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Dear Members of the Sarah Lawrence Community,
Last week I was delighted to join with students, faculty, staff, community partners, and local officials for “A Celebration of Community”, an event honoring the work of all those involved in the $1.2 million grant for civic engagement awarded to the College by the Mellon Foundation in 2019.
The excitement was palpable as we celebrated the work with our partners. In my remarks, I reflected on the origins of this grant, which took place at a gathering around the breakfast table at the President’s House in May of 2019. Having been invited by the Mellon Foundation to submit a grant proposal, I reached out to a group of existing and potential community partners with an invitation that read in part:
“I am writing because Sarah Lawrence has received an invitation from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to apply for a grant under the working title of “Higher Education and the Public Good: Reimagining the Role of a Liberal Arts College in its Surrounding Community.” Specifically, we are focused on the role that Sarah Lawrence might play as a convenor and connector of civic institutions in the communities—Yonkers and Bronxville—at whose borders the College sits (quite literally—as you may know, the College is in Yonkers, but has a Bronxville address).
“With this proposal, the College would hope to build on, but also to significantly move beyond, the present (quite deep, but traditional) ‘community partnership’ work we do to create and foster a network of civic organizations that might include libraries, museums, schools, and places of worship. We especially see this as an opportunity to strengthen and amplify (and even transform) a group of college-community programs that focus on addressing educational and social inequalities through the arts, to which Sarah Lawrence might bring a special focus and resources on film and visual storytelling.”
Looking back on that early invitation and that initial gathering, and reflecting on the work presented at last week’s event, it is so heartening to be able to share the ways in which Sarah Lawrence and our partners have more than met the promise of this generous grant and the way in which the College has developed its role as a critical anchor institution in our surrounding communities. And launching this grant as we opened the Barbara Walters Campus Center has helped us realize its potential as a crossroads of interaction within and beyond our campus. The program has not only flourished, but seeded important opportunities that we are eager to build on and deepen.
Our long history of engagement in community partnership work and our model of experiential learning provided a strong foundation for the signature feature of this grant: an intentional blurring of boundaries between the classroom and the community, providing opportunities for faculty to teach and students to learn in new and different ways in collaboration with our partners, including ArtsWestchester, Yonkers Public Library, Wartburg, Yonkers Arts, and the Hudson River Museum. The most original, and also the defining, feature of the grant allowed us to pilot a new type of faculty role in which grant-funded faculty fellows in the public humanities at Sarah Lawrence are shared and fully embedded in partner organizations, becoming active contributors to the cultural and educational initiatives of both the College and their hosting institution and, in so doing, breaking down the boundaries and barriers between an academic institution and its surrounding communities.
As we embarked on this work, we were guided by a challenging—and purely hypothetical!—question posed to us by the Mellon Foundation: If Sarah Lawrence College went away tomorrow, what would your neighbors say? My answer – and that of our partners – to that question today looks very different than it did at that breakfast meeting five years ago. A commitment to reciprocity and the co-creation of knowledge sits at the core of this work and the deepened relationships that resulted. To cite just one wonderful case in point, while we have long collaborated with the Yonkers Public Library on various individual initiatives, as home to two successive Mellon Fellows the Library now actively feels and celebrates its partnership with the College with co-created initiatives such as a local history lecture series. And that partnership, rooted in the Mellon Grant, has opened the door to collaborations with other areas of the College, most recently with our Child Development Institute helping to design The Cove, an indoor play space for children at the Library. Two students who served as summer interns are now part-time paid interns in the academic year. And one of our recent graduates, inspired by her work as a student, has gone on to graduate work in library sciences and is newly employed by YPL.
One other example I’ll offer is a particularly touching vignette, growing out of our partnership with Wartburg, a nonprofit retirement community in Mount Vernon. It provides a poignant demonstration of the multi-generational aspect of these partnerships, as well as a vivid reminder that we launched this new work in the midst of COVID. Working alongside senior residents at Wartburg in a series of courses and activities around memory, our students, many of whom had missed their high school proms because of COVID, decided to host a senior-senior prom with the residents of Wartburg. One of the students, Kaia Goudreau ’24, made a short documentary about the event as part of her conference work for the course embedded at Warburg – watching it will give you a tangible sense of the multivalent value of this work.
As I said at the celebration, I can wax lyrical about the “win-win” nature of this work: modeling a new kind community-embedded faculty member; situating our students in our surrounding community and expanding their horizons in preparation for their lives beyond the College; deepening our relationship with our neighbors; positioning Sarah Lawrence as an anchor institution…. I invite you to read more about the work of our fellows and our partner institutions in this article. We have been extraordinarily fortunate in the talented early-career cohort of fellows this program has brought to Sarah Lawrence (pictured below): Kishauna Soljour, Public Humanities Fellow from 2020-22 and last week’s keynote speaker; Yeong Ran Kim, Digital Humanities Fellow, Yonkers Arts; Emily Bloom, Public Humanities Fellow, Wartburg; Karintha Lowe, Public Humanities Fellow, Hudson River Museum; and Benjamin Zender, Public Humanities Fellow, Yonkers Public Library.
Many, many members of the SLC community play a key role in supporting this work, especially the faculty members who have served with our partner institutions on searches and designed new courses with curricular development funds from the grant, and the various staff who have navigated the complexities of managing this grant. I want to give a special shout-out to our former and current Associate Deans, Melissa Frazier and Lyde Sizer, for their extraordinary leadership in bringing this work to reality, and to our former and current directors of community partnerships, Mara Gross and Nelson Rodriguez.
The vibrant partnerships forged through the Mellon Grant for Civic Engagement have simultaneously helped Sarah Lawrence make an indelible mark in its community, as the community makes its mark on us, and created a model of engagement and teaching that transcends traditional roles and boundaries. This is the newest thread in the larger tapestry of our longstanding commitment to community engagement and the many programs through which our students, faculty, and staff engage deeply with those around us. This expansion of our ongoing collaboration is not only mutually beneficial for the College and our partners, but also lights the way toward a more inclusive, equitable, and engaged society. Now that’s worth celebrating!
Yours,
Cristle Collins Judd
President
president@sarahlawrence.edu
Instagram: @slcprez
Recent Announcements
More Mellon News
Gabriela Salazar’s solo exhibition Observed is on display in the Gallery at Heimbold through February 25. Observed is one of three exhibitions focused on Care and Climate Justice, a series made possible by another grant from the Mellon Foundation. Through that grant, faculty and students from SLC and Bronx Community College are collaborating to rethink the humanities through the lens of climate and environmental justice. Up next: “But It’s Ours”: The Redline between Poverty and Wealth, an exhibit by Shanequa Benitez curated by Nina Serrano ’25. Kudos to Sarah Hamill (Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History) and Izzy Lockhart (Literature) for curating this series.
The Writing Institute
There’s a lot going on at The Writing Institute! Registration is open for a full slate of spring courses, which you can see on their newly redesigned website. Plus, they are a finalist in Westchester magazine’s annual “Best of Westchester” honors! If you’re a fan of The Writing Institute and are so inclined, you can cast your vote for them here.
Go Gryphons!
Things are getting exciting on the basketball court! Both the men’s and women’s teams are having terrific seasons, and are competing for playoff berths in their respective Skyline tournaments. Currently, the men’s team sits at the top of their division. Senior Day is coming up for both teams this weekend, so join me in saying #GoGryphons and wishing them well!
(Less Than) 100 Days 'til Commencement
On January 31, the College hosted a new event for this year's graduates—the 100 Days 'til Commencement Fair! The event kicked off our soon-to-be graduates' final semester at SLC and featured food and fun as well as a one-stop-shop experience for students to gather more information on all the activities that come along with Commencement and planning resources for life after SLC. And, it featured a sneak preview of something new for Commencement this year—green caps and gowns for our undergraduates! The event was a big success, and kudos go out to our Student Involvement & Leadership, Career Services, Student Philanthropy, Grad Studies, and Library teams for organizing it!
Visit the Commencement website for all the latest details on the big day!
Snow Much Fun
We had a pre-Valentine’s Day snowstorm and it’s safe to say our students LOVED it! With classes canceled, they showed off their creativity with various snow creatures around campus and cleverly improvised sleds. Check out my Instagram for photos and videos of the fun.