Community-Engaged Learning

Emily worked for HealthiKids at Common Ground Health and the City of Rochester Department of Recreation and Youth Services (DRYS). Emily worked to capture child perceptions of play across different areas of the city of Rochester and created “pilot” activation program for DRYS based on data collected.

Sophia implemented a new community-engagement program to the University of Rochester’s EcoReps program. In partnership with Grow Green, an urban garden and outdoor classroom of the South West Area Neighborhood. Sophia worked to create a project catalogue that meets the interests and needs of both Grow Green and potential future EcoReps upon which to collaborate through the relationship she established. Some projects already completed by EcoReps under Sophia’s program include designing a new logo, launching an official website for Grow Green, writing educational notebooks about the insect/animal life at the garden for volunteers and children, creating lesson plans for a six-week summer youth program at the site, researching edible pond systems to implement on site, and drawing harvest maps to display on site for volunteers and visitors.

Kat worked with Child Protective Services to create a policy manual to encourage and create more capacity for organization. The manual clarifies policies for caseworkers, specifically regarding medical consents, special payments, college payments, daycare, extracurricular activities, and reimbursing foster parents. Katherine reviewed CPS’s policies one by one to determine what was outdated and revised the policies after meeting with the policy team.

Rochester Interfaith Hospitality Network (RAIHN) provides services to homeless Rochester residents, and Emerson’s Capstone project overlapped with his senior honors thesis in Religion, which focused on the way religion motivates people to work toward a better world. The thesis was based on ethnographic data collected from interviews and field notes compiled from conversations with volunteers and clergy involved in the RAIHN network, as well as interviews with the families using RAIHN’s services. Along with this research, Emerson produced a series of volunteer training videos to complement RAIHN’s in-person training for volunteers.