dedicated to educating people on such health issues as skin cancer, dental hygiene, accident prevention and hypertension.
"We tried to tailor the topics to things we thought might be useful to them," said Mickey Smith, education coordinator at the refugee center. "We wanted things that would be most universal."
Refugees and immigrants, many newly arrived from Latin America, Burma, the former Soviet Union or refugee camps in Africa and escorted by interpreters, moved between the stations in groups and listened to presentations until Smith rang a bell.
Awareness of the need for cultural competency training has grown since a 2003 investigation by the state Attorney General's office found that St. Elizabeth Medical Center and Faxton-St. Luke's Healthcare did not have adequate translation services available for non-English-speaking patients. Since then, the hospitals have improved their services, and Oneida County paid to translate common medical forms into Bosnian, Vietnamese, Spanish and Russian -- four of the region's most common languages.
Still, health-care providers must be prepared for differences a translated form cannot bridge. Religious beliefs, superstitions, vastly different dietary histories and a background of tribal or regional remedies can make a medical appointment a terrifying and confusing experience for a refugee or immigrant, experts say.
The health fair deals with the cultural competence of the entire health-care system, said Julie Gilbert Rosicky, director of multicultural services at the refugee center. Health-care providers need to be mindful of how much their own culture is influenced by their upbringing, she said.
"It's how to treat people when you don't understand where they're coming from, and how to be respectful of cultural differences," she said.
The Utica College students have worked at the refugee center through the spring semester through Health Literacy, an offshoot Students Helping in the Naturalization of Elders. The two-day health fair is part of that program, said Linda Aaronson, coordinator of health literacy at Utica College.
MVCC students, meanwhile, worked under a program funded by Slocum-Dickson Medical group, Caputo said.
The refugee center has long worked to train local service providers in cultural competency, but expanded those services after post-9/11 funding cuts left refugee resettlement programs scrambling to stay afloat. Now, the center collaborates with schools, hospitals and clinics to ensure that providers are prepared to serve refugees and immigrants.
But on Tuesday, just the chance to get a blood pressure test was enough for the ESL students.
MVCC nursing student Stan Bridgman pressed his fingers to the arm of Musa Said, a Somali Bantu refugee who arrived in the United States in December.
"Just checking your pulse," Bridgman said before strapping on the blood pressure gauge.
"It's good," Bridgman said after a few moments. "Right where it should be."
When Said stood to leave, a line of eager refugees had formed. Bridgman told them to come back after they had visited the other stations.
"I'll stay as long as it takes," he said.
Project SHINE's Aletha Asay Writes for Utica's Observer-Dispatch
Urban experience an eye-opener
Tue, Apr 12, 2005
Special to the Observer-Dispatch
EDITOR'S NOTE: Aletha Asay was among five Hamilton College students who recently spent their spring break volunteering in Utica's inner city as part of the college's Urban Service Experience Program.
As a college student, when confronted locally with problems of poverty or the real world outside the proverbial bubble of academia, it is easy to adopt one of two attitudes: Either feel helpless and look the other way, saying "it's not my problem," or to feel helpless and try to ward off the feeling by jumping into a volunteer effort.
I say that both options are easy because both tend to ignore the individual's need to understand the feeling of helplessness and do something constructive and long-term with it.
Through action and hours of discussion, the Urban Service Experience successfully emphasized the difference between "empowering" a community to continually improve as opposed to "enabling" its dependence on volunteer services.
On the first full day of the project, five students spent the day at JCTOD in Utica's Cornhill. For all of us, it was our first immersion in the inner-city of Utica.
I had no idea what to expect when dozens of children flooded the upstairs of the JCTOD house. Even from the view of the second story of the beautifully renovated old house, it would have been easy to look at Johnson Park and imagine people's lives behind the doors in rosy colors. But people do not see with their eyes; we learned that day that we had to listen and learn with our hearts. We didn't pretend to understand, but sought to understand as much as we could.
The service week, sponsored by Hamilton College and led by AmeriCorps VISTA worker Charlie Francis, was a humbling one. While we did do some physical service, the main effort of the program was for us as young people of "comfortable" means to feel a change in ourselves.
Ed Walsh of St. Francis de Sales stated that part of his mission of activism was to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable," and we saw our experience reflected in the latter part of his statement. All of the community members and leaders, professors and volunteers that we met reinforced this. They asked us to think seriously about our roles as individuals in a community that is striving against all odds.
The experience was especially important to me personally. A liberal arts education has created in me a strong desire to live deliberately -- that is, to be conscious of the results of all of my actions. Since becoming involved in the refugee population through SHINE, and now through USE, I can see the impact of my actions within a caring community right here in Utica. Equipped with the invaluable experiences afforded me through Hamilton and its involvement in local communities, I plan to stay in the area and look forward to serving the citizens of the Mohawk Valley after I graduate this spring.
To all people involved in college communities, I would ask that you look deeper into the precious resources afforded by your
local urban centers.
Aletha Asay is a senior at Hamilton College. She is from Waterford, Conn.
Fall 2005
SHINE on, volunteers
Aletha Asay '05, Hamilton's Project SHINE coordinator, is hoping to put herself out of a job. If she has her way, SHINE, the two-year-old service learning project offered through the Levitt Center, will become a student leadership program that will continue when grant funding ends. more...
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