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TOMMIES ENGAGE COURSE-BASED COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT FOR THE COMMON GOODENGAGE | EXAMINE | EMPOWER

CLASSROOMS WITHOUT BORDERS

For years to come, it will be the norm for students who graduate from St. Thomas to tell the story of their college experience by reference to transformative experiences that took them beyond the walls of the classroom and engaged them in the wider urban communities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, as well as the world. They will talk about their experience of learning in Classrooms Without Borders. ENGAGE. Students might tell of an introductory English class in which they tutored at a local school with a high concentration of refugee families even as they studied memoirs of immigrant families. EXAMINE. Intrigued by tales of anxiety and adventure they heard while tutoring, our Tommie next might have enrolled in a Sociology class where the professor invited students to examine the social structures and inequities confronting immigrant families and the student’s changemaking role in dismantling them. EMPOWER. After a semester-long study abroad experience in which the student witnessed the migration crisis in Europe rsthand, this Tommie might complete the major requirements for a bachelor’s degree in political science by writing an innovative senior policy paper identifying three changes that could be implemented in Minnesota law. Our Tommie will have become a genuine changemaker. How might the University of St. Thomas create the conditions that make stories like this one routine? This book envisions how engagement at St. Thomas can be designed with a focus on the world’s most pressing needs, informed by guiding principles and best practices in keeping with our institution’s Catholic identity. Each section includes an overview of a theme-based initiative, courses that exist or can be developed in relation to each theme, and a story about St. Thomas students who have been empowered to seek social change through engagement. It is a story of changemaking.Engage. Examine. Empower. All for the common good.OVERVIEW

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

A number of principles guide community engagement at the University of St. Thomas. All of them pertain, in some way, to the principles: do no harm and maximize the common good.First, there is in the academy a robust scholarship of engagement that informs best practices for community-based pedagogies. Students, faculty, and staff from St. Thomas engage the community from the theoretical and abstract learning of the academy with appreciation for the practical, lived experience of community partners as co-educators. Just as academic preparation informs experiences in the community, these experiences will inform and challenge theory. Second, St. Thomas participates in critical service-learning. Our engagement, whether it is meant to alleviate suffering in the community among the hungry or the homeless, or to ensure equitable access to education or healthcare for all, attends to dynamics of power and privilege. Because of these dynamics, an innate human right——to food, shelter, education, etc.——is accessible by some but not by all, and Tommies seek to be changemakers. The third guiding principle is a desire to be radically inclusive. St. Thomas is a pluralistic community where diverse worldviews and faith traditions, as well as those who maintain no faith tradition whatsoever, are respected. While community engagement at St. Thomas is inspired by Catholic Social Teaching, the values that it entails cut across our differences. Tommies engage precisely because advancing the common good and believing in the innate dignity of all human beings inspires this institution to care for the world. A fourth guiding principle is that collaborative strategies of engagement extend beyond traditional categories like direct service to include: capacity building, economic development, public policy advocacy, participatory action research, grassroots organizing, confrontational strategies, political advocacy and education. Collaborative strategies of engagement transcend a false dichotomy that is often thought to distinguish charity from justice. St. Thomas embraces a wide engagement framework to address social needs without privileging any singular approach.A fth guiding principle is that St. Thomas emphasizes a project-based approach to course-based community engagement. St. Thomas has fostered relationships with community partners by the practice of listening attentively to what our partners are saying their clients need, and by following the community partner’s lead in the task of education. The partner has entered into an agreement to serve the University’s mission, and the University has agreed to deliver something at the end of the engagement, sometimes in the form of data or data analysis, reports or plans, or translations or exhibits, in addition to the more traditional response to direct needs for service. A sixth and nal guiding principle is a recognition that staff also serve the mission of education at St. Thomas, and that meaningful education extends beyond the work of the faculty and beyond the implementation of the curriculum. Engagement is an area in which deep collaboration can occur not only between the campus and wider community within courses, but also within the University’s structure inside and outside of courses. All staff are educators who extend the learning that takes place within the curriculum in meaningful ways.

BEST PRACTICES

The Ofce of Community Engagement at the University of St. Thomas has adopted six best practices from Barbara Jacoby’s book, Service-Learning Essentials: Questions, Answers, and Lessons Learned (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2015). Six practices that inform our ethical engagement are: Reciprocity. The partner has articulated a real need for student engagement, and has agreed to serve the University’s educational mission. “Reciprocity means that we, as [community-based] educators, relate to the community in the spirit of partnership, viewing the institution and the community in terms of both assets and needs. ... Reciprocity implies that the community is not a learning laboratory and that [community engagement] should be designed with the community to meet needs identied by the community” (3-4). Student Orientation. Students are properly oriented to the work of the community partner and the task they are being asked to do, and are properly trained for engagement across lines of difference (140). Quality Reection. Students will be asked to reect critically on the work they have conducted in the community which is the hallmark of a community engagement experience. “Critical reection is the process of analyzing, reconsidering, and questioning one’s experiences within a broad context of issues. . . . Experience without critical reection can all too easily allow students to reinforce their stereotypes about people who are different from themselves, develop simplistic solutions to complex problems, and generate inaccurately based data (26-27). Common Good. According to the Bishops assembled for Vatican II, repeated by Pope Francis in his encyclical, Laudato Si’ and extended to environmental concerns, the common good speaks to the net social and environmental conditions necessary for human thriving. The Bishops write that the common good is “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulllment.” Student Evaluation. Students will be evaluated on what they learn, not on what they do. “Grades and credits are not awarded for doing the service, as they would not be awarded for doing the required reading. . . . In [community engagement], faculty assign grades to students based on the extent to which they can successfully [provide] evidence [of] what they have learned from the community experience. . . . In addition, they assess the quality of the students’ critical reection and analysis of the connections between academic content and experiences” (103). Program Assessment | Community Voice. The community partner will have a say in assessing the success of the engagement. “In the context of student learning and development, assessment . . . describes the process of determining the extent to which a particular outcome or set of outcomes has been achieved by an individual or a group. [Community engagement] outcomes assessment . . . measures the extent to which desired outcomes are achieved for students, communities, faculty, and institutions. Its purpose is to gather, analyze, and interpret various forms of evidence to increase outcome attainment by improving practice” (155-156).

THEME-BASED INITIATIVESThe newly established Center for the Common Good at the University of St. Thomas has been charged with oversight of the University’s engagement with off-campus partners. We work to connect innovative educators with community-based initiatives and with global service providers in order to foster ethical engagement that is truly all for the common good.The Ofce of Community Engagement has tracked courses through a designation process that was implemented by the University in 2008. Analysis of the courses and their community-based components reveals that students have been addressing through their course-based work a number of grand challenges confronting the modern world. The themes that emerged are: Fostering Inter-religious Understanding Ensuring Equitable Access to Education Alleviating Poverty and Hunger Dismantling Racism Establishing Food Security Promoting Women’s Equality Securing Environmental Sustainability Advancing Justice and Peace Improving Public Health Caring for Elders and People with Disabilities The Center for the Common Good wishes to support the University’s ongoing response to these grand challenges by developing intentional partnerships with schools, non-prot organizations, and governmental agencies in the wider community, such that these partners become co-educators with the University. Together, we will provide the 21st-century Tommie with a meaningful, relevant, and hopeful education, in order to engage real-world issues, examine the systems that make human ourishing difcult, and empower Tommies to respond in ways that are ethically informed and culturally sensitive. They will be changemakers. This is the motivation behind Classrooms Without Borders.

No longer a region dened by Garrison Keillor’s quip that everyone is Lutheran, “even the Catholics,” Minneapolis-St. Paul is now home to over thirty mosques, eleven Hindu temples, and one of the ten largest synagogues in the United States. Situated at the center of the earth according to Dakota origin stories, the Twin Cities reect the rapidly growing religious diversity taking place in North American cities. With this growth comes the daily encounter between and among people of different religious identities. Once represented mostly by Scandinavian and Germanic Protestant immigrants, the region’s religiously unique tapestry includes signicant and growing communities of Muslims (especially due to immigration from East African nations following the Somali Civil War); Hmong-Americans and Hmong immigrants from Laos, Burma, and Thailand who practice Christian, Buddhist, and shamanistic traditions; as well as signicant communities of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Bahá’í. Minneapolis-St. Paul continues to nurture innovative new religious movements such as Eckankar, Wicca, Paganism, and Heathenry (thus nicknamed “Paganistan” to signify its robust neo-pan-Pagan community). The region is home to well-represented indigenous traditions such as Dakota and Ojibwe, and has one of the longest running Muslim-Christian dialogues in the country. The state has federally elected ofcials from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. With this rapid growth in diversity come challenges and opportunities for inter-religious engagement. In a nation where over 50% report that they do not know a Muslim and 36% agree that Muslim immigrants should be banned from entering the country, St. Thomas has a role to play in changemaking by fostering inter-religious understanding through community engagement. This entails providing students with the opportunity to encounter this growing religious diversity by serving alongside those who identify with a religious tradition other than their own or the one they were raised in—all the while serving the common good of the community as a personally, socially, and globally responsible citizen. Core competencies promoted in community partnerships that engage this robust religious diversity include: a) increased religious and inter-religious literacy: b) critical reection; c) nurturing practical knowledge; and d) developing leadership. FOSTERING INTERRELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: The Qur’an and the Bible. This course will examine the Bible and Qur’an and compare them. Points of comparison might include: competing claims of divine inspiration; creation, Adam and Eve; Joseph; the law; Mary and Jesus; Mohammed and Jesus. This course has three goals. First, to gain an understanding of each broad tradition (Islamic from the Qur’an, and Jewish and Christian from the Bible); second, to develop a method by which to approach sacred texts, a way to see their relevance and power; and third, to appreciate both the differences and similarities in these two sacred texts, both in their literary features, and in their effect upon society.OPUS COLLEGE OF BUSINESS: Religious Pluralism and Workplace Inclusion. This course aims to prepare students to thrive in the workplace of today, which is increasingly characterized by religious pluralism. Through case studies, role plays, and interaction with professionals from a range of industries and cultural backgrounds, students will explore contemporary issues presented by working with colleagues and clients from various religious communities. Students will apply their learning in a semester-long placement with a local business, government, or non-prot organization facing signicant challenges and/or opportunities related to religious diversity.STUDY ABROAD: Religions and Cultures in the Villages of India. This course explores India’s religious pluralism, focusing especially on Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. While it is commonly known that India gave birth to Hinduism, it also gave birth to some of the oldest Christian churches in the world: the Syrian churches of Kerala. Several centuries later, Muslims arrived through the spice trade and later arrivals ruled India for centuries. By staying with local families, visiting temples, and hearing from local experts, students will gain a strong sense of the religious fabric of the world, becoming aware of diverse religions and diversity within religions. Further, they will learn a variety of positive ways in which Christians, Muslims, and Hindus have approached religious differences.COURSES

SARAHSarah pinpoints an encounter with pizza and God as the dening moment that launched her into the world of interfaith relations, a world that has taken her to the United Nations, the Vatican, and back again.As a graduating senior, Sarah was about to enter the “real world,” but she had not yet decided what the next step would be. She stopped by a room on campus offering free pizza, and suddenly found herself in a conversation about graduate studies in theology. A practicing Catholic, Sarah declared in the encounter that her recent study abroad experience in Turkey had left her with an interest in Islam and a desire to build bridges between members of diverse faith communities.Her next step was decided.Sarah received a scholarship and enrolled in the Master of Arts in Theology program, but quickly learned there was no track for studying interfaith relations. Working with her professors, she designed a program. As she was preparing to graduate with her theological degree, Sarah received a call from the Holy See Mission to the United Nations.Because of her background in interfaith relations, they wanted Sarah to move to New York City and represent the Holy See at the United Nations in the discussions related to Israel and Palestine. While living in New York, Sarah was offered a fellowship to move to Rome to continue her studies in ecumenical and interfaith relations.Sarah packed her bags, moved overseas, and enrolled at the Pontical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.While continuing her studies, Sarah was selected to represent the Vatican in Catholic-Jewish dialogues. She has become a changemaker by fostering inter-religious understanding. Today, Sarah is involved in interfaith networks throughout the Twin Cities and sits on the Archdiocesan Commission for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs. She works at St. Thomas in the Ofce for Spirituality designing and implementing faith-related programs, with a particular interest in interfaith programming.

Although the state of Minnesota has one of the lowest rates of poverty in the nation, far too many residents in the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul live in poverty. According to 2014 estimates from the American Community Survey, about 23% of St. Paul residents (68,000 people) live in poverty. Moreover, a full 36% of St. Paul children (ages seventeen and younger) live in poverty, and approximately 72% of all students attending St. Paul public schools are eligible for free or reduced lunches. Alongside these statistics are large racial disparities within the Twin Cities on measures such as poverty rates, median income levels, and rates of home ownership. Students attending the University of St. Thomas can be changemakers by helping to alleviate suffering caused by poverty and hunger in the Twin Cities and around the world. By participating in community engagement projects and working together with well established and highly respected community partners, students will learn about the complex forces at work that cause persons, families, and communities to experience hunger and poverty. Students will gain an understanding of the various ways in which society can serve those who are currently living in poverty in order to alleviate suffering, even while examining root causes in order to promote widespread social change, even with an eye to ending hunger for Twin Cities residents.In addition to these educational objectives, students participating in these community engagement projects will materially contribute to the alleviation of poverty and hunger in local and international communities by providing meals for those who are homeless and/or living in poverty, for example, and by assisting organizations that provide various educational and social services for those experiencing poverty.ALLEVIATING POVERTY AND HUNGER

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: Introduction to Sociology. All students taking Introduction to Sociology learn about the social and cultural forces that impact individuals and the world. Special emphasis is placed on gaining a better understanding of diversity within and across societies, including the status of those who are economically disadvantaged. Versions of this introductory course that include a community engagement component provide students with hands-on experiences working with and serving those who are poor and hungry right here in the Twin Cities, sometimes in partnership with Catholic Charities and with the Dorothy Day Center, in particular.ST. PAUL SCHOOL OF DIVINITY: Community and Mission in a Diverse Church. One key element within our divinity programs is an emphasis on pastoral formation. This course explores the Church’s role in building a better community—a project that requires recognizing that this community will be religiously, ethnically, and economically diverse. Students in this course engage in outreach activities to the underserved and those living in poverty, and participate in experiential encounters with diverse community groups—both within Catholic parish communities and in the greater Twin Cities community.STUDY ABROAD | CIEE: Service-Learning in Dominican Republic. Have you ever seen a fair-trade label on an item you’ve purchased? That means the item supports small producers in underdeveloped countries like the Dominican Republic, the second-poorest country in the Caribbean. Students on this semester-long study abroad program examine some of the great challenges the Dominican people face, and actively work to understand and improve poverty and hunger through engagement with communities, applied internships, and research. Students can be part of an ongoing and co-curricular rural partnership in organic farming and environmental justice, or work with the Fundación Cuidado Infantil Dominicano (FCID).

NATASHAA rst-year course called “Introduction to Engineering” led Natasha to change from her planned major of secondary education to mechanical engineering. During her time at St. Thomas, she participated in three study abroad programs (in Peru, Turkey, and France), which collectively motivated her to investigate the domestic and global implications of the technologies she would be developing. Natasha was also a member of the Aquinas Honors program. As part of the program, students were required to take a number of interdisciplinary seminars. One of her seminars, called “Green Capitalism,” was co-taught by faculty in business and environmental science. Her nal paper for the course was on the Ogallala Aquifer, which was to be her rst in a long line of papers about water.Since graduating from St. Thomas, Natasha has been attending graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working on the design and optimization of small-scale solar-powered desalination systems for use in India, Gaza, and other parts of the world where water resources are depleted and/or with saline levels too high to drink.Natasha travels to India three times per year to complete eld research and trials.Her team won the USAID Desal Prize in 2014, in part because of her team’s ability to dene the problem carefully, and then design within the context where the product will be used. Natasha has become a changemaker. In interviews following the win, Natasha frequently talks about the international and interdisciplinary nature of her engineering education at St. Thomas. It is not just about building a gizmo, she says. You rst have to understand the complex social, political, and economic landscape in which the gadget has to succeed. Natasha intends to graduate with her doctorate in the spring 2018.

ESTABLISHING FOOD SECURITYGlobal demand for food is predicted to double by 2050. However, agricultural production gains in the last twenty years have fallen far short of where they need to be to meet this growing demand. At the same time, the environmental impact of agriculture is already unsustainable. Agriculture accounts for about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global climate change. Soil fertility is rapidly depleting. And nutrient pollution from farming has created massive “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico and at the mouths of other rivers. Together, rising food demands and unsustainable environmental impacts are creating pressing challenges for all citizens, but their impacts will fall disproportionately on already underinvested communities. A complementary challenge arises from limited access to healthy, affordable food in many rural and urban neighborhoods. Enhanced nutrition and economic development programs are needed to make healthy options more available for these residents.These challenges facing our food system can be emotionally overwhelming, particularly for college students seeking to prepare themselves for prosperous and fullling lives. But many young people are realizing that solutions will require massive collective action, and they need to be part of it. They need to become changemakers. The question is: how? What can people do right now to make a difference? And how can educators help inspire and empower young people to lead us to a more productive, just, and sustainable food system? The diversity of issues involved create opportunities in many disciplines. Science faculty can develop classes on local agriculture that can interface with urban farmers, watershed districts, and community garden organizations. Engineering classes can help bring experimental technologies to small-scale local farmers and global partners. Social work, English, Theology, and similar disciplines can highlight structural injustices related to food access. Psychology and Health and Human Performance classes can explore student and community behaviors that lead to unhealthy food systems. The ability of so many disciplines to connect to this central theme—food security—will provide rich opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations and long-term community engagement.

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | English: Analytical/Persuasive Writing. This course examines rhetorical strategies used in published writing. Students will strengthen their own writing through various projects and possible partnerships with community organizations. For example, sections might collaborate with Brightside, a St. Thomas student-driven effort that addresses food insecurity in the Twin Cities by partnering with corner stores in low-income areas to provide fresh produce on a weekly basis. Students will apply their examination of the local food movement, urban farming, and food justice issues to Brightside’s work.SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING: Engineer Design Clinic I & II. A student design team, under the direction of a faculty coordinator, will develop engineering solutions to a practical, open-ended design project conceived to demonstrate the value of prior basic science and engineering courses. Students can choose the Engineering for the Social Domain option which would emphasize complex ethical, cultural, social, economic, and safety issues in addition to technical concerns. These projects often consider post-harvest technologies and food security in the developing world. Opportunity will be provided for objective formulation, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of alternative solutions. STUDY ABROAD | SIT: Rethinking Food Security: Agriculture, People, and Politics. This multi-site global program demonstrates how the dynamics of food production, distribution, and provisioning are affected by population growth, rapid urbanization, and globalization. By examining pressing questions around global food security in four contrasting countries: USA, Tanzania, India and Italy, students learn which responses offer the most promise for sustainable food futures at local, national, and global levels. Students analyze local, national, and global food systems—and the very direct impact of food on our daily lives—to develop a deeper understanding of one of the most signicant challenges of our time. They will identify strategies to ensure healthy and prosperous livelihoods in a rapidly changing world.

EMMABecause she is a changemaker, Emma makes things happen. She has helped build BrightSide Produce since she started with the organization in the fall of 2014. Her basic roles have been as a route manager and as the business manager. Her truly exceptional work was in summer 2015. After receiving a Community-Based Research grant, Emma piloted a sidewalk farm stand project in one of the poorest communities in Minneapolis. Emma reached out to a corner store owner to discuss a partnership where she and her youth collaborators would run a stand outside of the store. In order to make the stand protable, Emma and her team assembled all of the leftover produce at the end of the day and sold it to St. Thomas’ neighbors. They did this every week throughout the summer. Here is feedback that a St. Thomas neighbor sent to President Sullivan: “I am writing to thank you and the University of St. Thomas, specically BrightSide ‘liaison’ Emma Button, for your support of the BrightSide farm stand this past summer. What an incredible outreach from your Catholic university and role model for all of us in providing a community in North Minneapolis with access to basic needs such as healthy food options. Our family was incredibly impressed with the St. Thomas representatives who made this amazing project happen. It was also lovely to meet the North Minneapolis community members who were involved with running the farm stand, and who might someday nd a way to make food service/delivery/grocery their avenue out of poverty. Our own children attended Catholic universities (Holy Cross, Georgetown) and what amazes me is how this project has created such a beautiful neighborhood connection with St. Thomas that is often a challenge that exists between colleges in urban neighborhoods.” Besides her work with BrightSide, Emma is completing a major in the Biology of Global Health. She continues to seek curricular opportunities to extend her learning beyond the classroom into the community, and to reect critically on that work with her classmates in order to empower change.

SECURING ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITYNestled in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and along the Mississippi River watershed, our water systems in the Twin Cities connect us with over thirty states and provinces. Surrounded by fresh water, we may take for granted its abundance, quality, and multiple, life sustaining uses. Freshwater is essential for drinking, agriculture, production of goods and services, industry, recreation, and ecosystem health. It is a crucial feature necessary for a high quality of life in Minnesota and across the globe. However, over use is depleting our aquifers; and urban runoff and non-point source pollution are making the water supply unsafe. We face similar issues with sustaining energy supplies, transportation systems, food systems, and other natural resources. As we write, cities and towns around the world are working to meet the challenges of sustaining resources in order to maximize the quality of life and to ensure healthy, functioning ecosystems that sustain us all. Obstacles to this work often include the regulations, norms, and infrastructure that communities have built as a culture over time under different environmental constraints. However, as local and global communities identify sustainability goals to improve quality of life, they often run up against limited time and nancial resources to investigate and solve these emerging issues. At the University of St. Thomas, students are empowered to become collaborative and innovative changemakers and problem-solvers in their communities and beyond to address these emerging sustainability issues through the Sustainable Communities Partnership (SCP) in the Ofce of Sustainability Initiatives. SCP develops partnerships with cities and government entities to collaborate on projects that foster systems-level change towards sustainability in the Twin Cities by linking existing St. Thomas courses across disciplines to these projects. Courses in sustainability empower students to be culturally-aware, collaborative, and innovative problem-solvers in the 21st century to transform the world for the common good.

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | Department of English: Ethnographic Writing. The course focuses on the difculties, complexities, limits, and impossibilities of ethnography, exploring questions pertaining to the ethics of representation. Students collaborate with the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (MWMO) to create ethnographies of urban agriculture engagement and practice among residents of North Minneapolis. In their research, students seek to understand ways urban agriculture functions for the residents—its benets, challenges, and meanings. The ultimate goal is for the collected narratives and nal research projects to provide useful qualitative data that can aid MWMO in understanding the relationship of residents who live within the watershed to their urban farming traditions and practices and ways that these practices could improve water quality.SCHOOL OF LAW: Land Use Law. This course will explore the potential conicts between land use regulation and private property rights and will examine their respective constitutional bases. Students will consider topics like zoning, zoning relief, eminent domain, takings, wetland protection, historic preservation, development incentives and subsidies such as tax increment nancing.STUDY ABROAD | School for Field Studies: River Ecosystems and Environmental Ethics in Cambodia. The mighty Mekong River, whose headwaters originate in the Tibetan plateau and empty into the massive delta in Vietnam, is the focus of this program in Southeast Asia. This ribbon of life provides myriad habitats to threatened species and sustains many millions of people. Students study the environmental dynamics of one of the world’s most productive freshwater systems and gain an understanding of the interconnectedness of ecology and human actions on the sustainability of the greater Mekong region.

KYLEAs a University of St. Thomas changemaker, Kyle has a personal mission statement: “accelerate a global economy that produces, consumes, and disposes of products, services, and experiences in a sustainable way.”His philosophy emerged from a conuence of St. Thomas courses and experiences ranging from cultural exploration during the London Business Semester to learning the mantra “good goods, good work, good wealth” in his capstone Theology course. Through his off-campus J-term Entrepreneurship course, Kyle learned to dream big and have condence in his ideas. During his senior year, Kyle, an Economics and Entrepreneurship double-major and Biology minor, took an Economics course focusing on managerial decision making that included a Sustainable Communities Partnership (SCP) project with SCP partner, the City of Delano. His class analyzed the energy efciency of Delano’s public infrastructure. This experience reinforced the idea that efcient buildings and working at the city level can have an enormous impact on sustainability.As a student leader, Kyle linked his connection with SCP to his extracurricular pursuits. In fact, he had been looking for this very kind of experience for his Entrepreneurship Society, whose members want real-world challenges to tackle together. He linked up with SCP partner, the City of Elk River, to work on city-identied projects for the Entrepreneurship Society’s “design sprints.” The rst design sprint was to create an innitely-reusable pizza box. Next, Elk River Chamber of Commerce published a call-out from Kyle recruiting small businesses to work on their business strategy with members of the Entrepreneurship Society. Ten local businesses collaborated with St. Thomas students to achieve their goals. Kyle is eager to apply all that he has learned to his rst post-college job as the third employee at a local medical device startup. Given his personal mission statement, Kyle anticipates having substantial inuence throughout the growth of the company by integrating and applying emerging sustainability technology to improve products, services, and experiences. 

An understanding of public health is a critical component of good citizenship and a prerequisite for building healthy societies. The public health challenges of the 21st century include chronic disease, gun violence, homelessness, environmental health, and access to health care, as well as communicable disease and maternal and child health. These problems affect low-income and people of color disproportionately, and are inuenced by the physical, social, and economic environments in which people live.Public health organizations around the world, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recognize the importance of including community engagement in the spectrum of strategies to improve public health. The CDC’s list of “Ten Essential Services for Public Health” includes two community engagement-related essential public health functions: “Inform, educate, and empower people about health issues” and “Mobilize community partnerships and actions to identify and solve health problems.” The University of St. Thomas is poised to do both, and to become a true leader in changemaking in public health. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, every week, at least fty new immigrants arrive in Minnesota. The state attracts people who move here to attend school, start businesses, work in industries, and join family members. 79% of Minnesota’s foreign-born population lives in the Twin Cities metropolitan area; and while Minnesota has long been one of the healthiest states in the country, some Minnesotans—including foreign-born residents—tend to experience shorter life spans, higher rates of infant mortality, higher incidence of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and poorer general health.University of St. Thomas students can be partners in community engaged public health initiatives. Through the integration of classroom, experiential learning, community-based participatory research, and outreach, students and community partners can work together to address public health challenges in our immigrant communities.IMPROVING PUBLIC HEALTH

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | Department of Health and Human Performance: Global Health. Interacting with some among the Twin Cities’ many global health organizations and communities, students research, wrestle with, and uncover solutions to global health issues from a community health framework. This foundational perspective allows students to apply their learning on an international scale to issues of health in our local global communitySCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK: Development-Social Services. This class provides students with an overview of key elements of supporting and expanding social service programs in non-prot and public agencies. The topics of the course (non-prot governance and administrative structures, fundraising, program design and development, philanthropy, supervision of paid staff and volunteers, and grant-writing and program evaluation) provide a rich arena for community-based learning in public health.STUDY ABROAD | CIEE: Public Health in Thailand. According to the World Health Organization, Thailand has “a long and successful history of health development,” yet it continues to struggle with public health issues such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. On CIEE’s Community Public Health program, you’ll examine these issues and more on regional and national levels through classroom instruction, eldwork, and research with the help of health agencies and visits to local communities. Plus, you’ll develop your Thai language skills through exploration of this fascinating country.

HANNAHHannah enrolled in her 400-level senior biology class expecting to learn about infectious diseases.That she did—and so much more.The class completed a semester-long community engagement project reviewing research and data in partnership with Maysha and West African Medical Missionsto helpinformtheir educational curriculum to combat the issue of malaria in Uganda.Hannah discovered a passion for integrating scientic research and community-based public health initiatives, and gained skills necessary to do similar work in professional settings.Since graduation, Hannah has worked as a changemaker in the infectious disease division at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) on refugee and immigrant health issues. She used her infectious disease expertise to provide health messaging and to work with local Liberian immigrants to reduce stigma during the Ebola epidemic.Hannah recently worked with a team at MDH that engaged community stakeholders and developed recommendations on standards for medical interpreting. Ensuring that medical interpreters have proper training promotes better health outcomes for non-English speaking patients. Their recommendations led to the development and recent passage of bills in the Minnesota legislature that establish a veried registry of medical interpreters.Since her community engagement project at St. Thomas, Hannah has come full circle to work once again on malaria in at-risk communities. She is part of a team working to identify ways to reduce malaria in Minnesotans at greatest risk for the disease: immigrants who return to West Africa to visit friends and relatives. She is helping coordinate a community advisory board of local healthcare professionals from West Africa and is facilitating focus groups with community members.She is completing her master’s degree in Public Health and will enroll in a doctoral program with a particular focus on refugee health and infectious disease.

Equitable access to education—including the reality that students from underrepresented groups and rst-generation youth attend and graduate from college at signicantly lower rates than their white counterparts—is not only a signicant issue in the U.S. It is a signicant issue in Minnesota, where the gap in equitable access to education is among the worst in the nation. Given our mission, location, and deep commitment to working with our local urban communities, St. Thomas has a responsibility and an opportunity to become even more fully invested and engaged in changemaking to reverse the current trends. We have a signicant responsibility to collaborate with our surrounding communities on solutions. We believe that while there are gaps in achievement, those gaps do not emerge from an inability to learn. Rather, we know our educational systems do not currently work for all students equitably. These systems are not providing all students with an equal chance for experiencing the kind of excellent educational opportunities we know we can and should be providing to all students in Minnesota.As a University all for the common good, we have an obligation to engage fully, thoughtfully, and ethically with our local and regional educational partners toward ensuring equitable access to education, and we have a plan for doing so. This plan is based on listening deeply, building partnerships collaboratively, and securing long-term outcomes reliably with signicant, positive impacts on our region’s most vulnerable children, youth, young adults, and families. These partnerships will be positioned to tackle the very systems that currently perpetuate and inhibit each young person in our state from receiving the high-quality education that every child deserves.ENSURING EQUITABLE ACCESS TO EDUCATION

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | Undergraduate Family Studies: Foundations of Family Studies. Teams of students, armed with questions emerging from multi-week collaborations with 10th graders at Cristo Rey High school, focus on the inuence of family/parents on college aspirations and college access, co-create small interview teams (2 UST students and 2 CR students per team), and conduct interviews with families of rst gen college students. Results of their qualitative data analysis are used to reveal concrete actions St. Thomas and local high schools like Cristo Rey can take with parent/families in their communities to (perhaps) increase offerings/education/access to information/support from cultural brokers on supporting youth in the college journey.COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, LEADERSHIP, AND COUNSELING | Graduate Program Special Education: Secondary Academic Interventions and Transitions. Graduate students in special education co-create teams with special education teachers at Wellstone International High School. Together, after extensive listening-sessions by all members, the teams co-create culturally responsive and appropriate interventions for Wellstone students with special needs who speak Somali, Oromo, Amharic, and Swahili (the languages, in addition to Spanish, spoken by the bilingual associate educators at Wellstone). STUDY ABROAD | SIT: Education and Social Change in South Africa. This course provides students the summer to examine the challenges and successes of educational transformation and explore the role of education in a changing South Africa through theory, eld study, and practice. The program examines the role of education in South Africa in the context of the country’s historical circumstances, contemporary public policy, and economic development. Students spend time at primary and secondary schools as well as adult educational centers in urban and rural KwaZulu-Natal. Excursion and homestays provide students with the opportunity to compare educational approaches in different locations.

JASMESKUTMeet Jasmeskut (aka, Robby) Vang, a ’15 graduate with a major in Communication and Journalism whose story as a rst-generation college student is—like so many rst-gen students of color—complicated. Robby’s story involves a dream-become reality . . . a journey that at one point as a ninth-grader in high school had him partnering with a St. Thomas student in a introductory course in communication and journalism. Robby and his sophomore collaborators worked side-by-side creating the rst-ever Cristo Rey (CR) newspaper. More than just designing a newspaper, they created connections that are burned years later into Robby’s memory. “What I remember the most was when we all came together, . . . everyone t in together like a perfect puzzle. I felt accepted. . . . Was college possible for me?” Indeed, he was being accepted—soon into a group of Dease scholars: a select honor given to those earning a full-ride to the University of St. Thomas. When asked why he chose St. Thomas and not the seven other colleges to which he was accepted, and further not swayed by the “quarter of a million dollars in scholarship money offered in full-tuition scholarships” across multiple other institutions, Robby is clear: “Why St. Thomas? I was familiar with it.”Robby Vang has just spent his rst year post-St. Thomas participating as a changemaker by giving back to his Hmong community and the next generation as a grade-school teacher at College Prep Elementary. In his “free” time, he’s also a mentor on a team of fourteen Cristo Rey High School and current St. Thomas students (each a Cristo Rey alum and rst-gen student) conducting a Youth Participatory Action Research project. Robby reects on his role in this research and as a teacher/mentor, and points to the power of systems that prioritize human empowerment through education and collaborative mentorships: “In a nal epic (and perhaps cliché) conclusion, being rst-generation is denitely a very big role, but in life you will never be number one. There will always be somebody better than you at everything you do. But you should not be discouraged; because, what does it mean? It means there will always be a mentor for everything you do.”

At St. Thomas, community-engaged courses develop students’ competence to respond to the most pressing problems of our day. The issues facing people of color locally and globally include poverty, segregation, and racial disparities in employment and education. The Pew Research Center reports that in the United States, as of 2011, almost 1/3 of African-Americans live below the poverty line. The hardest-hit are children. 36% of Native American children live below the poverty line, as do 38% of African-American and 32% of Hispanic children. The Twin Cities in particular is known nationally for the acute racial segregation in our neighborhoods. High concentrations of poverty in black and brown neighborhoods is exacerbated by the decreasing options in affordable housing. The Metropolitan Council reports that while only 6% of whites live in poverty in the region, 25% of people of color do. The greatest concentration of neighborhoods where more than half the residents live in poverty is in St. Paul. While the Twin Cities region is noted as one of the best cities in the U.S. for its livability (high employment, a highly educated workforce, and high rates of home ownership), people of color are not reaping these benets in comparison to whites. African Americans, for example, are unemployed at twice the rate of whites in the region. While it is very important to build awareness of power and privilege, cross-cultural understanding, and to work on overcoming individual bias and prejudices, the challenge for dismantling racism is to work in partnership within our broader community to raise awareness of how institutional practices and policies impact oppression and hurt every one of us—and to rethink those practices to build a more racially just Twin Cities. At the University of St. Thomas, we support changemaking by leading these conversations to advance the common good.DISMANTLING RACISM

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | English Department: Community Writing for Social Justice. This course pairs students with grassroots and non-prots in the Twin Cities that work to dismantle racism at the local level. This writing course publishes pieces for these organizations’ websites—from Op-Eds proposing community schools in African-American neighborhoods to FAQ pages that address the racial segregation resulting from housing discrimination in the Twin Cities. These community partnerships empower students to tackle institutional racism in the Twin Cities in real ways. COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, LEADERSHIP, AND COUNSELING | Organization Development and Change in a Diverse and Multicultural Context. This course recognizes that change occurs in contexts that are local, global, multicultural, and diverse. Organizational development practitioners must understand the inclusive, exclusive, and cross-cultural experiences present in our community, and how to address challenges through organization, group, and individual-level initiatives. Students design interventions that contribute to inclusive and multicultural workplaces by assisting a local, non-prot organization’s objectives of dismantling racism through education and programming in talent development, cultural competency, or strategic planning. STUDY ABROAD | SHORT-TERM PROGRAM: Ethnicity, Multiculturalism and Globalization in Cuban Society. This course examines recent and contemporary issues in Cuba within the context of globalization. Students learn from Cuban scholars as they discuss relations between Cuba and the United States; structural transformations in the Cuban economy and their impact on Cuban society; higher education; gender studies; perceptions of race; effects of recent advances in healthcare, education, and changing employment opportunities; and psychosocial development of women. Students also will participate in a community-focused project with Centro Memorial Martin Luther King school in Havana.

From the moment he stepped foot on campus, Adam took the mission of the University of St. Thomas to heart. He knew that he wanted to be a part of something greater. Immediately, he joined the extra-curricular Volunteers In Action service organization, starting out as a volunteer before becoming the founding site leader of an environmentally focused service site, and then eventually leading the organization as a student director. Next, he joined the Linkages Mentorship Program, which enabled him to mentor traditionally underrepresented students enrolling at St. Thomas. He also ran for a seat on the Undergraduate Student Government, serving as the junior class senator. It was during his junior year that he was accepted into the Ronald E. McNair Scholars program, a graduate school preparatory program for underrepresented students in higher education. This allowed him to think critically about the opportunities he was afforded while at St. Thomas, as well as how to utilize the skills he gained when he would move outside of the arches. As a McNair Scholar, Adam conducted his rst research project, studying the impact of students’ socioeconomic status on their ability to gain student leadership opportunities while at college—an article that was later published. He also studied global health abroad in South Africa. These opportunities opened doors for him. After graduating from the University of St. Thomas, he went on to earn his master’s degree in higher education from the University of Michigan, through which he again studied abroad at the University of Cape Town as he continued to focus on dynamics of power as it intersects with race. He now works as a changemaker at Texas State University as a research analyst in the Ofce of Institutional Research, where he examines issues for rst-generation college students in higher education. He recognizes how his experiences at St. Thomas shaped how he views and serves in the communities he calls home, “forever striving to advance the common good.”ADAM

In the United States, according to the 2015 report of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, there is widespread gender inequality. Although women make up almost half of the workforce, they are more likely to provide care for family members, young and old, to need time away from work for family responsibilities, and to be paid less for their work. Women are more likely to live in poverty than are men, in part due to income disparity. Women earn 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, often earning less at the same job or even one that requires greater knowledge and skill. The disparity grows for women of color or women dealing with other forms of discrimination.Despite progress in recent years in addressing violence and abuse, over 30% of women experience intimate partner violence at some point, while 20% of women are raped and almost 45% experience other forms of sexual violence. Approximately 25% of teenage girls have been bullied at school, while another 20% have been bullied electronically over a twelve-month period. The devaluation of girls begins at a very young age and extends throughout a woman’s life. No wonder women are more likely to experience depression than are men. There are several organizations in the Twin Cities metro area that deal with these and many other problems faced by women, or that are designed to empower women and girls. By working with these community partners and simultaneously examining the lives of women in literature, history, or contemporary culture, students are able to gain an understanding of the evidence for and complex causes of gender discrimination. In offering support to various women’s and girls’ organizations, students contribute to the healing that is needed by women who have suffered, while also working to end the conditions that result in a lack of ourishing for women and girls. In addition to local organizations that empower women, St. Thomas students have the opportunity to be changemakers by working for the welfare of women around the globe as well, whether in rural villages in Central America or in the townships of South Africa.PROMOTING WOMEN’S EQUALITY

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | Theology and Women’s Studies: Women in the Early Church. Students work with organizations that seek to improve the lives of women and their families through education (Jeremiah Program) or through providing a safe space (Women’s Advocates). By comparing the situations of modern women with those reected in ancient Christian texts, students come to see a common double thread: while women who are less fortunate are often blamed not only for their own struggles but for all ills, praise is lavished on wealthy, elite women. Students learn that fostering gender equality involves addressing intersections of discrimination.SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING: Engineer Design Clinic I & II. A student design team, under the direction of a faculty coordinator, will develop engineering solutions to a practical, open-ended design project conceived to demonstrate the value of prior basic science and engineering courses. Students can choose the Engineering for the Social Domain option which would emphasize complex ethical, cultural, social, economic and safety issues in addition to technical concerns. These projects often consider women’s issues in the developing world, and may involve designing equipment for income generation that stays with women in the Global South. Students may work directly with women’s aid organizations. Opportunity will be provided for objective formulation, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of alternative solutions. STUDY ABROAD | DIS Stockholm: Gender & Sexuality Studies. Well known for its progressive norms and policies, Scandinavia is a perfect place to study the challenges and opportunities of core topics within gender, equality, and sexuality. Sweden is the most gender-equal country in the world—but it also has the most gender-divided work force with women still working largely in traditionally “female” jobs, such as health care and education with men in industries and business. With a focus on Sweden, this program explores topics of gender, equality, and sexuality in all their complexities.

ERICAErica had previously worked in an ofce that provided legal assistance to prisoners. But it was her rst-year practicum in the University of St. Thomas’s Master’s in Social Work program that led her to the Shakopee Women’s Prison and inspired her passion to serve incarcerated women. She eventually founded the non-prot Minnesota Prison Doula Project.For several years, Erica volunteered in the women’s prison and noticed the issues faced by pregnant women. “They were horribly depressed, dealing with shock and trauma. They would become dissociative, returning to the prison after birth but without their babies.” She began to ask the women what they needed and she developed, with the input of the women themselves, parenting classes to help the women know what to expect when their children were born, and to provide them with skills for the difcult job of parenting from inside prison. But when Erica rst suggested in 2008 that doulas could come into the prison to support women while giving birth, prison ofcials weren’t sure they were ready for it. Then the recession hit and prison programs were eviscerated. At the same time, the prison population exploded. In 2010, the prison had an inmate who was dealing with a very complicated pregnancy, and prison ofcials called upon Erica for assistance. That baby was delivered safely, and Erica and her team have since attended every birth in the Shakopee Women’s Prison, providing support and encouragement to mothers as they have brought 99 babies into the world.More recently, the Minnesota Women’s Doula project has trained other doulas to help pregnant incarcerated women throughout Minnesota. Erica will soon be visiting the Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama, identied by the Department of Justice as the most dangerous women’s prison in the country, where sexual abuse and assaults of women by the correctional staff have been commonplace. In addition to changing the experiences of the women in one Minnesota prison, Erica and her staff are setting out to change the state, the country, and perhaps even the world—one woman at a time. If this is not changemaking for the common good—what is?

FOSTERING INTERRELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDINGPeace is more than the absence of war and violent conict; it is also the presence of just relationships and just systems. Community based courses that advance justice and peace address structural violence and systems of injustice. By comprehending systems of oppression, identifying structural problems, and searching for effective and ethical solutions, students participate in changemaking. Issues like human trafcking, immigration, child soldiering, mining conict minerals, and practicing fair trade extend beyond the boundaries of any one discipline, and across cities, regions, and nations. The broad frame of Advancing Justice and Peace also encourages inter-disciplinary analysis, systematic and strategic change, and attention to immediate needs and long-term social change.These courses will acknowledge and address the impact of power and privilege in community engagement in local neighborhoods and around the world. Our good intentions must be interrogated by critical reection on the ethics of intervention so that we “do no harm” in our pursuit of the common good. Questioning our worldview, as well as our blindspots and biases, will lead us to more ethical and effective accompaniment.Our work takes into account the long history and broad context of advancing justice and peace to help students see themselves as building on the work that has been done on these issues long before students arrive, and that will continue beyond the scope of a single course or sequence of courses. Yet the work is also tangible, making a difference in the particular moment. Advancing Justice and Peace will help students understand what Dr. Martin Luther King meant when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Our changemaking work is a part of that bending.

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | Justice and Peace Studies Department: Introduction to Justice and Peace Studies. Students in JPST 250 learn through assignments on human rights, history, media analysis, and action planning. The January-term section incorporates a community engagement project that meets the goals of the class and meets the needs of a partner organization, the Jane Addams School for Democracy (janeaddamsschool.org). In this informal school, new immigrants and college students come together in evening “cultural circles” as learners and teachers, working on language skills for one hour and sharing cultural traditions over a second hour. SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK: Social Policy for Social Change. This course equips students to understand and critically analyze current and past social policies. Policy alternatives are explored with a focus on the values and attitudes as well as the societal, economic, and political dynamics from which they originate. Roles and responsibilities of citizens and professionals in formulating and implementing policies responsive to actual social needs are addressed.STUDY ABROAD | HECUA: Democracy and Social Change in Northern Ireland. In 1969, society in Northern Ireland was torn by violent conict that erupted from issues relating to civic, social, and political differences. Today, Northern Ireland offers an example of the vast dimensions of transition from conict to democracy. Students in this study abroad program examine the historical, political, and religious roots of the conict in Northern Ireland, the prospects for peace, and the progress being made. Through readings, lectures, discussions, internships, group and independent study projects and eld experiences, this program invites interaction with people involved in social change. The program explores theoretical approaches to understanding conict and its transformation as well as the processes underway in Northern Ireland to create a sustainable democracy.

MARTHAMartha might be initially perceived as a quiet or reserved student, though she is quick to laugh and engage in critical conversations. Underlying this positive and thoughtful exterior is a determined activist who has dedicated herself to the cause of women, especially those who are marginalized by their immigration status. She has worked for inclusion and agency of women on the University of St. Thomas campus, for women in our community, and for women around the world through scholarship, service, and advocacy. She is a changemaker. Martha is critically reective on her role in the world and demonstrates a thoughtful maturity and capacity to internalize complexity about navigating the challenges of the world. She is graduating with a major in Justice and Peace Studies and with a minor in American Culture and Difference. She is a gifted student, participating in the Aquinas Scholars Honors Program, having studied internationally in the Dominican Republic. In St. Thomas’s Leadership for Social Justice course, Martha published a prole on Casa de Esperanza, which she described as “an organization whose goal is to provide culturally appropriate resources to Latina women experiencing domestic violence. Casa offers a safe space for a diverse community to feel comfortable and supported, where women can speak their own language and feel culturally at home” (M. McKinley, “Casa de Esperanza” in M. Klein, Murmurations: A Collaboration of Peacebuilders, Leadership for Social Justice, II [Createspace, 2016]). As Martha prepares to graduate, she has been accepted to several full-time volunteer organizations working on the US-Mexico border to address immigrant and refugee crises. She plans to spend the next year focusing on women’s issues in immigration, then decide how to channel her energy and determination into a next step that will undoubtedly extend the profound commitments of her college years. (Photo credit: by “Rare Photo”, rare-c.blogspot.com.)

According to the Minnesota Board on Aging, the population in Minnesota will shift dramatically in the next two decades. The “baby boomer” generation started turning 60 in 2006 (1945-2005), driving the state’s demographic shift. Between 2010 and 2030, the number of Minnesotans aged 65 and older will double, from 685,000 to 1.3 million. In addition, those aged 85 and older will also nearly double, growing to 163,000 by 2030, and doubling again by 2050. Finally, by 2020, the state demographer estimates that there will be more people over the age of 65 than children who attend school. Moreover, because of the state’s increasing levels of diversity, more older Minnesotans will be persons of color, and more will be living beneath the poverty line. The implications of this demographic shift are striking. The state’s aging population will require an increase in long-term care, and these senior citizens will require greater levels of support because this generation had fewer children to offer nancial assistance to their aging parents. More members of this generation will be on their own due to the death of a spouse or a divorce. Finally, long-term care requires low-wage workers, but with increasing competition for younger, low-wage jobs, the industry could experience a lack of employees to provide services to the elderly.The University of St. Thomas can be changemakers for the care of elders and people living with disabilities in our communities. Through course-based community engagement, students can support and engage the older population through direct service by providing “meals on wheels,” or by interviewing elders to record family histories. Students can advocate at the state legislature to ensure the rights of older adults and to prevent their abuse, neglect, and exploitation. Faculty can partner with organizations, agencies, and other entities in the community responding to the care of elders, and they can invite their students to contribute to this work by increasing the capacity of these agencies, by participating in their marketing campaigns, by designing new adaptive technologies, or by conducting data analysis, among other options.CARING FOR ELDERS AND PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

COURSESCOLLEGE OF ARTS | Department of Communication and Journalism and Family Studies: Family Communication. This course examines communication dynamics within family systems. Patterns of interaction, message exchange,developmental stages, satisfaction, and stability willbe explored in light of today’s ever-changing familystructure. Focus will include traditional (nuclear) and non-traditional family types.Students will conduct oral histories with elders at a local care facility, writing an oral history of the elder’s life and then giving it to that person and his/her family as a gift.SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK: Practicum with Older Adults and Their Families. This course provides an introduction to, and overview of, social work knowledge, skills, and values for working with older adults and their families. Content includes an examination of theories such as: “activity theory”, “substitution theory”, “continuity theory”, “labeling theory”, “transpersonal theories”, and the “transition model” as well as the “strengths perspective and empowerment principles” as they apply to an elderly population. Students are expected to examine their own and societal attitudes about aging, risk factors of aging, the nature and limitations of gerontological social work, forces shaping the delivery system, major bio-psychological and spiritual dimensions in practice, and differential models of intervention. STUDY ABROAD | LAC: History and Memory in Toledo, Spain. In this service-learning course language and history are taught side by side. Students study grammatical structures and their use as well as gain knowledge of the past through the study of Spanish history and the memory of the elderly. The overall objective of the service-learning portion of this course is to create a Memory Archive by recording interviews with elderly men and women living in senior residences in Toledo. The project will be completed completely in Spanish, thus improving the linguistic competency of the students while broadening their understanding of Spanish history and the role of oral sources in reconstructing the past.

Katie completed an undergraduate degree in Social Work before moving to Washington, D.C., where she continued her studies at the Catholic University of America, completing a master’s degree in Social Work with a concentration in Social Justice and Social Change.While she was at the University of St. Thomas, she gravitated to courses that emphasized social justice, and particularly those courses that focused on the role of art in resisting injustice. In 2011, she traveled to South Africa to study “AIDS, Apartheid, and the Arts of Resistance,” focusing on the theme of community as she witnessed it in South Africa, especially in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Upon her return to the United States, Katie continued as a social work intern at the Interprofessional Center where she provided case management services to a variety of clients including immigrants, the elderly, and other underserved populations. Before she graduated, she wrote a Summa Exam on the role of the arts and the humanities in overcoming oppression.In further internship and work experiences, Katie developed a passion for working with individuals experiencing chronic homelessness which, according to HUD, are those who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, substance use disorder, developmental disability, or other ongoing medical condition and have been homeless for at least one continuous year or have had four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. The chronically homeless are typically older adults without close relatives who can or will care for them. Today, Katie is a changemaker, working for the State of Minnesota in the Ofce of Governor Mark Dayton. She currently serves as the governor’s scheduler and works with the public, legislators and their staff, cabinet members, and governor’s ofce staff to assemble the schedule. Prior to this, Katie served as the Special Projects Coordinator in the Appointments Department and as a Citizen Outreach Liaison, working in both roles to connect constituents to the Governor’s ofce and direct them to the appropriate resources within state government.KATIE

By 2020, students who graduate with a degree from the University of St. Thomas will change the world for the better because they challenged themselves. As changemakers, they will engage the most pressing problems of our day because they learned through course-based community engagement and study abroad experiences multiple ways to address contemporary issues. They will continue to examine complex social structures that give benets to a few and disadvantage the rest, and will comprehend how inequities harm everyone within the system—knowledge they will share with the industries, corporations, and agencies that employ them. Finally, they will empower themselves and one another by thinking critically, acting wisely, and working skillfully to advance the common good. The University of St. Thomas is already producing changemakers. And it can produce many, many more impassioned, committed, and ethically responsible change leaders. This book outlines ten theme-based initiatives within the Classrooms Without Borders program that can be offered through the Center for the Common Good as one means for the University to live even more deeply into its tagline—all for the common good. This vision was written collaboratively by a group of engaged faculty and staff under the leadership of Kimberly Vrudny: Dominic Longo and Hans Gustafson on fostering interreligious understanding, Jon Stoltz on alleviating poverty and hunger, Adam Kay on establishing food security, Elise Amel and Maria Dahmus on securing environmental sustainability, Carol Bruess on ensuring equitable access to education, Jill Manske on improving public health, Mike Klein and Brad Pulles on advancing justice and peace, Rama Hart and Lucia Pawlowski on dismantling racism, Sue Myers on promoting women’s equality, and Kim Vrudny on caring for elders and people living with disabilities. Kelly Sardon-Garrity thought of the inspiring title. Sarah Spencer contributed suggestions for international programs in relation to each theme-based initiative. Sam Olukiran, a graduate intern in the Ofce of Community Engagement, assisted with meetings to keep the project on target. Camille George, the Associate Vice-Provost for Global and Local Engagement, championed the cause out front and behind the scenes.ENGAGE. EXAMINE. EMPOWER.