TLS Brochure 2009

TLS 2009 Trustee Leader Scholar Program

Community Service and Social Action

Bard College

The Trustee Leader Scholar Program of Bard College supports undergraduate and leadership development in the context of hands-on, student-initiated community service projects.

Founded in 1860, Bard offers a four-year bachelor of arts in the liberal arts and sciences through approximately 50 academic programs in four divisions. It also offers a five-year dual degree in economics and finance (B.A./B.S.) and a five-year dualdegree program through The Bard College Conservatory of Music (B.A./B.Music).

For more information about Bard College, visit www.bard.edu.

Front cover: Children’s Expressive Arts Project Inside front cover: Nicaragua Exchange

New Orleans Project

Theme for the Year Compassion

Last year’s theme, “Wrestling with Oppression: Coming to Terms with Our Motives and Beliefs,” compelled all of us in TLS to identify, with some precision, the consequences of oppression inside of ourselves. At our annual retreat we spent two days tugging out our own racism, classism, homophobia, ableism, and misogyny. Throughout the year we wrote and reflected on the ways that our intolerances affect our projects. It was an exhausting, yet fruitful, year of self-examination. This year we balance the inward wrestle with an outwardlooking focus. In a time of considerable political, economic, and cultural harshness, remembering civility and kindness seems crucial.

As themes for the year I considered grace and forgiveness. Though each of these has attractive elements, neither sufficiently honors fundamental TLS principles. Ultimately, “unmerited assistance” (Webster’s definition for grace) and “allowing room for error and weakness” (forgiveness) are too passive. In TLS we look for the engaging, the challenging, the compelling call to personal action.

Compassion, according to Webster’s definition, is the “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” At first glance this reads as simple acts of kindness, wholly benign and imminently achievable. Let me propose that acting with true compassion is a substantial undertaking with rewarding challenges at both ends of the equation.

For starters, resonating with another person’s distress is a huge matter. We can never truly experience another’s pain. The person next to us might have a nail through their hand, but we feel nothing. And there is, in fact, ample reason to ignore compassionate outreach. To paraphrase Ernest Becker in Escape From Evil, you are either hungry or about to be hungry.

Our animal nature, with its selfish desires, is always present; overcoming the gravitational pulls of self-interest is no small matter.

So why be compassionate at all? Because the individual experiences, at the primal level, the sense that his or her survival depends on collective well-being (Becker also makes this clear). Life on this planet is precarious, a balancing act of self-promotion and collective commitment. Practicing true compassion—stilling self-interest, paying deep attention to and ultimately acting on behalf of the other—is always a choice, a powerful choice.

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The quality of our lives depends, to a great degree, on our ability to engage others. Through the arts, through service, through reading, we cultivate empathy. But even when we surrender and turn toward another with the whole self, union is never wholly achievable. We can only approach (by physical law, vicariously) another’s distress. The attempt, however, is crucial. It draws us nearer. It inspires, it sparks, it infuses. It is a full-bodied pursuit. We open our eyes, our ears, and perhaps our hands to the other and we experience a tingle, a spasm, a rush of energy that sends us into motion on their behalf.

At our retreats and workshops this year we are developing active listening skills that promote precise and responsive outreach to other people. Students are paired with a TLS partner for the year. These pairs meet weekly to practice communication and mutual support that goes beyond surface check-ins. We have not forgotten to ask the hard questions, we are simply adding the deeply personal ability to quiet self-interest. In TLS we believe it is the balance of engagement with individuals in a context of historical and societal awareness that ultimately makes for effective, nuanced action.

There are rich psychosocial, personal, and organic reasons for making the compassionate choice. A full discussion of human motivation is far too complex for this introduction; after all, we spend school careers studying why each of us, with different histories and beliefs, mobilizes our energy to serve another. Let me posit that accessing that generous motivation is a practice that involves will, and in many respects, TLS is a will-creating machine.

Paul Marienthal, Director

“I am a caseworker helping parents whose children are headed for foster care placement. I knock on doors and make cold calls to struggling families I’ve never met. These crucial, barrier-breaking interactions are a skill I learned doing neighborhood needs assessments in post-Katrina New Orleans.”

—Ariana Jostad-Laswell, former leader of the New Orleans Project now working for a Catholic family services agency in Rochester, New York

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Trustee Leader Scholar Program

What is TLS?

The Trustee Leader Scholar Program is the formal community service and social action program for undergraduate students at Bard College. TLS supports the liberal arts mission of enlightened citizenship: personal development in the context of community building.

Who is in TLS?

Every Bard student is eligible to apply to TLS and TLS students come from every academic discipline on campus. Approximately 50 undergraduates participate in the program at any given time, and most TLS students remain actively involved in the program throughout their college career.

What do TLS students do?

TLS students design and implement service projects based on their own compelling interests. For example, they organize relief efforts in New Orleans; run General Education Diploma (GED) programs in local prisons; build biodiesel processors; mentor at-risk students in Hudson, New York; provide music lessons for economically challenged teenagers in Kingston, New York; and build houses in hurricane-ravaged Nicaragua. TLS students write extensive proposals, budgets, and personal accounts of their activities. They meet one-on-one with program administrators and attend workshops and retreats to explore and discuss issues in community service, public speaking, and facilitation. TLS students raise funds for their projects, and many become proficient grant writers and letter-writing campaign organizers.

What makes TLS special?

The TLS program supports students in taking substantial risks as they turn their own passionate interests into action. The fundamental criteria for a TLS project is that it challenge the student—organizationally, ethically, politically, and emotionally. TLS prepares leaders who can generate an idea, then create an organization and make a plan to manifest that idea. Many colleges provide ample community service and volunteer opportunities. Bard is one of the few that puts substantial resources and trust behind student initiative.

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What are some key values in TLS? TLS addresses the issues of paternalism and privilege that are stirred up by the notion of “helping others.” Students are encouraged to examine the world, read widely about oppression, identify their own motivations and needs, and experiment with ways of organizing that treat other people as partners, not passive recipients. We try hard to strike a balance between inward reflection, societal awareness, and compassionate outreach. TLS considers this life training.

What is the ultimate goal of TLS? TLS strives to put into the world capable, sensitive adults who have the ability to design,

plan, fund, and implement large-scale projects that matter and that influence environments positively and humanely. Many TLS students leave Bard capable of creating their own nonprofit organizations.

How does TLS differ from similar programs?

TLS is a leadership development program, not a service-learning program; TLS students

do not earn academic credit for their efforts. For their participation, TLS program members receive stipends and transcript recognition. Separating TLS work from academics allows participating students to design and implement ambitious projects that span multiple years. TLS recognizes that organizing a major service project while completing Bard’s rigorous academic requirements is a demanding load, and is not for everyone. It is worth noting, however, that many TLS students have said, “My project was the most important thing I did in college.”

How do you apply to the TLS program?

TLS applications are considered on a rolling, year-round basis. The best way to start the process is to talk with TLS staff members, who are always open to hearing the words, “I have a TLS project.” Students are encouraged to consider TLS from the moment they arrive on campus, and several first-year students are on the current roster.

How can you help if you are not a Bard student?

Making contacts, building networks, and creating webs of action are crucial to a project’s success. TLS projects flourish because of the enthusiasm of Bard students, faculty, and administrators, as well as community members outside of the academic environment who generously give their time, creative energy, and financial support.

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Current Projects

Join a TLS project Every project listed below needs volunteers. A TLS student initiated and facilitates each of these projects, but the success of the work always depends on widespread participation.

Please get involved.

Have your own idea for a project?

Meet with us to discuss how to make your project come to life—even if your idea is still in formation. We are always available.

Paul Marienthal, Director Susanna Armbruster, Assistant Director Room 213, Campus Center 845-758-7056 service@bard.edu Astor Home for Children Bard Volunteers

The Astor Home for Children in Rhinebeck, New York, is a residential facility for emotionally challenged children. Since 1997 hundreds of Bard student volunteers have become a part of the lives of these children by sharing their love of creative writing, arts and crafts, photography, sports, gardening, and theater and musical performances.

Student Leader: Katy Kelleher Activists’ Worldwide AIDS/HIV and Reproductive Education (AWARE) AWARE: Java assists the HIV-positive community of Surakarta, Indonesia, in its efforts to educate local youth about HIV/AIDS, intravenous drug use, and general reproductive health. The program works in conjunction with MITRA ALAM, a Javanese nongovernmental organization dedicated to community organizing in and around Solo City (Surakarta). MITRA ALAM also runs a needle exchange center that serves as a safe resource for intravenous drug users in the area. In the summer of 2008 two members of AWARE: Java traveled to Indonesia to help facilitate and document MITRA ALAM’s programs.

AWARE: Java also assisted program facilitators in teaching high school–aged students during peer education sessions. Topics included HIV/AIDS, other STIs (sexually transmitted infections), destigmatization, general reproductive health, and the perils of narcotics. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a team of high school–aged educators who can

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deliver important information to their peers. The curriculum includes Q&A sessions and lectures by local doctors, testimonies of HIV-positive persons, talks with local law enforcement, and games explaining scientific functions.

Student Leader: Carolyn Lazard

“Wearing a Barack the Vote pin on my jacket I find myself discussing the election and civil rights with perfect strangers on the bus each morning. The most inspiring conversations are with a former Freedom Rider named Carolyn. She tells me about traveling by bus across the South, registering other black voters, facing down bigots with sticks. On Election Day I tell Carolyn that I’m on my way to Obama headquarters to call voters in swing states. She smiles widely and thanks me. A Freedom Rider thanks me for making phone calls. Living in Baltimore it is hard not to consider privilege and racial alienation, but my peers in TLS offered insights that I think about on a daily basis. They helped me to reexamine my own privilege, to confront my own biases and questions.

TLS continues to help me find my niche in a city that sometimes feels like a foreign country.”

—Genya Shimkin, founder of AWARE currently doing AIDS work in Baltimore

Bard Biodiesel Cooperative

With the generous support of Bard’s Building and Grounds Department and local tradesmen, the Biodiesel Co-op has built a fully operational biodiesel processor. Members of the Co-op make fuel from restaurant waste grease for use in vehicles, home furnaces, and farm equipment. This locally-based effort pushes the limits of the petroleum paradigm and functions to critically engage us with the complex relationship between economics and environmentalism. Are we truly seeking a cleaner burning fuel or simply a cheap fuel? The processor also initiates newcomers into the world of modern technologies, demonstrating that people can make their own cleaner energy source and thereby contribute, in a small way, toward lessening environmental disaster. The Co-op is open to new members.

Student Leader: Emma Brinkman

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Bard College Community Garden

Since 1997 the Bard College Community Garden has been a haven for agricultural enthusiasts from Bard and beyond. During the growing season, people from the College and surrounding communities meet in the garden for weekly potluck suppers and work parties, helping to maintain the garden’s abundant fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The garden is a favorite year-round gathering spot for students: a place for conversation, campfires, and drumming. In 2008 we planted 400 additional feet of blueberries and built a domed entranceway. In 2009 we will build an outdoor bread oven. There is always work to do, and you are encouraged to participate in every aspect of the garden.

Contact: Paul Marienthal Bard Math Circle

The Bard Math Circle is a math outreach program for local middle school students. Its aim is to provide an entertaining and stimulating experience that encourages critical and creative thinking. For the Bard students that lead the sessions, the Math Circle is an opportunity to experience math outside the world of academia and to face the difficult question of why the math world is so insular. Through cooperative exploration and hands-on activities participants aspire to cross the barrier that so often exists between math teacher and math student.

The Bard Math Circle thus actively challenges the separation between math as a discipline and math as it exists in society at large.

Student Leader: Ezra Winston Bard Permaculture Initiative

The Bard Permaculture Initiative educates Bard students and the local community about permaculture—a regenerative agricultural system designed to meet human needs more efficiently—and implements permaculture projects. Members offer workshops on and around campus and initiate collaborative ventures from building to gardening. This initiative seeks to reimagine an approach to meeting human needs that regenerates the ecosystem and rebuilds our planet rather than destroying it. By unlinking from destructive and harmful practices, we can begin to see and create a more just and sustainable world.

Student Leader: Anya Raskin

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Bard Prison Initiative Volunteers (BPI) BPI is a collective of Bard College faculty, students, and staff that establishes connections between

educational institutions and correctional facilities in New York State. Volunteers organize and train facilitators for BPI’s inmate educational programs, including the A.A. degree–granting program, General Education Diploma (GED) programs, and poetry workshops. The BPI Volunteers project sponsors speakers, workshops, and conferences at Bard on topics relevant to prison life and the prison industry in New York.

Student Leader: Lilly Bechtel Bard–Sri Lanka Project

The Bard–Sri Lanka Project seeks to cultivate a network of exchange between Bard and Sri Lankan students. The Project provides opportunities for Bard students to do research and assist with social rights advocacy in Sri Lanka. It is also working to create financial scholarships for Sri Lankan students to gain higher education. On campus, panels, teach-ins, and lectures led by visiting scholars are events that aim to raise awareness about Sri Lanka’s civil war as well as issues concerning the island’s culture and society. In the spring of 2009, a Bard student will travel to Sri Lanka to help establish a sustainable expressive arts center, in conjunction with the Centre for Childcare and Women’s Development in Vavuniya. The expressive arts project has been funded by Davis Projects for Peace.

The Bard–Sri Lanka Project has worked with the following Sri Lankan organizations: the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement and Eco-V Environmental Volunteers. Visiting speakers at Bard have included peace activist and president of Sarvodaya Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne; poet and diplomat Indran Amirthanayagam; and filmmakers Lisa Kois and Helene Klodawsky. Opportunities are available for internships with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies and the Centre for Poverty Analysis. For more information please, visit our website: http://students.bard.edu/projects/srilanka.

Student Leader: Jennifer Lemanski

“I do not want to get caught up in the media spectacle of traveling to one of ‘the world’s most dangerous places.’ I simply want to bridge connections between young people in two very different parts of the world in the most common of ways: through art making, through study, through a shared meal.”

—Jennifer Lemanski, Bard–Sri Lanka Project

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Children’s Expressive Arts Project (CEAP) CEAP brings the practice of expressive arts to disadvantaged children. Expressive arts is a

discipline that focuses on both community art making and the process of finding a personal, creative, and empowering voice of expression through visual arts, movement, theater, music, poetry, and play. The arts and the process of art making have the capacity to help us respond to and shape the world through playful exploration. CEAP members may find themselves building forts or painting murals with children; they may also find themselves sitting with young people as they struggle with questions and emotional moments that arise. Expressive arts allows children to consider their challenges in safe, imaginative ways.

CEAP works locally at the Astor Home for Children in Rhinebeck, New York, a residential

home for emotionally at-risk children; the Children’s Annex in Kingston, New York, a school for children with autism; and Red Hook Residential Center in Upper Red Hook, New York, a low-security juvenile detention center for boys aged 11 to 18. Since June 2006, members of CEAP have also made biannual visits to the James M. Singleton Charter School in New Orleans (K–8), facilitating expressive arts workshops during and after school hours. In the summer of 2008, CEAP collaborated with Bard’s New Orleans Project and the men’s basketball team to host a summer camp for children in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans that focused on arts, sports, and literacy activities. Members of CEAP have also taken trips to work with children and young people in Burma (Myanmar), Ghana, South Africa, Thailand, Colombia, India, and Sri Lanka.

Delivering quality workshops requires training. CEAP students meet regularly with certified expressive arts practitioners. A number of CEAP students will pursue careers in this important field in the coming years.

Student Leaders: Anna Putnam, Rebeka Radna, and Emily Wolff Eco-Discoverers (Eco-D)

Eco-D is an environmental education program for 8- to 12-year-old children from Red Hook, Tivoli, and Hudson, New York. In partnership with Time & Space Limited in Hudson, Bard student volunteers and the children visit outdoor locations such as Tivoli Bays and the Hawthorne Valley Farm. Focusing on themes such as local agriculture, water, and botany, the program, held on alternate Saturdays, gives the children a basic understanding of local ecosystems.

Children are also offered time to play and explore the outdoors while they learn about the area in which they live.

Student Leaders: Sascha Woolfe and Camden Segal

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Germantown Tutoring Program

The Germantown tutoring program is an after-school homework help program that pairs Bard undergraduates with middle and high school students in the Germantown Central School. The tutors provide help in all subjects and work alongside the students to help them get a better understanding of academic material. There has been an alarming dropout rate at the middle school in this nearby community, and Bard students are helping to reverse that trend.

Student Leader: Alyssa DeConto The Grace Smith House

The Grace Smith House is a residential facility in Poughkeepsie that serves domestically abused women and children. Bard students volunteer at the house, counseling the women and providing emotional support. All volunteers receive substantial training from Grace Smith. During the holidays, students raise funds to provide each of the residents with the gift of a new bathrobe. Lasting and encouraging relationships are fostered between the women and volunteers as awareness is raised about domestic violence and its emotional toll.

Student Leader: Jenna Goldstein The Hudson Project

Students for Students seeks to foster a greater sense of community at Hudson High School by creating a space for students to bond over common beliefs, qualities, and goals, and to explore and embrace the differences among them as well. Bard College students help to provide resources and ideas, but all discussions and activities are led by Hudson students and serve to better understand identity issues.

Student Leaders: Julz Benedict and Kat Anderson Hudson Gay-Straight Discussion Group is a high school–aged group that provides a nonjudgmental conversational forum for young people exploring queer issues. Bard students act as mentors, advocates, and open ears for Hudson youth.

Student Leader: Molly Cox International Tuberculosis Relief Project

The International Tuberculosis Relief Project raises public awareness of the global fight against tuberculosis (TB). In the United States, TB is considered a disease of the past yet TB statistics internationally are shockingly high. One third of the world’s population is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis; 10 percent of those infected are active cases. Eight million people become ill with TB each year, including 1.5 million in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Tuberculosis claims 4,500 lives per day, two million lives per year. These deaths could be

avoided with education and the proper funding. The full course of a regular TB treatment can be completed for $15 a person per year in some parts of the world.

Students raise funds toward the cost of medication and equipment for TB patients who cannot afford these necessities. Project volunteers also establish personal relationships with TB patients in order to give a human touch to medical intervention. The program is currently providing medicine for a college student in China. In January 2009 three Bard students traveled to Vietnam to deliver educational workshops in a rural province and provide TB tests and medicines for high school students. The trip was partially funded by the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.

Student Leaders: Anh Pham and Tessa Dowling La Voz

La Voz is a Spanish-language magazine, distributed monthly throughout New York’s Dutchess, Ulster, and Orange Counties, which elevates the discourse and news coverage available to the Spanish-speaking population of the Hudson Valley. This project involves continual dialogue with the communities served by the magazine. La Voz is a critical source of information on immigration law, available health services, legal rights and resources, education opportunities, and local events relevant to the more than 12,000 Hispanic/Latino area residents. Bard students work directly with editor Mariel Fiori ’05 on all aspects of the magazine’s production, from graphic design to editing to reporting. Fiori began the magazine as a TLS project while an undergraduate at Bard; after graduation, she was hired by the College to publish La Voz on a permanent basis. In December 2008, the magazine received an Ippie Award for overall design from the Independent Press Association of New York.

Student Leaders: Mona Merling and Jonathan Raye

“Imagine being an immigrant in a culture very different from your own, where you do not speak the language, you cannot speak to your kid’s teacher, cannot get proper medical attention, cannot understand the laws. La Voz is not only trying to reach out to these people by providing information and entertainment, but it is also trying to make the voice of the immigrant heard.”

—Mona Merling, Rumanian student writing in English about the experience of writing in Spanish for La Voz

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The Media Analysis Project (MAP)

The Media Analysis Project brings critical media analysis to Bard by connecting current and potential campus media outlets with available resources and facilitating meaningful consideration of the impact these entities have on the community. MAP also helps supply outside media to Bard, from national news publications to obscure zines. The central focus of the project is to make available to Bard students a broad array of media formats for the gathering and dissemination of ideas, while encouraging careful examination of the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the medium itself and the ways a particular format or the content therein makes the media a more or less inviting place for all perspectives.

Student Leader: Lisa Dratch New Old Gym Project

The Old Gym is Bard’s only multipurpose, student-run arts space. While Bard fully supports the arts, it can be hard for students of the performing and visual arts (majors or nonmajors) to find space for experimenting and taking risks. The Old Gym, which has the technical capabilities of a small black-box theater, is open to all students who want to explore performance or alternative installation projects. The space is run by a committee of students from every artistic discipline—theater, dance, studio arts, photography, and music.

Student Leaders: Anna Henschel and Evan Spigelman through May 2009; Eva Steinmetz and Carley Matey beginning September 2009 New Orleans Project

The New Orleans Project engages Bard students as broadly as possible with the city of New Orleans as it stands today: battered yet vibrant, neglected yet determined. More than 400 Bard students have traveled to the city to repair storm-damaged homes, stabilize schools on the brink of collapse, teach expressive arts workshops in after-school programs, and carry out research and planning projects with communities eager to take rebuilding into their own hands. The project has adopted the Broadmoor neighborhood, a diverse community that has developed a strong grassroots revitalization organization. Bard students assist Broadmoor with census taking, needs assessments, and intake interviewing, among other highly skilled tasks. Project members also balance their hands-on engagement in New Orleans with work at Bard, creating resources such as panel discussions, New Orleans–based classes, film screenings, and lectures.

Student Leaders: Travis Rubury and Maureen Crittenden

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Nicaragua Exchange

Bard students began an exchange with the town of Chacraseca, Nicaragua, in 2002.

Chacraseca had been hit by several natural disasters, including flooding from Hurricane Mitch and the eruption of the Cerro Negro volcano. The pastoral committee of Chacraseca reached out for international aid, and Bard students responded by visiting the community and helping to build houses. Six groups of student volunteers have visited Chacraseca and have built 18 houses. The director of the pastoral committee has also visited Bard and was hosted throughout New England by members of the Nicaragua Exchange.

Bard student volunteers have also worked in collaboration with community leaders in Chacraseca to improve the distribution of potable water. They are also beginning to address shortages of medicine and to provide scholarships for students attending elementary school, high school, and the university.

Student Leaders: Jonathan Raye and Elysia Petras Project for the Awareness of Resource Consumption (PARC) PARC helps reduce consumption and waste at Bard College. It engages faculty, staff, and

students to rethink our lifestyles, habits, and values, and to think about the long-term health of our planet and the long-term survival of the human species. Participants explore ways the campus community can consume as little as possible, throw away as little as possible, and make sure that anything thrown away is recycled.

Student Leader: Spencer Lawrence

“From conversations with people whose homes in the projects have been demolished by the city government I experience the gravity of social analysis. Hauling rubble from a shuttered school building, a hundred of my peers argue political science through wheezing respirators. TLS gives me a direct and ongoing challenge: to see that theory and practice are never very far apart, and to understand that action is a form of critical thought.”

—Stephen Tremaine, founder of the New Orleans Project

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“There has been nothing in my life that gives me such happiness and pride as the experience of leaving ESL class knowing that tomorrow a student will be able to ask an important medical question.”

—Hannah Cole-Chu, Red Hook ESL Center

Red Hook English as a Second Language (ESL) Center

The Red Hook ESL Center brings English-speaking and immigrant community members together through free drop-in English classes. Organized and staffed by Bard students and local community volunteers, the center serves a diverse and emerging population in the Hudson Valley. Classes meet twice a week throughout the year. Students who work at the ESL center participate in ongoing training in ESL theory and practice.

Student Leaders: Hannah Cole-Chu and Ana Blagojevic R.I.S.E. (Respect, Integrity, Service, Education) R.I.S.E. is a safe and inclusive support group that focuses on issues of identity, diversity, and

the role of students of color at the College and in the wider community. R.I.S.E. fosters leadership, community, and intercollegiate networking.

Student Leader: Carlos Apostle Students for People’s Relief (SPR)

Students for People’s Relief raises awareness of poverty, which affects more than half of the world’s population. SPR feels that the solutions to poverty and the hardships it causes should come at the grassroots level, and that every single individual should be involved in doing something to fight the problem. SPR wants to spread the message that the very small act of donating a single dollar can buy, for example, mosquito netting that will save an African child from deadly malaria. We can do very small things that have huge global impact.

Student Leader: Ashfaque Kabir

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Surrealist Training Circus (STC)

The Surrealist Training Circus is a workforce for creative disruption of the public spaces in a private institution. Members believe that academic and rational training falls short in preparing students for the absurdities of today’s world; in response they pursue public theater, circus arts, and even the collection of refuse as modes of training for our futures.

Through the presentation of the chaotic, emotional, sometimes frightening, sarcastic, and bizarre, the Circus suggests that the irrational is to be honored. The Surrealist Training Circus welcomes the participation of any and all students, and sees spectators as ensemble members. The group’s year culminates each spring in a grand spectacle that, ironically, has become a school tradition.

Student Leaders: Glenna Broderick and Alison Wilder

“When I took on the Surrealist Training Circus, Paul looked me in the eye and said, ‘Rachel, you better find someone who knows how to BUILD!’ I responded with all the confidence I could muster, ‘I’m that person, Paul!’ I was mostly lying, because there’s a long list of skills needed to put on a circus: building giant structures, wiring sound stages, lighting safe fires, rigging trapezes, assembling stilts, choreographing dances, making giant puppets, lifting heavy things, driving pickup trucks. I can do some of these things now, but what I learned from TLS was how to ask for help, then share the joy of achievement.”

—Rachel Schragis, former Director of STC now teaching elementary school in Portland, Oregon

Time & Space Limited Tutoring Program

The Time & Space Limited (TSL) Tutoring Program partners Bard student volunteers with the staff at Time & Space Limited in Hudson, New York, to offer at-risk middle school students in the city a general education tutoring program that will help them succeed in their academic endeavors. TSL is an arts organization with the mission of carrying local and global messages to the public about art, activism, and community exchange. This program includes educational field trips, most recently to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Student Leaders: Adwoa Adusei and Carolyn Lazard

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Triform Community

Triform connects Bard students with developmentally disabled adults living in a residential community in Hudson, New York, and in an assisted-living home in Saugerties, New York. Student volunteers go to these communities to conduct workshops in various art forms (drawing, sculpture, writing, photography), play sports, and do other fun activities such as cookie decorating and crafts. Students also bring residents to the Bard campus and out into the community for more active events, including tours of the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard, dance performances, and afternoons at the bowling alley. Students work closely with the residents, developing lasting relationships.

Student Leader: Rachel Zwell The Upbeats: Bard Music Mentoring Program

The Upbeats is a program dedicated to bringing the joy of music making to children from local communities. Bard music mentors have a passion for music and, more importantly, a passion for sharing the gift of playing music with others. Lessons are provided to children for whom private instruction would otherwise cause their families financial strain. Children are given individual lessons as well as the opportunity to play in small ensembles and participate in theory/history workshops.

Student Leaders: Kylie Collins and Tina Doran Young Rhinebeck Youth Programs

Life, Learning, and Language: The Life, Learning, and Language Program at Rhinebeck’s Chancellor Livingston Elementary School is designed to meet the needs of children who are new to the United States and/or come from homes in which English is not the first language.

Through one-on-one interactions with children from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and France, mentors build relationships and provide language and homework support.

Student Leader: Thea Piltzecker Young Artists of Rhinebeck: In a series of weekly workshops, Rhinebeck middle school students explore environmental issues through drawing and sculpture in order to develop their awareness of natural beauty, pollution problems, and inventive recycling. Bard art students encourage participants to take a closer look at the environment in which they live, and then to create art from their discoveries. Students create observational drawings, collages, and sculptures with natural objects as well as things that would normally be thrown away or recycled. The workshop culminates in an art show in which the artists share their art with the community and raise funds and awareness for environmental issues.

Student Leaders: Lotte Allen and Allison Brainard

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Selected Project Archive

Academic Advancement Program Activists’ Worldwide AIDS/HIV and Reproductive Education (AWARE): Russia Bard Health Initiative (BHI) Bard High School Early College Play/Mentoring Program Bard Space Program Bhopal Memory Project Chiapas Solidarity Project Children’s Gardening Program Children’s Rights Are Human Rights, Amnesty International Conference Coalition for Peru Relief Conversations on Education Diamondz Hudson Young Women’s Group Flying Fiddlers Mentoring Program Free Press Ghana Project Great River Sweep Habitat for Humanity at Bard Human Rights Film Series Intercollegiate Energy Audit Iraq Watch Kosher-Halal Kitchen and Multipurpose Prayer Space Linden Avenue Middle School Drama Project Mexico Solidarity Network Delegation Migrant Labor Project “One Year Later” (academic conference on the anti–Iraq War outpouring in 2003) Palestine Awareness Project Red Hook Residential Reciprocal Education Project Register to Vote (in 2000 a Bard student successfully sued the state of New York for the right to vote in Dutchess County) Rhinebeck Connections Homework Help Program Senior Citizen Writing Project SSTOP (Students Stopping Trafficking of Persons) STD of the Week Campus Education Project Student Labor Dialogue Thailand Project Trans Action Initiative Understanding Arabs and Muslims Visible and Invisible Disabilities Awareness Project For the entire project archive, visit the TLS website: http://inside.bard.edu/tls.

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We Need Your Support!

Volunteer Volunteers are the backbone of TLS projects: whether you are a Bard student or a community member, we need your help. Join the Astor Home project in Rhinebeck, build homes in Nicaragua, teach outdoor education to middle schoolers from Red Hook, offer arts workshops in New Orleans . . .

Contribute Funds

Leadership includes fund-raising. Many TLS projects require thousands of dollars. The TLS office can only provide seed money, so many projects rely on the generous financial support of people who want to make a difference in the world. With your support, TLS students have built schools in Africa and houses in Nicaragua; run tutoring programs in Hudson, New York; taught violin to economically challenged children in Kingston, New York; and recorded the indigenous music of the Sudan. These are projects that link people of all ages and needs with valuable assistance. Your willingness to support our work is crucial.

Making a charitable contribution to Bard College, the Trustee Leader Scholar Program, or a specific TLS project is easy. Many of our projects also benefit from donations of goods and professional services, such as books and bikes for raffles, printing services, and wellmaintained cars.

Making a Gift by Check

Checks can be made payable to Bard College. Please note TLS and a project name on your check if you would like your donation to go toward a particular project. Checks and other correspondence should be sent to: Trustee Leader Scholar Program Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 Making a Gift by Credit Card

Bard College accepts VISA, MasterCard, and AMEX. To make a contribution over the telephone, please contact the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs at 845-758-7315 or 1-800-BARDCOL.

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TLS gratefully acknowledges the support of many individuals and foundations whose generos-

ity makes our work possible. For further information, please call Paul Marienthal, director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program and associate dean of student affairs, at 845-758-7056 or e-mail service@bard.edu.

Above: New Orleans Project and Children’s Expressive Arts Project Back cover: Bard College Community Garden

Published by the Bard College Publications Office.

All photography by TLS students except back cover, by Doug Baz.

Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 845-758-7056, service@bard.edu, http://inside.bard.edu/tls