An idea from the Kalamazoo College Board of Trustees is ensuring that K’s students will continue to thrive in the K-Plan. The board has decided that three of its members, elected to three-year terms, will serve as recent-graduate trustees. The advantage is that trustees with better knowledge of how current students navigate their educations and experiences will help the board make more informed decisions in guiding the College.
Mark Ghafari ’14 serves as one of three recent-graduate trustees on the Kalamazoo College Board of Trustees.
As the board convenes this month, the recent-graduate trustees are:
Mark Ghafari ’14, a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch in Grand Rapids, Michigan;
Asia Liza Morales ’15, a strategic projects specialist at the Posse Foundation in New York City; and
Jerrod Howlett ’09, a manager of product solutions at Google in New York City.
Ghafari is beginning his first year on the board, Morales is in her second year and Howlett is in his third.
In his years as a student, Ghafari majored in economics, played men’s basketball, studied abroad in Strasbourg, France, with travels through Belgium and the Netherlands, and learned about internships while working in the Center for Career and Professional Development.
Asia Liza Morales ’15 serves as one of three recent-graduate trustees on the Kalamazoo College Board of Trustees.
“It’s an unbelievable honor to provide the board with the perspective of a recent graduate,” Ghafari said. “I applaud the College for having this role, and it’s a great opportunity to advance the mission of the College. It’s an exciting time with President Gonzalez and a new strategic plan. It’s exciting to be able to help.”
The board is comprised of 33 trustees including Gonzalez. Its members reflect major sectors of society and represent nationwide locales as well as the Kalamazoo community and College alumni. All are tasked with serving current and future students by assuring K’s continued place among the top private liberal arts colleges in the country.
Morales says to those current and future students, “There are so many experiences to be had at K that don’t happen at other colleges. This place fosters an experience unlike any other. It can be anything and everything you want it to be. Once I got in the workplace, I knew how far ahead I was because of Kalamazoo College.”
Jerrod Howlett ’09 serves as one of three recent-graduate trustees on the Kalamazoo College Board of Trustees.
Morales was a Posse scholar on campus, majored in biology, minored in anthropology and sociology, served as a president’s student ambassador, and spent a semester abroad in Cáceres, Spain.
Howlett as a student sought outside-the-classroom activities such as intercollegiate athletics including tennis; arts experiences such as Premium Orange, an a capella group; and a summer internship through Compuware, a software company. He also wanted the personal access to faculty that K provided.
“The relationships I built with my professors and the level of care they took to invest in me were the pinnacle experience of attending Kalamazoo College,” Howlett said. The faculty “always ensured they could take time out of their day so we could learn more. I know I could always go to them to ask questions.
“I have no idea if I’d be in the same place without K. I know it helped me get here.”
Kalamazoo College tied for 11th in 2018 among small colleges and universities sending alumni to Teach for America, which recruits outstanding leaders to become lifelong advocates for educational equality in the U.S.
Kalamazoo College ranks 11th among small schools sending its alumni to Teach for America as seven from the class of 2018 joined the education organization’s corps.
Teach for America’s recruits work for at least two years in a low-income school district classroom, where they nurture students and build their own leadership skills. The experience helps recent graduates gain the context and clarity they need to move on to graduate school or continue developing educational equality in any sector. Recruits receive salaries and some receive student loan forgiveness.
The recruits, in 51 communities nationwide, will team up with more than 56,000 alumni leaders, who work as professional educators, policy makers, lawyers, business owners, nonprofit administrators, medical professionals and more, to expand children’s opportunities. Of the organization’s 3,600 recruits from more than 700 colleges and universities, seven recruits are 2018 K grads.
This year’s recruits are among Teach for America’s most diverse since its founding in 1990 with more than half the recruits identifying as people of color, about 45 percent coming from low-income backgrounds, and about a third being the first in their families to graduate from college.
Teach for America Recruitment Manager Jess Hernandez says K’s place in the rankings figures considering the sense the College’s students have for community engagement and the students’ highly respected educational achievements.
“We only accept about 14 percent of the recruits who apply, so Kalamazoo College should be proud it’s contributing such excellent numbers,” said Hernandez, who has worked with K students for about two years. “We’re looking for students who are leaders, and we’re looking for strong academics. Kalamazoo College students check off those boxes,” noting program and K alumni such as Michigan Rep. Darrin Camilleri.
“We see it in their civic engagement,” she added. “We see it in their orientation leaders. We know that (Teach for America) offers Kalamazoo College students an opportunity to continue their service work after college and that’s really attractive.”
Kalamazoo College is receiving nearly $300,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice through a shared grant to proactively prevent domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking on campus.
K is the only Michigan institution and one of just a few small private schools among 60 colleges and universities nationwide to receive part of the $18 million being distributed. K’s portion, totaling $298,698, will:
create a Campus Coordinated Community Response Team;
expand training for campus safety officers and Title IX investigators;
expand victim services;
hire a full-time project coordinator who will focus on culturally relevant prevention efforts;
further enhance the College’s focus on student safety; and
support a K partnership with the Kalamazoo YWCA and the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety. The partnership will bring a victim advocate to campus for 20 hours a week and formalize response to incidents that involve students in the city.
“This grant is very competitive, so we’re excited to have this additional funding and support,” said Ellen Lassiter Collier, K’s Title IX coordinator and director of gender equity. She added documented endorsements of existing efforts from students, faculty and staff likely were determining factors for the Department of Justice in securing the shared grant.
“This kind of grant traditionally goes to public schools,” Lassiter Collier said. “That speaks to the work the College is already doing and the support we receive from across campus.”
K’s existing efforts include programs such as Green Dot, which offers bystander training that statistically reduces the likelihood of dating and domestic violence, stalking and sexual assault. Green Dot at K is funded through the State of Michigan Campus Sexual Assault Grant Program, which gave the College about $18,600 in 2016 and $41,800 in 2017.
The Department of Justice grant, though, will enhance such efforts and others, including the creation of targeted online training programs for students, to ensure the programs and training materials are culturally competent considering K’s diversity, and relevant to its student experiences such as study abroad.
With study abroad, for example, “We want students to know that the College is still a source of support and potential investigation should something happen abroad,” Lassiter Collier said.
For more information on the grant from the Department of Justice, visit its website.
Kalamazoo College is included in the newly published 2019 edition of “The Best 384 Colleges,” the annual college guide of the Princeton Review.
Kalamazoo College is included in the newly published 2019 edition of “The Best 384 Colleges,” the annual college guide of the Princeton Review.
The guide says K “brings a personalized approach to education through a flexible, open curriculum featuring real-world experience, service learning, study abroad, and an independent senior year project.” Among praise from students quoted in the guide’s Kalamazoo College entry: K “allows students to really develop personal relationships with their peers and professors” and is “a campus run by and for the students.”
Students also tell the Princeton Review that K:
“Will try as hard as possible to get you to graduate in four years.”
Enables students, through its open curriculum, to “have more time to explore exactly what they want to learn, rather than being required to take classes in which they have no interest.”
Has “a huge culture” among alumni “of giving back to the school and being there for each other” and for current students.
Has professors who “view students as equals and peers, and are open to listening to everyone’s ideas in classes.”
Provides “good food and fun activities” for students and a wide array of clubs and athletics that are open to everyone.
Attracts students “who show creativity, ambition and motivation.” “You will never find any two students who are the same here,” one student says.
“Our students in the Princeton Review say it in their own words: Kalamazoo College provides a distinctive liberal arts education that is among the best available anywhere,” said Eric Staab, Kalamazoo College dean of admission and financial aid. “It’s a real testament to the enduring value of the K-Plan and the K experience.”
The Princeton Review says the college rankings are based on surveys of 138,000 students at 384 top colleges that includes a wide representation by region, size, selectivity and character.
Kalamazoo College is among 20 colleges and universities nationwide to be named a Best Buy School in the just-published 2019 edition of the highly respected Fiske Guide to Colleges.
Kalamazoo College is among 20 colleges and universities nationwide to be named a Best Buy School in the just-published 2019 edition of the highly respected Fiske Guide to Colleges.
Fiske says it based the ratings on “outstanding educational value as determined by academic quality in relation to the net cost of attendance.” The guide says of Kalamazoo College: “Ninety-eight percent of students at this globally oriented liberal arts school receive financial aid and 70 percent study abroad for the same price that they pay for regular tuition.”
Eric Staab, K’s dean of admission and financial aid, says Fiske’s recognition comes as no surprise.
“At Kalamazoo College, the flexibility of the K-Plan, our integrated approach to an excellent education in the liberal arts and science, allows us to seek out students with a broad array of interests, achievements and experiences,” Staab says. “We work hard to ensure that cost is not a barrier for students who can contribute their distinctive ideas and talents to, and benefit from, our richly diverse campus and programs.”
Chartered in 1833, Kalamazoo College is among the nation’s 100 oldest colleges and universities. It ranks in the top 2 percent among the nation’s four-year liberal arts colleges for the percentage of graduates who go on to earn doctorate degrees.
K is the only college in the Great Lakes region named to the Best Buy Schools list, which is comprised of 10 public and 10 private universities and colleges.
Established by former New York Times education editor Edward B. Fiske, the Fiske Guide to Colleges has been among the foremost sources of information about higher education quality and affordability for more than 30 years. USA Today has deemed it “the best college guide you can buy.”
For more information about Kalamazoo College, visit www.kzoo.edu.
Kalamazoo College has been awarded a $1 million, five-year grant to participate in a nationwide quest to find ways to better serve students from demographic groups that are underrepresented in science and mathematics. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced that K will be one of 33 colleges chosen for the Inclusive Excellence initiative. Efforts under the initiative will focus on closing what biology professor Jim Langeland ’86, who will lead the program, calls the “persistence gap.”
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has announced that Kalamazoo College will be one of 33 colleges chosen for the Inclusive Excellence initiative.
K is attracting talented students from a variety of backgrounds who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education, including students of color, first-generation college students and students from low-income families. Those students enroll in roughly proportionate numbers in introductory science and math courses. In the long run, however, they are more likely than students from more privileged circumstances not to continue in those fields, said Langeland, Upjohn Professor of Life Sciences.
“We would like our senior major classes in the science field to look like our incoming classes in terms of demographics,” he said.
Associate Provost Laura Lowe Furge, Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry, said K will use the HHMI grant to take a three-fold approach:
Developing culturally competent faculty and staff who are better able to connect with the varied backgrounds and value systems of students.
Revising introductory science and math curriculum to integrate career guidance, emphasize shared concepts among disciplines and enhance academic support centers.
Revising hiring, tenure and promotion policies to reward cultural competency and inclusive practices.
Langeland said the first approach of the initiative will be addressed by expanding the College’s existing training in recognizing systemic and often unconscious racism and bias.
“We’ve been diversifying our student body and the idea is that there are institutional barriers to access and we’re trying to eliminate those,” he said.
The second part of the initiative will seek to provide students taking entry-level science and math courses with clearer entry points to those disciplines and guidance to potential careers, he said.
“One of the things we have identified is that we think there are a lot of aspects of our curriculum that are hidden—things that we assume students know and can navigate without being explicit about them,” he said.
Some students come to K steeped in that knowledge, gained from family members or teachers at high-achieving schools, Langeland said; others need a “roadmap” to follow because the route is unfamiliar.
Bringing accomplished alumni into classrooms is another way to help students understand the possibilities for careers in science and math, he said.
In the third approach, the Kalamazoo College Provost’s Office will work with faculty on ways to reward professors for developing skills that help ensure diversity and student success, Langeland said.
Kalamazoo College President Jorge G. Gonzalez said the HHMI grant recognizes K’s existing commitment to inclusiveness and will build momentum for efforts to achieve that goal.
“Talent comes in many forms, and our mission is to recognize and nurture it in the most effective ways,” he said. “We are proud to have the most diverse student body ever at Kalamazoo College, and we firmly believe that with the help of our dedicated faculty and staff, we can ensure that our liberal arts curriculum and our historic strength in sciences and mathematics will provide access to those professions for all students.”
Stryker’s contribution establishes a 10-year scholarship program at the College for talented students in need of financial support.
Kalamazoo College is proud to announce today the establishment of the Jon L. Stryker Future Leaders Scholarship Program. Through a generous $20 million contribution from Jon Stryker, the scholarship program has been created to assist students in need of financial support and to further Kalamazoo College’s commitment to diversity within its student body. The program, beginning in academic year 2018-2019, will provide $2 million in scholarships annually over the next 10 years.
Jon Stryker ’82 believes education for all people is a highly effective way to break the cycles of marginalization and inequality that continue to plague this country. His generous $20 million gift will provide scholarships to future leaders seeking a Kalamazoo College education.
The Jon L. Stryker Future Leaders scholarships will primarily support students of color, first generation college students and students from lower income families.
“We are incredibly grateful to Jon Stryker for this remarkable gift that opens the doors of our unique institution to students who otherwise would not have this opportunity. The future of our society depends on our ability to develop leaders from diverse backgrounds. It is an honor that Jon has placed this tremendous trust in his alma mater,” said Kalamazoo College President Jorge G. Gonzalez.
Stryker’s contribution supports and affirms the goals of the College’s new strategic plan, “Advancing Kalamazoo College: A Strategic Vision for 2023.”
Additionally, the gift is being made in anticipation of Kalamazoo College’s next fundraising campaign and is intended to encourage other alumni, families and friends of the College to contribute $20 million toward endowed scholarships.
“I am thrilled to be able to make this contribution to my alma mater with the goal of advancing diversity and inclusion in higher education,” Stryker said. “Supporting a pathway to higher education for all people is a highly effective way to break the cycles of marginalization and inequality that continue to plague this country. There is much more work to be done and my hope is to inspire more members of the Kalamazoo College community to make additional contributions to support diverse students at K.”
The scholarships made possible by Stryker’s contribution and others like it will have an immediate and long-term impact for current and future members of the College’s student body.
Jon Stryker, a native of Kalamazoo, Mich., is an architect and philanthropist. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Kalamazoo College in 1982 and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2000, he established the Arcus Foundation to support the advancement of LGBT civil rights globally and the conservation of the world’s great apes.
He has been an influential contributor to Kalamazoo College over the years. He serves on the College’s Board of Trustees, and has made more than $10 million in funding grants to support the College’s highly ranked study abroad program and enrollment diversity efforts. In 2008, he established a $5.6 million grant to fund the tuition and financial support of 50 Posse Scholars, a program of the Posse Foundation to pair high-performing public high school students from underrepresented groups in higher education with full, four-year academic scholarships.
Additionally, his Arcus Foundation awarded the College more than $25 million in grants to create and sustain The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. The center became fully operational on campus in academic year 2010-2011 and supports the College’s goal to develop emerging leaders and sustaining existing leaders in the field of human rights and social justice. Stryker also funded the award-winning building that houses the center. This building, designed by Studio Gang in Chicago, was dedicated in September 2014.
Through these and other donations, Stryker has given a total of $66 million to Kalamazoo College. For Stryker’s devotion to K, he was awarded the College’s Distinguished Service Award in 2010.
Kalamazoo College is a nationally recognized residential liberal arts college located in Kalamazoo, Mich. The creator of the K-Plan, Kalamazoo College provides an individualized education that integrates rigorous academics with life-changing experiential learning opportunities.
Examining a patch of Oriental bittersweet, an invasive plant, Mathew Holmes-Hackerd ’20 makes use of Kalamazoo College’s Lillian Anderson Arboretum as part of a research project. A $250,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations will help the College spread environmental education and sustainability throughout its curriculum and make wider use of the Arboretum via the Center for Environmental Stewardship.
The center’s goals are to:
Increase sustainability and environmental stewardship across the curriculum.
Enable more students to incorporate sustainability and environmental education into their work.
Build on existing assets to expand the College’s capacity for responsible resource management and sustainable development.
Increase the effectiveness of College’s Lillian Anderson Arboretum as a learning lab for the campus and community.
The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations are a major supporter of private colleges and universities like K, based on their conviction that “an educated society strengthens democracy through principled, thoughtful and compassionate leadership.” The Center for Environmental Stewardship is consistent with Kalamazoo College’s strategic vision of integrating academic rigor with life-changing experiential education in a values-driven community.
Biology Department Chair Binney Girdler says the grant will allow the hiring of a dedicated director for the Center for Environmental Stewardship, a key element of launching a program with the breadth and depth envisioned.
Girdler, whose duties include serving as faculty director of the arboretum, says environmental studies are nothing new at K — the subject has been an interdisciplinary minor for about 30 years, and both biology and chemistry classes make heavy use of the arboretum for those and other courses. She also says the College has a record of sustainability initiatives dating back at least to the launching of a recycling effort in the 1990s.
“So we’ve had these bubbles of passion around the campus, but no one person to get their arms around the whole thing and to really center it, and enrich it, and expand it,” Girdler says.
The director, whose position will be half-time, “will be able to really do some connecting the dots and cultivating collaborations among” faculty in their classes, the College’s facilities staff, student organizations, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership and the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement, she says.
“It will be more than the sum of the parts,” she adds.
Working with the director, she says, will be a student Environmental Leadership Corps, with paid positions dedicated to sustainability initiatives both on campus and involving the wider Kalamazoo community. She says those students will engage Kalamazoo-area residents “from pre-K to gray” through activities such as leading interpretive hikes at the arboretum, a 140-acre expanse of woods, meadows and marshes six miles from the College in Oshtemo Township.
“We’ll be cultivating a corps of students who themselves have gained from their connections with the natural world and their understanding of sustainability, and having them lead others to the understanding that we’re all in this together,” Girdler says.
Ultimately she expects efforts to acquaint students with environmental education and sustainability issues, and the related use of the arboretum, to spread far beyond science courses like the ones she teaches. She cites a music class that held a session at the arboretum, where it coaxed sound and rhythms from sticks, stones and other natural materials, and a philosophy class that used the forest to explore environmental themes.
“Our poets should go out, our musicians should go out, to experience the complexity of nature,” she says. “You have to see all those interactions, you have to feel it, you have to smell it. There’s no substitute for being outdoors.”
Grants will be available to faculty members across the College to help them design instructional modules that make use of the arboretum.
Mathew Holmes-Hackerd ’20, a biology major, shares Girdler’s enthusiasm for the arboretum’s possibilities. He will be conducting a survey there this fall of the invasive species colonizing the former farmland, a 1982 gift to the College by the late Lillian Anderson ’26.
“We’re really fortunate to have this,” he says as he searches along the Arboretum’s Meadow Run Trail for patches of Oriental bittersweet, an invasive vine that can overwhelm and damage native trees. “It’s going to be really amazing.”
SAGA Foundation, a nonprofit organization committed to cultivating leadership, has awarded a $1.1 million grant to Kalamazoo College to support the College’s mission to develop enlightened leaders.
The grant, honoring foundation creator Bill Laughlin, will have a far-reaching impact on Kalamazoo College’s campus and in the greater Kalamazoo area by:
Bill Laughlin had a deep connection with Kalamazoo College that began in 1951 through Saga Corporation, a food and restaurant company he co-founded. He lived on campus with his dogs in Welles Hall for a short time.
Providing SAGA Foundation scholarships for the College’s juniors and seniors
Supporting a Bill Laughlin Endowed Internship program, giving stipends to K students working with nonprofit organizations
Establishing a Bill Laughlin Leadership Award presented annually to two students who best demonstrate leadership, an entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to community
Initiating Laughlin Links, an outreach program introducing golf, and teaching valuable life skills, to youth in the Kalamazoo community
“This grant will offer amazing opportunities for Kalamazoo College students to develop their leadership skills on campus and beyond,” Kalamazoo College President Jorge G. Gonzalez said. “It supports K’s approach to the liberal arts by emphasizing experiential education within our local community as well as nationally. We are excited and honored by SAGA Foundation’s trust and confidence.”
The deep connection between Laughlin and K began in 1951 through Saga Corporation, a food and restaurant company he co-founded that supplied the College with food service. Laughlin headed the food service program and became a popular figure at K, briefly living with his dogs in the basement of Welles Hall. He occasionally taught economics and coached the golf team, which won five MIAA conference championships under his guidance in the late 1950s and early 60s.
As Laughlin’s business grew, he served on the boards of more than 45 nonprofit, political and business organizations, including the College’s Board of Trustees from 1963-1980. SAGA Foundation was established to continue his charitable efforts and promote his values. SAGA Foundation President David Bartoshuk said Laughlin was a visionary who believed global problems require bold actions through collaboration, teamwork and open communication.
“Entrusted with continuing Bill’s legacy, SAGA Foundation is honored to partner with the College and provide a multifaceted grant that supports underserved youth and promotes entrepreneurship and leadership,” Bartoshuk said. “We are especially inspired by the creative ways the supported programs incentivize students to bring their passion to the community and make a lasting impact on the world.”
Kalamazoo College, founded in 1833, is a nationally recognized residential liberal arts college located in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The creator of the K-Plan, Kalamazoo College provides an individualized education that integrates rigorous academics with life-changing experiential learning opportunities.
Hoop house sounds like a nickname for a basketball arena.
In the field of agriculture, however, it’s a term for a kind of light yet sturdy, metal-framed greenhouse with a clear polyvinyl cover that can be erected anywhere it’s needed. A hoop house provides a year-round environment for growing vegetables, flowers and other cold-sensitive plants.
Kalamazoo College’s Just Food Collective collaborated on a proposal for a “hoop house” greenhouse that, with contributions from alumni and friends of the College, will greatly expand the year-round gardening space at the College. Gathering in the College greenhouse the group currently uses are some of the Just Food Collective members involved in the proposal (from left): Maya Gurfinkel ’20, Aiden Voss ’20, Natalie Thompson ’19, Elliott Boinais ’21 and Lee Carter ’18.
It will be several times the size of the College’s existing greenhouse behind Hoben Hall. And unlike that structure, where potted plants are grown on tables, the crops in the hoop house will be planted in ground-level boxes, making them easier to tend, sustain and harvest.
Ultimately, say student organizers such as Lee Carter ’18, a CCE Civic Engagement Scholar, the food produced in the hoop house could become part of the supply chain for the College’s Dining Services and perhaps for other food programs in the Kalamazoo community. It’s part of a wider goal of the Just Food Collective to increase the use of locally sourced food, easing nutritional inequities, bringing more transparency to the food supply system and reducing the College’s carbon footprint.
The idea has been around for over a decade. CCE Director Alison Geist says it got its start with a group called Farms to K, a program that grew from the service-learningfirst-year seminars Cultivating Community, first taught in 2008 by English professor Amelia Katanski ’92, and Roots in the Earth, led by College Writing Center Director Amy Newday, that focus on food justice and sustainable agriculture. Katanski and Newday serve as advisors to the group and Larry Bell ’80, founder of Bell’s Brewery, has provided support.
An artist’s depiction of the College’s new 1,800-square-foot hoop house, which will be erected in a corner of the intramurals field north of the Fitness and Wellness Center.
The CCE, students and faculty revived and expanded the mission of Farms to K in spring 2016 as the Just Food Collective, whose mission includes policy work on food insecurity. The students involved included Carter, who says he grew up in a “back to the land, homesteader” household in rural New Hampshire that always had a vegetable garden. With Newday, an owner of Shelbyville, Michigan’s, Harvest of Joy Farm, as mentor, they drew up a simple proposal for a hoop house, and Anika Sproull ’17, wrote a senior individualized project (SIP) advocating that K invest in sustainable agriculture.
Over the next two years, more than a dozen students devised a detailed, illustrated proposal and prepared a presentation that, Geist says, “just bowled over” President’s Staff. The proposal lays out the plan and explains how it would provide learning opportunities for existing classes and connect to campus programs such as a composting initiative. It also details the involvement of paid and volunteer student workers, tells how it would fulfill existing College policies concerning environmental justice and sustainability, looks at what other colleges and universities are doing and even includes the results of an informal survey demonstrating K student support for the idea.
Alumni and other supporters of the College, impressed by the plan, contributed the $26,200 needed to fund it.
“I was personally blown away by how quickly [the College] raised the money,” says Just Food Collective Civic Engagement Scholar Natalie Thompson ’19, who participated in the presentation.
Geist says she believes the donors were enthusiastic because they saw it as “a really K kind of thing,” where students used the freedom inherent in the K-Plan to take the lead and work outside of traditional structures. It’s the sort of student-led initiative, with one foot in the classroom and the other in contemporary social issues, that will spread throughout K’s curriculum under the new strategic plan. The plan calls for the College to “become the definitive leader in integrating academic rigor with life-changing experiential education in a values-driven community.”
“This is a really good example” of what the plan envisions, Geist says. “We’re not educating leaders of tomorrow, we’re educating leaders of today.”
As a 2018-19 Civic Engagement Scholar, Just Food Collective member Elliott Boinais ’21 will be in charge of the project, advised by Newday.
Geist cites it as a “fellowship in learning” — a principle that has illuminated the College’s approach to education for almost a century and which defines the CCE’s mission.
“It provides a prototype for what this kind of collaborative learning community can look like and achieve in the future,” she says.
“I hope it’s going to outlast our time here,” says Just Food Civic Engagement Scholar Aiden Voss ’20.
The graduating Carter regrets he won’t be around for the completion of the hoop house, which the philosophy major says he has dreamed about since he was a sophomore in a nearby Living-Learning Housing Unit, gazing at the intramural field as he drank his morning coffee while sitting on a sofa he dragged onto the porch.
Still, his K-Plan has revolved around food, with a SIP on food and philosophy and his experience helping lead a sustainable agriculture initiative. And his next step demonstrates the value of the education he received when, he says, he chose K over culinary school: This fall, he will begin work as a line chef at Canlis, the James Beard Award-winning restaurant widely acclaimed as Seattle’s finest.
