Dartmouth Social Impact Review Issue 1

Maya Wiley ‘86 on Reimagining America

Senator Angus King Jr. ‘66 on Public Service

David Brooks on the State of Higher Education

A Decade of Changemaking: A Note from DCSI's Director

It is with pride and gratitude that we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact and this commemorative volume of the Dartmouth Social Impact Review. At this important milestone, we joyfully celebrate the remarkably dedicated community of faculty, staff, alumni, students, and partners who advance our mission to educate Dartmouth students to be transformative leaders for the common good.

Since its founding in 2015, emerging from the legacy of the William Jewett Tucker Foundation, DCSI has become a bold catalyst for creating sustainable, thriving, and just communities. Through DCSI, Dartmouth students learn alongside faculty and community leaders, broaden their horizons through alumni mentorship, and develop the skills needed to create effective and lasting change. Dartmouth has always sought to make a meaningful impact on the world, and DCSI has honored and advanced that community-wide goal by:

• Creating the Social Impact Practicum, a classroom-based program where liberal arts education meets real-world challenges within our local community.

• Launching leadership development initiatives which ground students in systems thinking and foundational skills in changemaking.

• Elevating awareness and opportunities for impact careers through robust alumni and global community networks and mentoring.

• Focusing local efforts to support public education and youth, engaging aspiring educators, and strengthening community ties.

Our success has been fueled by many partners who generously share a wide array of tools needed to make change through perseverance, innovation, creativity, and empathy. From business to the environment, inside and outside the classroom, and in our own backyards and across the globe, the Dartmouth community brings a wealth of talent to our most pressing social challenges.

Our work is far from over. The complex and acute challenges facing our communities—local and global—call upon us to sustain our efforts and intensify our commitment. Looking forward to the next 10 years, DCSI will deepen the connections between scholarship and real-world applications through community-engaged learning and research, foster vibrant networks on and off campus to support student pursuits of impact careers, and build enduring communities of practice among students, faculty, alumni and the community. In all these ways and more, we will ensure that future generations of Dartmouth graduates are fully prepared and motivated to work toward the common good.

This, our tenth birthday, is both a moment to reflect on a decade of progress and a chance to rededicate ourselves— our energy, passion, and skills—to the essential work of building strong, equitable communities. After you turn these pages, I hope you will help us open our next chapter as we continue to educate Dartmouth leaders dedicated to building a more just, livable, and compassionate world.

Tracy Dustin-Eichler, Director, Dartmouth Center for Social Impact

The DCSI Journey from 1951 to Today

Illustrated by Angela Shang

Impact as an Institutional Priority

Since 2015, the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact has become a launchpad for thousands of students committed to building more just and livable communities.

Over this past decade, they’ve paired rigorous learning with real-world practice by embedding community-centered projects into the curriculum, enabling impactful internships, and building connections between students and our incredible alumni network.

Through DCSI, students learn not only what they, with their unique talents and perspectives, might contribute to the common good but how to do so in a way that centers community, honors difference and drives lasting change.

The work is interdisciplinary, experiential, and, like other key institutional efforts, grounded in the local community our campus calls home.

I am immensely proud of DCSI’s contributions to Dartmouth and society more broadly. As dean of the newly instituted School of Arts and Sciences, I congratulate them on 10 years of meaningful progress and look forward to the next decade of innovation and impact.

- Nina Pavcnik, Interim Dean, School of Arts & Sciences

Impact Across Campus

Collaborative Climate Action

Humans of the Upper Valley

Humans of the Upper Valley, inspired by the popular photo blog “Humans of New York,” is an initiative led by Associate Professor of Sociology Emily Walton and managed by a team of dedicated Dartmouth students. It aims to tell the stories of the wonderful and diverse community that surrounds campus – known as the “Upper Valley” – and build connections between students and local residents.

Emily Walton is an associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Her research applies a racial lens to health and community sociology. Her forthcoming book, "Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England," is set for publication in November 2025.

The Irving Institute’s Energy Justice Clinic brings together students and faculty to support Upper Valley communities facing energy insecurity, highlighting the difficult choices residents make between essentials like food and energy. Through partnerships with local groups such as LISTEN Community Services and the Lebanon Energy Advisory Committee, student leaders and faculty conduct surveys and interviews to capture the real experiences of those burdened by energy costs. Their collaborative research not only uncovers critical challenges but also amplifies community voices, driving practical solutions that enhance health, resilience and well-being for the common good.

From left: Ella Briman '25, Jon Chaffee (Lebanon NH Energy Advisory Committee), Angela Zhang '12, Piper Edwards '25, Dr. Sarah Kelly, Arshi Mahajan '27, and Woody Rothe (Lebanon NH Energy Advisory Committee).

Editor's Note

Welcome to this first (and perhaps only) edition of the Dartmouth Social Impact Review.

I say “only” because this publication is, at present, the manifestation of an ad hoc opportunity, coinciding with the 10th anniversary celebration of the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact (DCSI), and being printed in honor of it.

Tellingly, I write to you not in the formal role of magazine editor but as the assistant director of the DCSI, where I mostly oversee programs, not publications.

I make this prelude less to excuse any editorial shortcomings (though I do ask for forgiveness on that front) but to confess that our ambitions for this magazine started out a bit more modestly than where they ended.

Our initial hope was to curate a space that could exhibit the stories of social action and impact springing from our Center and the Dartmouth community.

Though we found no shortage of inspiring cases for the genuine, positive social change being driven by our community, we also found ourselves bumping up against a larger and more complicated conversation, of which these stories would inevitably come to be just one part.

This conversation, unfolding not just in op-eds or atop the ivory tower, but at kitchen tables and town halls, centers around a deep, society-wide critique of higher education itself.

From political and economic leaders of all stripes, to the communities that surround these institutions, and to the students attending these institutions themselves, we seem to be asking, as Americans, if higher education (especially of the elite, ivy-clad variety) is actually a driver of social good in our country, and the world more broadly.

While our answer is ultimately “yes," we certainly should not ignore the sweeping, multifaceted, and legitimate criticisms directed at institutions such as ours.

So, besides showcasing the community-centered values and public service DCSI has embodied over the past decade, we felt called to take up the challenge of speaking to these criticisms in our publication.

To that end, we begin this issue in conversation with renowned columnist David Brooks, whose critiques of higher education and elitism—most notably 'How the Ivy League Broke America' in The Atlantic, Dec. 2024— help frame our discussion.

From this interrogation of the system as it currently stands, each subsequent section will move through an answer of sorts to the question “Are We Educating for the Common Good?” by speaking to how the Dartmouth community is seeking to do so.

We begin by showcasing what educating for the common good has looked like for us, the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact.

Then, we turn outward to hear from Dartmouth alumni who have leveraged their education for the common good in various ways, especially within the education sector itself.

Finally, we invite readers to explore ideas and perspectives from the Dartmouth community that address some of the greatest challenges of our time—insights rooted in the collective knowledge and experience a good education should impart.

We forward these “answers” not seeking exoneration from criticism, but as prompts for what we educators might be getting right, and where we are still falling short.

In moving through this narrative, we hope to inspire a genuine, productive dialogue around the purpose and practice of higher education, ideally leading to a more definitive, shared understanding of what “educating for the common good” can and should look like.

Henry Do Rosario, Assistant Director, Dartmouth Center for Social Impact

Henry Do Rosario, Editor-in-Chief

Warren

Valdmanis, Contributing Editor

Charlotte Albright, Managing Editor

Cass North, Creative Director

Sabrina Chu, Editorial Assistant

Emma Hwang, Cover Illustrator

Yawen Xue and Angela Shang, Illustrators

Higher Education: From Meritocracy to Meaning

David Brooks in conversation with Warren Valdmanis '95

Read David Brooks' piece "How the Ivy League Broke America" in The Atlantic here. This conversation has been edited for length.

Warren Valdmanis: Your recent Atlantic essay, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” struck a nerve across higher education. What motivated the writing of this essay?

David Brooks: One of the odd things that's happened in American politics is that it used to be that you could tell how somebody voted by their income. Rich people voted Republican and poor people voted for Democrats. And that's no longer true. You can't predict anything by income. But you can predict phenomenally well by education levels. College educated people vote for Democrats and high school educated people are much more likely to vote for Republicans. And that's not the only difference. College educated people live about 10 years longer. College educated people obviously make a lot more money. College educated people are much more likely to marry. College educated people are much less likely to have drug addictions, to commit suicide, to be obese.

So we have created a caste society, an inherited caste society, where families pass along their educational advantages down to their children. And this chasm, in my view, not only explains a lot of the polarization of our society, but it explains the rise of populism. Essentially 80 % of Americans or Europeans—because this is a Western phenomenon—are saying the top 20 % have too much cultural power, have too much financial power, too much political power, and we're going to flip the table. I just wanted to know, how did this come about?

Warren Valdmanis: The essay describes the unintended consequences of meritocracy, so I did a little research. Michael Young, a sociologist and politician, wrote in an essay called “The Rise of the Meritocracy” that, by the year 2033, the meritocrats will have all the power and the common people will have none. Should we have listened to Michael?

David Brooks: Yes, he understood where we were headed beautifully. I went back and read that novel before writing that Atlantic piece, and it's pretty accurate.

Warren Valdmanis: And so now this is an unintended

consequence, presumably, of meritocracy: a system that creates arrogance at the top and resentment at the bottom. You describe a system that has built-in hypocrisy where institutions and students preach equality but practice exclusivity.

David Brooks: Yes, if you go back to the 1920s, we had a different social ideal. We had a different view of what makes a talented person. That was not being smart. It was being well bred. And if your dad went to Harvard, your odds of getting into Harvard were 90 %. It really was the East Coast aristocracy, whether in the New England area or in Philadelphia or other places. And that's where they sent their kids for finishing school. And people actually thought at the time this was the way to run an elite, because these people were bred to know how to do public service. It was not totally stupid. When I look back at Franklin Roosevelt or Teddy Roosevelt or George H.W. Bush—they were not bad leaders. They were bred in a certain way. “We are the elite. We don't really deserve to be the elite. It's just the way it is in our bloodlines.” And so you have responsibility to the common good. But between the 1930s and 1950s, James Conant, who was president of Harvard, said we can't run a 20th century American society governed by the dimwitted blue blood heirs of the old Mayflower families. We need a better aristocracy. Conant was very much worried about oligarchy. He thought these families have too much power, they control all sorts of wealth, and so we need to democratize. So we changed the definition of what ability is. It was no longer the well-bred person. It was the intelligent person. Conant thought he was democratizing the admissions process, but in fact, he was really prioritizing the kids who came from families who could invest massively in them and turn them into the sorts of kids who could get into an Ivy League school.

Warren Valdmanis: Your article is called “How the Ivy League Broke America.” Can the Ivy League help fix America?

David Brooks: Well, first of all, that was not my favorite title, because I taught at Yale off and on for 20 years. I love going to Ivy League schools. I have friends there. I think the Ivy League can reform itself not only by changing admissions criteria, but by inculcating in its students a greater sense of social responsibility.

Warren Valdmanis: Speaking as someone who graduated from one of these schools with a boatload of debt, it seemed to me at the time, not only was there a prestige element, but there was also a reality. I was scared I wasn’t going to land on my feet. But one of the things that we try to do at the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact is to show folks that just because you may start your career in banking or consulting doesn't mean you can't bring purpose to your job. It doesn't mean you have to stay in that line of work exactly. So I started down that road but ended up in impact investing actually. There are many more paths now to find purpose, regardless of where you start out.

David Brooks: I don't really begrudge finance and consulting firms. They teach people how to think. And once they take that ability to another field, they can do tremendous good. The one thing I do resent about some of these firms is they prey on the insecurities of undergrads. So I met a young man at Williams several months ago who had a summer internship at Bain his sophomore year, and they offered him a job the summer of sophomore year and so he didn't have to go through the last couple years of college wondering what am I going to do? I think that's just exploiting the insecurities of the youth. He had no clue at that age. He's 19.

"I think the Ivy League can reform itself not only by changing admissions criteria, but by inculcating in its students a greater sense of social responsibility."

Warren Valdmanis: Do you think elite college admissions should be screening for more than just academic ability, IQ, SAT? Are there other things that they could be screening for? If so, how could they go about doing that?

David Brooks: All these Ivy League schools get so many applicants, they can pick from a lot of kids who are smart, and who are astoundingly talented. But the first screen, before they even look at your essay, is SAT scores and grades. And that's basically a proxy for IQ. But IQ is not the same as good judgment. IQ is not the same as what they call metacognition, the ability to look at your own ability, your own thinking process and then detect errors. IQ is not the same as social skills. IQ is not the same as being a good human being. IQ is not the same as kindness. Those soft skills, which are harder and more expensive to quantify, are to me the most important thing.

Warren Valdmanis: So if you could change one thing about the college admissions process today, what would it be?

David Brooks: I’d change the high schools so they're more involved in project-based learning, where you work in teams to produce projects together. That's what more workplaces are actually like. And I think we should make college admissions criteria much less IQ-based, much less rigorous. If you admit anybody from the top 20%, they're going to be fine at almost any school.

Warren Valdmanis: The way you described some of those projects is much like some of the projects that we do at the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact, where a lot of the community engagement work and the pedagogical work is fundamentally done by teams— often students, faculty, and folks at local organizations in the Upper Valley, working on real problems together.

Another thing you talk about is moral formation, moral ecologies. Philosophers throughout history, from Plato, through St. Augustine, through Nietzsche and Jung— they've talked about the body, mind, and soul, nourishing all three. Do you think colleges have abdicated their responsibility to work on the soul?

David Brooks: Absolutely. When the founders created this country, they realized human beings are wonderfully made but also broken. And so they decided that what was most important was moral formation. Moral formation is a fancy and pretentious phrase, but my best definition comes from the gospel of Ted Lasso, when he’s asked, “What's your goal for your football team FC Richmond?” He says, “My goal is not to win a championship. It's to help these young fellows become the best versions of themselves on and off the field.” That's what moral formation is. It's helping people restrain their selfishness. It's helping people treat each other with consideration in the complex circumstances of life, and it's helping people find a moral purpose in their lives, meaning in their life. That used to be job number one, not only for colleges, but for every single educational institution from K through whatever. But for some one reason or another, we have gone several generations without passing these skills down.

Warren Valdmanis: When I was at business school at an elite university, there was a lot of talk about leadership, but it was never clear to what end. I mean, there are lots of effective leaders who have morally ambiguous or even negative legacies.

David Brooks: We define leadership often as being all about optimization and effectiveness. And believe me, I love effectiveness. I rent a car; I want Avis to be effective. But there's a difference between the utilitarian lens and the moral lens. And when you walk into a room, you can either put on one lens or the other.

Warren Valdmanis: The president of Dartmouth, Sian Beilock, has said the goal of Dartmouth is to teach students how to think, not what to think. Understanding that’s just one goal she outlined, do you think that's enough?

David Brooks: No, because life is more than about thinking. The distinction we make between the brain and the body, reason and the emotions—these are bogus distinctions. A lot of the mistakes we make are because of what I call cognitivism: overemphasis on cognition and underemphasis on affect, which is our emotion, and conation, which is our motivation. If we're just training people to think and not what to want, then we're leaving students unguided about where they should direct their lives and unguided in where they should bring their motivation and energy to life.

Warren Valdmanis: At the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact, we've got a mission to educate transformative leaders for the common good. And we seek to fulfill that

mission through a combination of initiatives like imbuing community engagement into the pedagogy through partnerships with faculty. We also send students on an immersive trip to the border—all kinds of ways of exposing them to relevant issues and getting them more oriented towards purpose. What other suggestions do you have for us?

David Brooks: I would say in the schools where I do teach, so many students come from the most affluent 20% that they really are strangers to working class kids from Bismarck, North Dakota, for example. To create cross-class experience strikes me as completely necessary. The second thing that comes to mind is it's very easy to use public service as a patch over moral formation. It's very possible to spend your life working for the Salvation Army or UNICEF or whatever noble organization and still be a rotten human being. Moral formation is not only what do you do, but how do you care? How do you empathize? Moral formation is really a process of transforming the inner self. The inner capacity to be loving is different from serving food to the homeless, as noble as that is.

"Moral formation is not only what do you do, but how do you care? How do you empathize? Moral formation is really a process of transforming the inner self."

Warren Valdmanis: At DCSI, we are doing the equivalent of serving food to the homeless while also encouraging the reflection that would lead to moral formation. It is interesting that our center grew out of the Tucker Foundation, which was religiously-focused, but we are not. And I think many students today see colleges as a secular place. So how do you actually encourage moral formation with that backdrop?

David Brooks: The first thing is to take the great books of moral philosophy seriously. My faculty at Chicago burned with enthusiasm. They thought if you read Hobbes, Aquinas, Augustine, Plato, Aristotle's Ethics, with care and intensity, you will know how to live. And that totally rubbed off on all of us. Second, you hold up exemplars. We tell students today—and this is the worst thing we tell students—come up with your own values. Come up with your own truth. If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can come up with your own value system. Most of us can't do it. But if you take those four years in college or in grad school and say, you are the lucky inheritor of a whole bunch of moral traditions—stoicism, Epicureanism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, rationalism—try them out. See which one fits you. Then you'll have a world view, and you'll have criteria to judge

right from wrong. Another thing that faculty can do is embody a certain way of being. Small gestures of consideration, of respect, of tolerance, of difference—you pick up on those small gestures.

Warren Valdmanis: I want to talk a little bit about the students and what they can do. You’ve said that Ivy League student cultures are built around keeping your options open and a fear of missing out, and that we live in a society filled with decommitment devices. What can students do to counter that?

David Brooks: The first thing they can do is understand that over the next 20 years of their life, they're probably going to make four big commitments. They're going to make a commitment to a vocation. They're going to make a commitment—probably—to some sort of family structure. They're going to make a commitment to a community where they want to live. And they're going to make a commitment to a philosophy or faith, what they're going to believe. And so making those four big commitments is really going to determine largely how your life goes.

Warren Valdmanis: Let's bring this down to the individual level. You spent a career interviewing and observing purposeful people. What distinguishes those who can sustain that over time?

David Brooks: Let me go back to the people I found who are the most purposeful. I started an organization in 2017 called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. It was based on the idea that a lot of our problems are caused by social distrust. People don't trust each other. This problem is being solved at the local level by people we call Weavers, who are active in the neighborhoods where they live. And some of them have big formal organizations. There's one called Thread, an organization where they surround the underperforming kids in the Baltimore school system with networks of volunteers who basically serve as extended family. But some of the people who are Weavers have no formal organization. Whether they're organized, part of an organized nonprofit, or just active in their community, they're driven by moral motivations.

One of the things I've learned about these Weavers is, you would think if you're working as a corporate lawyer working 90 hours a week, you were really prone to burning out. And of course, maybe you are. But if you are working to save your community, you're working 100 hours a week. And that's where the burnout really is most dangerous. It was a surprise to me that the people doing the most altruistic work have the strongest ambition, and actually, they need to do more self-care than the rest of us because they put pressure on themselves.

Warren Valdmanis: Do you think that AI and other technological advances have changed the way people interact and develop a moral orientation?

David Brooks: I use AI every day. I'm not down on AI, but it will not sit with the widow. When somebody is depressed, AI may offer the simulation of a relationship. I don't think it's going to do some of these jobs. I think it's pretty great at cognition. But I don't think AI is going to have motivation. I don't think it's going to have imagination. I don't think it's going to have empathy. And so I still think there will be some skills, which may not be cognitive skills, but other skills that we will rely on even more. There are just basic human interactions—falling in love, having a dream, having an ideal—that AI is not going to be able to do, and those will become super important for humans. That'll be our decisive advantage.

Warren Valdmanis: You've been candid about your own journey from careerism to what you've called “second mountain living.” How does that experience shape your view of universities?

David Brooks: Well, first of all, they should be lifelong. In the last couple of years, I've been teaching a course for people over 65 who are trying to figure out the rest of their lives. They're retiring. They probably have 20 or 30 vital years. Another thing universities can do is to narrow the chasm between town and gown. We need to make it so that people in the community don't only feel invested in the sports teams of the university but the everyday life at the university. And that's proving to be a challenge. You can send kids out to the neighborhood. How do you get the neighborhood to come onto campus?

Because there are a lot of people in all these towns who look at Columbia University, Harvard University, and think, that's a very forbidding place. I am not going there. We've created these chasms. And that's maybe just inherent because town-gown conflicts have been going on since the Middle Ages. But somehow that needs to be addressed if we're going to get out of this era of populism, where people just not only hate the universities, they come to hate knowledge.

"It's helping people treat each other with consideration in the complex circumstances of life, and it's helping people find a moral purpose in their lives, meaning in their life."

Warren Valdmanis: David, we've talked about how the Ivy League broke America. We’ve talked about political divide and many other issues. Yet through all of this you describe yourself as an optimist. What fuels your optimism in these challenging times?

David Brooks: History. I read a lot of history. And I ask people, if you're depressed now, what decade do you want to go back to? Like the 1930s? Was the Depression so rosy?

But when I ask people who made you the person you are today, no one ever says, “I had this fantastic vacation in Hawaii.” They always point to some hard time, and they got through it. And I think we grow, as people and as a society, through a process of rupture and repair. Right now, we're in a period of rupture. It’s brutal to live through this period, especially if you're a scientist at NIH, or if you're a researcher at Harvard, or any of these schools. All the personal assassination, all the nastiness. But human beings are tremendous at innovation. And culture shifts when a problem arises, and the whole of society pivots. I think we're in the middle of this kind of pivot. We went through 60 years of a very individualistic culture and we're now trying to find our way to community. You could define the current moment as this big brawl over what kind of community we want to have. You might like MAGA or not like MAGA, but it is a form of community. You may like the social justice movement or not. It's a form of community. And so, we're having a fight over what kind of community we want to return to. We've got to return to some more communal thing, where we think about our social impact.

Warren Valdmanis: David Brooks, thank you so much.

David Brooks is a longtime New York Times columnist and a commentator on PBS NewsHour, where he provides political and cultural analysis. He is the bestselling author of The Road to Character, The Second Mountain, and How to Know a Person. Through his journalism and books, he explores morality, community, and the pursuit of a meaningful life.

Listen to the full conversation here or look up "All the Difference" wherever you get your podcasts

A Roadmap for Educating Transformative Leaders

Since its inception in 2015, the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact has served as a powerful catalyst for creating sustainable, thriving, and just communities the world over. Our primary means of doing so has been a suite of rich, immersive, and diverse experiential learning programs that place students at the forefront of local and global changemaking.

Though the constellations vary, the guiding star of these programs is that they seek to educate students to be transformative leaders for the common good. After a decade of progress, we’ve honed in on a few key elements of our practice that have been most essential for driving the growth and learning that helps develop students into these transformative leaders—connecting the curriculum to real societal needs, grounding students in authentic partnership with the communities they seek to empower, and embedding them on the frontlines of change.

We begin this section with a thoughtful piece from Associate Professor of Religion Devin Singh. In it, he speaks to what may be driving today’s students towards moral action in a more secular age from the heyday of the religiously centered Tucker Foundation (from which DCSI branched out). The stories that follow map how different DCSI programs have shaped students and their trajectories, enabling them to tackle global issues through local action with support from forward-thinking faculty.

Illustrated by Yawen Xue '26

Moral Leadership and Social Ethics in a Secular Age

By Devin Singh

Earlier this year, I enjoyed an engaging lunch at the Hanover Inn's Pine Restaurant with two students, one a committed believer and the other an avowed atheist. They had invited me to mediate their spirited yet friendly debate: “Do you need religion to live a moral life?” It’s one of those enduring questions of our modern age. What drives people to do good in a world where traditional religious imperatives, once deemed central to ethical responsibility, no longer hold sway?

The Dartmouth Center for Social Impact supports students who are passionate about making a difference, but the motivations behind that passion are far from uniform. Some arrive with deep commitments grounded in faith. Others bring a strong ethical vision shaped outside any religious framework. Still others stand somewhere in between, influenced by inherited traditions but uncertain about their personal beliefs.

While some students with strong religious convictions explore service through the religious communities and chaplaincy initiatives supported by the Tucker Center, many others pursue their social action work through DCSI. But the relationship between these centers is complementary, not oppositional. Religious students often design projects through DCSI, and secular students sometimes find themselves drawn into Tucker-supported initiatives. This overlap reflects the deeper reality: there is no simple mapping of religious and secular motivations onto institutional structures, let alone onto the nature of the service projects with which students engage.

That complexity mirrors the pluralism of our broader society. The question it prompts among many has implications beyond Dartmouth: if religious commitment is no longer the dominant framework for social service and moral leadership, what takes its place? Now, I’m not sure I agree with the underlying assumption that there was ever a unified religious framework in the past or that it clearly drove social action. Still, the notion is common enough that it’s worth taking seriously.

One response can be found in the language of care. Ethics of care, a moral framework developed over recent decades, argues that morality arises from our relationships—our mutual dependencies, our vulnerabilities, our obligations to others. Rather than begin with abstract rules or universal duties, this approach starts with attention to concrete people in particular situations. It emphasizes empathy, responsiveness, and the moral significance of encounter and relational bonds. Many Dartmouth students

speak in this register, whether they use philosophical terms or not. They describe being moved to act by someone’s story. They express a desire “to be there” for communities they’ve come to know, the groups they’ve joined and senses of fidelity they’ve kindled. Their motivations reflect a moral imagination shaped less by rules and more by connection.

Another framework is virtue ethics. Originating in ancient philosophy but resonant today, virtue ethics focuses on character and the cultivation of moral habits. It asks not simply "What should I do?" but "What kind of person am I becoming?" For students at Dartmouth, this process of moral development often happens implicitly, whether through the communities they inhabit, the mentors they encounter, or the intellectual traditions in which they engage. Even those who do not identify with any religious tradition are nonetheless shaped by moral narratives: the stories they hear, the values their families uphold, the peer cultures they inhabit.

Here, the liberal arts—the humanities, in particular—play a vital role. In studying literature, history, philosophy, religion, and the arts, students cultivate capacities essential for moral leadership: empathy, critical reflection, ethical imagination, and the ability to hold multiple perspectives in tension. These disciplines do more than transmit knowledge; they form people. They invite students to consider not only what is true, but what is just, meaningful, and worth striving for. In a time when ethical foundations can feel unstable, the humanities offer a space to wrestle with enduring questions of purpose, responsibility, and care.

While reflection is critical, action is key. More than this, critical reflection on action—on praxis—emerges as essential. Praxis emphasizes that we come to understand the world not only through contemplation, but through participation. Working with a mutual aid organization, tutoring a child in a nearby school, organizing for environmental justice—these are not only acts of service; they are experiences that shape one’s worldview. They generate insight. They reorient assumptions. They can transform identity and values.

This view aligns with traditions of thought that see solidarity with marginalized communities not simply as ethical obligation, but as a way of knowing. While this idea has roots in liberation theology, it does not require religious belief. It simply affirms that lived experience and moral commitment are sources of knowledge, not just sentiment.

Importantly, the motivations that drive students to serve do not always fit into tidy categories. Some are driven by ideals of justice, others by compassion. Some see their work as a response to structural inequality; others are motivated by personal relationships. The diversity of motivations is a strength. What matters is that institutions like Dartmouth create spaces where those motivations can be explored, deepened, and translated into thoughtful action.

That exploration also includes wrestling with discomfort. Many students express frustration or disorientation as they confront injustice or their own complicity in systems of privilege. Others wonder whether their work is truly effective or if their motivations are "good enough." These struggles are not signs of failure but rather moral growth and deepening wisdom. By supporting students through these tensions, we can help them build the resilience and clarity needed for long-term engagement.

In short, DCSI and the broader Dartmouth ecosystem provide more than opportunities to serve. They provide opportunities to ask why service matters and how it changes us. In a time when easy answers are abundant but increasingly suspect, this deeper inquiry is essential. And in a liberal arts context, where questions of value, identity, and responsibility are central, it is also profoundly appropriate.

So, if religion no longer functions as a primary motivator for doing good, what takes its place? The answer is not singular. It likely never was, despite what proponents of tradition might claim. Motivations for service are as diverse as the students who walk through DCSI’s doors. But whether rooted in care, character, justice, or community, these motivations are real. They are shaped by experience and tradition, nurtured by relationships and reflection, and refined through action. They form the basis for the kind of moral leadership our world so urgently needs.

Devin Singh is an associate professor of religion, teaching social ethics and market morality, and serves on DCSI’s Lewin Fellowship review committee.

A Blueprint for Climate Education

By Erich Osterberg

I was brought onto Dartmouth’s faculty to study climate science—to track the relentless rise of temperatures, the surge of storms, and the creeping threat of rising seas in the polar regions and in my own New England backyard. My students and I drilled ice cores like forensic scientists and combed through weather data to reveal the unfolding story of a planet in crisis. At its core, my job was to discover and deliver the sobering science: diagnosing climate change and communicating its urgency to the world.

But something shifted fundamentally in how I saw the world. The years 2016 and 2017 shattered global temperature records—shocking jumps that spoke louder than the UN climate reports. The following year, two

graduate students in my lab, working on seemingly unrelated projects, independently identified 1996 as a critical turning point. One was tracking the acceleration of Greenland’s ice melt; the other, the surge of heavy rainstorms flooding New England communities. The connection was undeniable—the same processes melting the Arctic are fueling the floods in our streets. August 2018 became New Hampshire’s wettest month on record, drenching communities with unprecedented rainfall. That’s when I realized that studying the disaster wasn’t enough. I needed to evolve from diagnosing climate problems to building solutions.

At the same time, higher education was entering a moment of reckoning. In an age where billions of facts, instant answers, and AI-generated content are at our fingertips, what, really, is the purpose of a university education? If knowledge is cheap and instantly accessible, the value of higher education must shift from passive consumption to active engagement. We need to pull students out of our ivory towers and immerse them in the realities outside the Dartmouth bubble. They must be challenged to collaborate with people who see the world differently and to tackle messy, seemingly unsolvable problems whose outcomes matter to someone other than a professor with a red pen.

My first steps down this new path came through the DCSI Social Impact Practicum. Years earlier, I had joined the Upper Valley Climate Adaptation Workgroup (UVAW)— not as “Professor Osterberg,” but as a community member ready to get things done. UVAW brings together state and municipal leaders, business leaders, nonprofits, social workers, and researchers—anyone committed to making our region climate-resilient. Starting in 2018, UVAW partnered with Dartmouth students through ten different SIP projects: surveying urgent community needs, securing funding, developing branding, organizing neighborhood meetings, and even building a carbon footprint app. Suddenly, education wasn’t just theory, it was providing real impact for an organization I valued.

Building on this momentum—and inspired by Professor Eugene Korsunskiy’s “Senior Design Challenge” course— my colleague Carl Renshaw and I launched “Community Partnerships for Climate Resilience,” a two-term transformative experience for Dartmouth students. Supported by the Climate Futures Initiative, the course was designed to serve as a proving ground for meaningful student engagement with the community. We received 13 project proposals from across the Upper Valley and selected four community partners for our student teams:

- Storing sunshine on a ski hill. With the Lyme Energy Committee, students explored converting Dartmouth’s Skiway into a pumped-storage hydropower battery—pumping water uphill when solar energy is abundant, then releasing it to generate power at night. This isn’t science fiction; it’s a practical, tangible clean energy storage solution built around infrastructure we already have.

-A safer future for a flood-prone neighborhood. Together with Sustainable Woodstock, students suppor ted residents of a mobile home community repeatedly flooded by back-to-back storms. Their actionable plan examined a range of solutions from partial relocation and river eng ineering to temporary flood protections, balancing hard science with the humanity of a community under siege.

-Growing resilience, one tree at a time. Working with Upper Valley Apple Core, students helped secure g rants and refine the strategic plan for a nonprofit that plants fr uit and nut trees in public spaces. Their key insight: beyond carbon sequestration and local food production, these trees foster social connections as neighbor s gather to plant, maintain, and har vest together.

-Mapping r isk to protect jobs and ecosystems. Partnering with Hypertherm, a certified B Corp, students assessed flood r isks at a warehouse, developed flood models, and uncovered how a historic stone-arch br idge complicates the picture. Their work didn’t just identify hazards—it demonstrated how existing floodplains provide cr ucial protection for downstream communities.

When students presented their findings to community partners and campus leaders, the verdict was unanimous: rigorous, valuable, and transformative for both students and community partners. This is a model of higher education working for both students and the broader community.

Why does this matter? Because this is about far more than Dartmouth. It’s a blueprint for what climate education must become when fake facts and instant data are everywhere. In this era, the true challenge for students is not regurgitating answers—it’s mastering the human work of listening, building trust, squaring trade-offs, and developing solutions whose stakes are real and immediate. This is education no AI chatbot can replicate.

Erich Osterberg is one of dozens of faculty members that have partnered with DCSI to embed a community based project in their course. These Social Impact Practicums support students in connecting classroom theory with real world impact - a strategic priority area for DCSI.

An Education Beyond the Dartmouth Bubble

By Nico D'Orazio '28

On a beautiful fall afternoon, I walked onto the Green with Collis stir-fry in hand, searching for the perfect picnic spot with friends. Looking around from the center, our campus extended as far as the eye could see, embracing me with its magnetism. For better or for worse, my early college life unfolded inside the Dartmouth Bubble, and my learning, growth, and ambitions became inspired by Dartmouth experiences alone.

That all changed when, as a freshman, I discovered TEACH, an immersive program run by the Center for Social Impact that places Dartmouth students in a local elementary school classroom to assist teachers. When I first stepped into Mrs. Miller’s first-grade class at Dothan Brook School in Hartford, Vt., my Dartmouth Bubble burst. My students did not care about what I was studying or which classes I was taking. Instead, they cared about a sick grandparent or their pets at home. Though I was only two miles away from campus, it felt as if I had stepped into a whole new world.

On my first day, I was struck by how distinctly the challenges of teaching in a rural school system differed from those I saw at home. Mrs. Miller’s class reminded me how easily Dartmouth can blind you to the outside world, and this reminder only magnified each week I returned to her class. As we worked through phonics and my students slowly learned to read and write, I saw how they struggled to grasp even simple concepts. Their profound daily struggles took me far from my own college classroom experiences. My one hour at Dothan Brook became the most important part of my week. It didn’t matter if I had to skip breakfast and run straight from spin class to make my shift. What mattered was whether my students understood how the letter 'e' can change a vowel’s sound, and whether the child who had a challenging home life had the support they needed to learn. No lecture could teach me how difficult and personal literacy education can be for early learners.

Yet, because of the intense difficulty of teaching a child how to read, the small successes were incredibly gratifying. I distinctly remember when a boy we'll call Michael finally grasped 'c' versus 'k', or when a girl we'll call Clara made it through her favorite book without my help. Being a partner in Mrs. Miller’s efforts was a privilege, and I gained a deep sense of responsibility for her students. Skipping or being late to a shift was not an option because if I wasn’t there, her students lost the support they depended on.

Erich Osterberg is a professor of earth science, chairs the Upper Valley Adaptation Workgroup, and researches climate resilience.

As a prospective government and Spanish major, my commitment to TEACH and my students at Dothan Brook amplify my “why.” Mrs. Miller’s class reminds me of the human side of policy, making my studies in government that much more important, and her students are reminiscent of the English language learners back home who inspired me to continue studying Spanish. As I join her class each week, I consider policy interventions, career paths, and ways I can make even the smallest difference. My students drive me to use my education for the common good, and I view TEACH as a proving ground where classes like Educational Testing, Politics of the World, and Spanish 20 can come together and inform my understanding of policy. Every day I enter Mrs. Miller’s first-grade classroom, I am allowed the unique opportunity to turn theory into practice.

I could not be more thankful for my time in TEACH because, in bringing humanity to my studies, I am exploring fields I had never imagined before. This past summer, I interned at the National Head Start Association to grow my knowledge of early childhood education. My experience in Mrs. Miller’s class led me to pursue this experience, an opportunity to understand policy by learning directly from educators. And while I may not become a teacher, I hope for a career that provides the same sense of purpose, connection, and impact.

Although it is easy to get pulled into big-money jobs like investment banking and corporate law, I worry that without path or purpose, these careers waste our potential to have an impact on the world. The knowledge we gain from a prestigious institution like Dartmouth is a privilege. So, why not use it to benefit those most in need? Making service a part of my Dartmouth education has taught me that my passion lies in supporting our youngest learners.

What will it teach you?

Nico D’Orazio '28 is a teacher’s assistant at Dothan Brook School through TEACH. He also interned with the National Head Start Association in DC through the DPCS Internship program.

TEACH provides students with the opportunity to serve as teaching assistants in local schools. Participants gain hands-on experience in the field of education, while providing support to local educators and youth.

A Path to Educational Access

By Maanasi Shyno '23

This fall, I’ll be beginning my sixth year in college access work. My journey began as an adviser for Strengthening Educational Access with Dartmouth (SEAD), which laid the foundation for my relational approach to community work. SEAD gave me a community of peers with a deep sense of collective responsibility and ultimately inspired my commitment to educational equity.

After graduating, I joined a college access nonprofit in San Francisco, where I work with middle school students. Here are three philosophies I’ve come to value in my short career. 1.Act within an ecosystem.

When I got the assistant student director position for SEAD, I was troubled. I had assumed it would go to a first-gen adviser with lived experience. However, none of them had applied. Although I trusted myself to move into the role with respect and consideration, I worried my perspective as a non-first-gen student would limit my effectiveness.

While I didn’t easily dismiss this concern, I decided it should not hold me back. Yes, college access initiatives should have first-gen leaders. But those of us who aren’t first-gen should not discount our ability to listen, assess what is needed, and commit ourselves to the tasks at hand. Questioning "Who am I to do this?" may invite us to consider whether we are right for a role. But a more useful question is "Who am I doing this with?" Over time, I realized I wasn’t doing this work alone. I was constantly learning from my student director and eventually my own assistant student director, both of whom were first-gen. The advisers didn’t hold back on feedback, challenging me to weave their expertise into our curriculum. Every idea I proposed was shaped by the team’s diverse experiences and rooted in our solidarity.

2.Commit to making social change.

In his book of essays, "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded," violence prevention activist Paul Kivel asks, "Can we provide social service and work for social change, or do our efforts… maintain or even strengthen social inequality?"

This has been on my mind as I help launch a program at a new school. On one hand, I hold close the importance of depth over breadth when it comes to impact. On the other hand, I realize the work I do does not change the education system, which perpetuates inequity. Instead of encouraging school systems to directly integrate access support in community schools, nonprofits too often come in with stopgap solutions. For those of us brought into social impact work with a desire for change, the contradictions are endless. Over time, they grate on us. We sometimes ask ourselves, "What are we doing here, really?"

There are no perfect formulas or easy answers. We must constantly reflect on the outcomes of our work and

Dartmouth students work with elementary school students in their school garden.

whether they align with a vision for social change. Kivel provides a series of questions for us to grapple with, a primary one being “Whom are you accountable to?”

Doing direct service work, I come face to face with the students I’m accountable to every day. My relationships with them push me to consider what I owe them, beyond the responsibilities of my job. To honor this, I’ve begun to intentionally study where the cracks in our education system are, and to imagine how we may begin to strategically repair them.

3. Invest time in community partnership.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my time in education is that the strongest partnerships are reciprocal —that relationship-building is integral to our work.

My supervisor has modeled what this looks like in practice. He emphasizes the importance of showing up and supporting school events, especially those not related to our work. We attend awards ceremonies, gather at barbecues. Because of these efforts, our program is known for always helping out and chipping in. This knits us into the school community. Schools understand our work better and make extra efforts to support us. Partnership isn’t just built on the services we provide, but on how we build trust.

I'm learning to promote collaboration at the classroom level as well. With my second cohort, I struggled to cultivate an environment of active participation. I tried a variety of strategies with limited success. One day I stopped my lesson early to ask my class what was stopping them from participating and what would make it easier for them to do so. To my surprise, the students with whom I’d least successfully engaged expressed their fears and ideas the most clearly. Soon afterwards, I implemented their ideas in my practices and saw a vast change in classroom culture. I hadn’t needed to struggle so much to find what worked for the cohort. I just needed to invite them to work with me.

Community partnership is anchored in investment and requires a steady focus on time and resources. Tending to the soil in this way centers our relationships, because those are what fuel and shape the work we do together.

Maanasi Shyno '23 is an educator in college access in San Francisco. She was formerly the student director for DCSI’s Strengthening Educational Access with Dartmouth (SEAD) program and participated in DCSI’s Philadelphia internship cohort.

SEAD connects Dartmouth students as advisors to local low-income high school students, many of whom would be the first in their immediate family to attend college. SEAD advisors support these students in building the skills and knowledge needed to succeed during and after high school.

Co-Designing Public Education

By Rafe Steinhauer

It's the first week of March. A kindergarten classroom sits empty of children but full of adults—teachers, administrators, and district staff gathered after school. For the past five months, a team of Dartmouth undergraduates and kindergarten teachers has studied the benefits of play for kindergarteners. The goal of the study has been to help stakeholders in this district better understand the link between play and learning. Now comes a pivotal moment. After sharing insights from this primary and secondary research, the team asks, "On a scale from '1 (not very)' to '5 (very),' how important is increasing our kindergarteners' play time in our schools?" After three minutes of nervous silence, the responses come in: one participant writes "4" and everyone else writes "5." The team has secured buy-in for change.

Interactions like this—Dartmouth students and local teachers working together to seek a district community's feedback—anchor the unusual Dartmouth undergraduate course I teach, Design and Education.

Why are gaps between theory and practice so persistent in American K-12 public schools, and what improvement strategies are both effective and ethical?

We explore these questions in my course through both theory and practice. Crucially, by "we" I mean not only me and Dartmouth students minoring in human-centered design or education, but also small teams of teachers and administrators from local public school districts working on year-long school improvement projects in the program I started, Upper Valley Education Design Clinic. Rather than the more common “client-consultant” model of service learning, our program uses what's known in legal education as the "clinic model." Each group of local teachers proposes the school-improvement project, comes to class several times to learn design thinking and systems thinking alongside Dartmouth students, and fully leads the project for a whole school year.

One team in last year's cohort sought to increase playtime for kindergarteners in their district. Although research shows that play supports both social-emotional growth and long-term academic success, the amount of time for play in kindergarten nationwide has dropped in recent decades. How might a college like Dartmouth help local kindergarten teachers shift their district's policy and practice —bucking national trends—to increase student play? To answer this question, we must concurrently examine why change is difficult in public education, and which improvement strategies work best. Three insights from scholarship on these questions informed our program's design.

Insight #1: "Power is Distributed, Therefore Co-Design."

In "Tinkering Toward Utopia," David Tyack and Larry Cuban examine failed movements to change American public school practices throughout the 20th century. They explain how the split governance of public schools creates a status quo bias: any major stakeholder group that's sufficiently opposed can block or significantly hinder change. School board members and administrators can enact mandates limiting classroom possibilities. Families can pressure against proposed changes. Teachers may choose not to implement directives they see as misguided or too onerous.

This is why our program prioritizes co-design. Together, district teams and undergraduate students learn design thinking—a human-centered approach to problem-solving that emphasizes understanding stakeholders and seeking their continual feedback. Co-design goes further, inviting stakeholders to collectively interpret insights from literature and community data, brainstorm interventions worth trying, and reflect on learnings from small-scale experiments. Throughout our program, the educators and undergraduates jointly run co-creation sessions: large gatherings of district staff, administrators, board members, families and—depending on age—students.

Through these co-creation sessions, as well as dozens of interviews primarily conducted by the undergraduates, the kindergarten team created broad community support. But co-design not only increases political viability; it also improves work quality by incorporating stakeholders’ knowledge and feedback. After confirming support, the kindergarten teachers and undergraduates next presented the most challenging barriers to implementation, such as the limited time teachers had for class prep, and the district's purchase of a costly but prescriptive curriculum. The team asked participants to brainstorm ways to overcome these barriers.

Insight #2: "Content and Context Matter, Therefore Educators Facilitate Improvement." Teachers, as well as many administrators and other building staff possess unique dual expertise. Formally trained, they understand curriculum, pedagogy, and child development. Through daily experience, they are most likely to know how proposed changes might impact their diverse students; how receptive colleagues are to experimentation, which school processes are more sacred than others; and much more. And as the deliverers of instruction, teachers and staff are typically the people who must implement proposed improvements. Thus, teachers and staff are best-positioned to facilitate the co-design process.

As Anthony Bryk and others show in "Learning to Improve" (Harvard Education Press, 2017), top-down reforms aimed at scaled standardizations typically fail because they neither account for local factors nor do they allocate resources for the experiment-learn-iterate cycles that effective implementation requires. The authors propose "Networked Improvement Communities," in which teachers, administrators, and staff leverage design thinking,

systems thinking, professional learning communities, and improvement science—a model that heavily influenced our program's design.

Once the kindergarten teachers created district-wide buy-in, they could immediately begin trying ways to incorporate play into their classroom, informed by the input of their community.

Insight #3: "Make Sessions Fun and Empowering." Teachers and administrators are extraordinarily busy. While our program offers stipends and professional development credits, these pale beside the reality that educators travel to Dartmouth after long school days and dedicate countless hours to these projects.

For the program to be sustainable, the experience must be fun, empowering, and intellectually stimulating in ways that increase educators' overall sense of satisfaction, agency, and efficacy. This is where liberal arts colleges like Dartmouth shine. Dartmouth undergraduates model joyful experimentation, collaborative inquiry, and genuine respect for practitioners' expertise. The undergraduates’ diverse academic backgrounds mirror the interdisciplinary nature of school improvement itself, while their curiosity helps educators see familiar challenges with fresh eyes.

This collaborative learning environment creates a professional development experience that the teachers describe as professionally invigorating. "The experience was thoroughly enjoyable," said Joshua Hunnewell, a middle school teacher on a team implementing restorative practices to replace traditional disciplinary approaches in Plainfield, NH. "I felt like a school kid again deeply involved in a process of brainstorming, creation, and critique with fellow educators and Dartmouth students."

Many teachers in our program report that the most valuable outcome was increased enthusiasm at work, born from collaborating in new ways with both district stakeholders and Dartmouth students. This is an exciting model for town-gown partnership—not just universities serving schools, but higher education and K-12 educators working as co-designers of change.

Editor's note: Steinhauer's course and program are made possible by support from Dartmouth’s Center for Social Impact, the Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth’s Center for Teaching and Learning, the Design Initiative at Dartmouth, Dartmouth’s Ethics Institute, and the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation.

Rafe Steinhauer is an assistant professor of engineering who focuses on human-centered design and teaches a DCSI Social Impact Practicum in collaboration with local school districts.

Traveling Towards Social Action

By Abby Kambhampaty '25

I was a sophomore in high school when I first understood the true story of Interstate 81. My father drove me to school on it every morning through my diverse but segregated home town of Syracuse, N.Y. Construction of the I-81 through an economically thriving Black neighborhood allowed quick travel from the suburbs to the city, but the highway displaced Black residents, destroyed affordable housing, and locked immigrant communities into poor health and homelessness. I began viewing all the structures that shaped our community members’ lives and health care rights as metaphorical I-81s. My determination to tear down these structures has inspired how I’m pursuing my career in medicine.

The following year, every weekday at noon, I found myself on the I-81 again, this time in the driver's seat, taking my father to his radiation treatments. The daily drives became our therapy: a stitched-together language of Telugu and English filled the car with jokes and stories. On one drive, I asked him what was hardest about adjusting to life in America after being born and raised in India. He barely thought before answering: “I can’t be funny in English.” Humor was how my father and I said "I love you." In America, language barriers, cultural gaps, and a lack of community left him isolated in ways I had not fully seen. His experience ignited my resolve to dedicate my life to immigration advocacy, ensuring that dignity and belonging are fundamental rights for all.

I deepened my engagement with migration justice work in college. I joined and later led, alongside a DCSI staff member, Dartmouth’s Center for Social Impact program to the U.S.-Mexico border. I studied the forces shaping migration—topics that were never addressed in my pre-med courses, but essential to understanding health inequities. Amid this injustice I witnessed in the borderlands, I also encountered joy, resilience and community. It was here that I found my love for community organizing and for working alongside others to build systems rooted in care.

In 2022, I visited Team Brownsville’s border center as a sophomore participating in the border program. Team Brownsville was a bustling welcome hub, filled with community and hope, a first stop for people walking from the refugee camp in Matamoros in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. When I returned in 2024, it was gone, shut down by a lack of funding. Resilient volunteers still drop off donations across the border in this patchwork of a crumbling system.

Yet, even amid these harsh realities, our group found a sense of lightness at the border. Leading up to a youth maker space workshop, in partnership with Sul Ross University, we spent weeks coordinating logistics, planning hands-on activities and rallying students to join. As the day

approached, we were unsure if the effort would resonate. When the day arrived, families poured in as children learned about water conservation and filtration techniques. Children’s laughter filled the air as they decorated recycled containers and playfully pretended to deliver weather reports from an imaginary newsroom. I discovered my love for community organizing as a way to educate and create spaces of joy and connection. This workshop was a testament to the strength, happiness and resilience of border communities, often overshadowed by stories of struggle.

These experiences shaped my perspectives and fueled the desire of many border-trip participants to pursue impactful careers and advocacy efforts. The trip has solidified my commitment to becoming a physician who serves refugees and underserved populations, working on the border or in similar contexts. I hope to use my future education and partnerships to explore sustainable ways to contribute to migration justice and health care access. Through this program, I also had the privilege of meeting some of my closest friends, each bringing unique perspectives from their diverse fields of study—from theater to environmental studies to computer science. Within these interdisciplinary connections, I envision future collaborations, combining our unique skills and passions to drive meaningful change in the areas of migration justice. Just as I-81 carved through my hometown and divided communities, immigration policies and violence continue to fracture lives at the border. Yet, in every space I have entered, I’ve witnessed that what survives beyond these man-made barriers is resilience, solidarity, and care. My hope is to help reimagine systems of care that no longer resemble highways cutting through communities, but bridges that connect them.

Currently, I’m working in community medicine at NYU Langone, where I provide clinical services to unhoused and undocumented patients across New York City. In our exam rooms, I see the same forces of exclusion and resilience I first witnessed in Syracuse and along I-81: language barriers, fractured systems of care, and communities left to navigate impossible choices. My work in HIV care and health literacy is rooted in what I learned from families, organizers, and children at the border—that advocacy must be both systemic and personal, dismantling barriers while also creating spaces of dignity and belonging. As I move forward in medicine, I remain committed to transforming clinics into places of connection and justice.

Abby Kambhampaty '25 majored in biology and anthropology and led DCSI’s U.S.-Mexico Immersion Trip. She now works in HIV care at NYU Langone.

First Awareness, Then Action

By María Clara de Greiff Lara

The starriest sky I ever saw was in Vermont. I can say the same about the greenest mountains, the warmest lakes in the fleeting summer, and the whitest snow. Here I learned that Vermont’s Green Mountains, part of the Appalachian chain, guard the secrets of the Abenaki, Mohican, and Pocomtuc tribes. These seemingly impenetrable walls also hide a resilient population of migrants from other nations on dairy farms, survivors of structural violence that drove them from their motherlands. Not seeing them is a way of denying their existence, of de-legitimizing them, of justifying our comfort zones.

They labor in oblivion, working more than 72 hours per week and accounting for approximately 70 percent of the state’s milk production. Without adult and teenaged migrants, the dairy industry in the Upper Valley would not survive. According to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, dairy farming, which yields more than two billion pounds of milk each year, is the state’s largest agricultural industry, and about half the milk New Englanders consume is produced here.

Teaching at Dartmouth, I have become aware of disparities within the student population and the complexity of their intersections. Yet I have also learned to have faith in the future after seeing their deep commitment to igniting social change. They thirst for a better reality through education—a kind of transformation whereby experiential learning leads to a better society.

I often remind my students that social impact does not begin in distant and foreign territories but in the immediacy of our own backyards. At Dartmouth, that lesson evolved at La Casa, one of Dartmouth’s living and learning communities for students. In March 2020, the pandemic arrived to remind us of our fragility and impermanence. That’s when I began meeting virtually with three La Casa residents—Gabe Onate '21, Juan Quinonez '23, and Keren Valenzuela '21, plus a Thetford Academy student, Frank Loveland. We each logged on from our own island: California, Texas, Mississippi, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Digging into our own pockets, we launched the FUERZA Farmworkers’ Fund. (In Spanish, “fuerza” means “strength.”) In those first months, as fear and uncertainty mounted, we visited six dairy farms to listen to the concerns and struggles of our migrant neighbors as they faced the advent of the new virus.

In a cruel irony, the farm workers felt little changed by the arrival of the pandemic, since they were already living their lives, for the most part, in forced isolation. Their main distress was for their families in Mexico and

Central America. What weighed on them more directly was the sudden hypervisibility they faced: “They gave us dirty looks when we went to the store because we didn’t have masks,” they told us. The shortage of masks left migrant farm workers unusually exposed, subject to a level of scrutiny they had not experienced before.

Thanks to the support of Thetford Hill Church and generous donations from relatives of FUERZA’s co-founders, we distributed over 200 homemade masks across the farms. We also launched a series of forums to ensure our friends on the farms were seen and heard. We organized panels titled “Hands that Speak, Voices From the Farms of the Upper Valley," allowing a space where the farm workers spoke directly with the audience, sharing their needs and stories.

The same spirit infused our DCSI Borderlands trip to Texas in 2024,"From the Upper Valley to the Lower Valley: Immigration and the ‘New Ellis Island’ of the Texas-Mexico Border," where students stood face-to-face with harsh immigration and asylum-seeking policies at the border. Upon returning to Hanover, the journey continued as students engaged in exploring other kinds of borders in the Upper Valley: fences of silence, invisibility and marginalization.

The work ahead remains daunting. Structural violence still hides behind green mountains. Health care is still inadequate. Education is still a privilege rather than a right. Walls continue to rise. DCSI’s anniversary reveals that cultivating awareness blossoms into social impact. FUERZA is one example, born at the peak of a crisis, but it is not the only one. FUERZA is part of a larger network within the DCSI community through which students are making life better for people they might not otherwise meet. They persist in listening until the invisible becomes a name, and empathy grows into camaraderie.

The rhetoric of “diversity, equity, inclusion” and “sustainable justice” rings hollow if we close our eyes and surrender to the lull of our privileges and certainties in our classrooms. As a journalist, I learned the importance of observing, discovering, acknowledging the other and recognizing our overlapping

Winterim Immersion Trip to the Texax-Mexico border in 2022

vulnerabilities. Only then can we approach and embrace each other along the same horizontal line, attentive, with non-judgmental empathy. Awareness is the seed that harvests the visibility of others. Ignoring the other is wrapping ourselves in a lukewarm dormancy that numbs us more than the sharpest winter.

As long as this collective pulse continues beating, the Upper Valley’s night sky will remain as starry as ever, and our work below will be worthy of its brilliance.

María Clara de Greiff Lara is a Colombian-Mexican journalist, writer, translator, and lecturer in Spanish and humanities. She co-founded FUERZA Farmworkers’ Fund and works with the First Generation Office.

Immersion Trips embed students on the forefront of change and contemporary social issues. The current trip takes students along the Texas-Mexico border where they engage with the nuances of immigration policy and asylum-seeking.

DCSI's Pathways to Impact

The Dartmouth Center for Social Impact's mission is to educate students to be transformative leaders for the common good.

Besides the programs featured earlier in this section, DCSI provides a host of other opportunities that connect our students with community-engaged learning which are outlined below. Through these programs, the students that participate in them, the partner organizations that host them, and the alumni that help fund them, we’re able to support and empower our local community and other communities across the world.

Growing Change – Connects Dartmouth students with local children in pre K to 2nd grade to explore food systems and nutrition.

Outdoor Leadership Experience – Dartmouth students teach leadership and outdoor skills to local youth through nature-based adventures.

SIBS – Pairs Dartmouth students one on one with youth ages 6 to 12 to serve as mentors and friends.

Foundations in Social Impact – a social impact leadership program designed exclusively for first-year students who work together to actively examine social impact themes and their place as changemakers in society.

ImpACT Winterim Leadership Intensive – enables students to make an impact on a social challenge in their home community or within the Upper Valley while learning with peers about systems mapping, a practical tool for changemakers.

Social Impact Non-Profit Consulting – a student-led, mission-driven consulting group which supports local social sector organizations to maximize their impact in the communities they serve.

Dartmouth Partners in Community Service –supports students interning at social sector organizations with a living stipend and alumni mentorship (more on the next page).

Cape Town Social Transformation Internship

Cohort – places students as interns at social sector organizations in Cape Town, South Africa that are driving systems level change.

’82 Upper Valley Community Impact Fellowship –created and supported by the class of ’82, this fellowship enables students to build a long-lasting impact in the Upper Valley through a strategic, innovative project they complete over the course of three to four terms.

Breaking the Mold – an annual conference which brings alumni who have leveraged their careers for the common good back to campus to speak to students.

Schweitzer Fellows Program – funds graduate health professional and law students enrolled at institutions in New Hampshire and Vermont (including the Geisel School of Medicine) to address unmet health needs throughout the region.

Olga Gruss Lewin Fellowship – supports recent Dartmouth graduates who are pursuing significant acts of citizenship and service to others after graduation.

Bridges to Impact – an alumni-led professional development community for recent graduates working, volunteering, or studying in social-impact related fields with current chapters in Boston, Washington D.C., and New York City.

Dartmouth Partners in Community Service

30 Years of Alumni Driven Impact

Dartmouth Partners in Community Service (DPCS) was born from a simple idea proposed at the Class of 1959’s 35th reunion: to create a structured way for alumni to support students who want to “give back” during an off term. The class rallied to raise funds, and with College approval, brought this idea to life in the form of the DPCS program. It provides a living stipend, alumni mentorship, and professional development support to students interning at social sector organizations. DPCS was housed within the Tucker Foundation and the Center for Social Impact continued to steward it after it branched out from the Foundation in 2015.

Since its founding in 1995, close to 20 alumni classes have joined the ‘59s to sponsor the program, along with hundreds of alumni who have volunteered their time as mentors to students. Over 1,000 students have participated in DPCS in the three decades since its inception, lending their time and talent to underserved communities across the country.

“This experience reinforced the idea that true social impact is a collaborative effort rooted in trust, empathy, and a deep commitment to fostering the resilience and capabilities of the communities we serve."

- Max Winzelberg '27

We are incredibly proud to be celebrating 30 years of DPCS alongside DCSI’s 10th anniversary. This program serves as a powerful example of how the alumni community can create an enduring legacy which reflects Dartmouth’s shared commitment to service and impact.

DPCS was formally recognized in 2019 with the Granger Award for Lifetime Achievement in Public Service, presented to the Class of 1959 (pictured).

A special thanks to the classes of '44, '58, '59, '63, '67, '79, '83, '85, '86, '87, '88, '89, '90, '92, and '95 for their continued support of this transformative program.

Summer 2024 DPCS Internship students with Assistant Director, Henry Do Rosario

Photo by Eli Burakian '00. Social Justice Awards in Filene Auditorium in Moore Hall, from L to R: Michael Stern '59, Chris Cundey '59, Evelynn Ellis, vice president for institutional diversity and equity, Karl Hultszhue '59, and Douglas Wise '59.

The Key to Meaningful and Impactful Careers

Every year, shortly after commencement, Dartmouth runs a cap and gown survey to glean where its most recent graduates have landed professionally. In its most recent publication, centered on the class of 2023, a full 49% of respondents indicated they were working in either finance or management consulting following graduation.

David Brooks’ charge that elite colleges have become too oriented towards funneling talent into high-paying, low social-impact sectors seems to be well founded if we take this data at face value. It would seem lamentable then that, as Brooks has put it, “Generations of young geniuses were given the most lavish education in the history of the world, and then decided to take their talents to finance and consulting.”

Undoubtedly, the full picture is more complicated—for example, Dartmouth also ranks among one of the top sending institutions for the Peace Corps. Many alumni also end up finding social purpose later in their careers.

That notwithstanding, there is certainly an argument to be made that more Dartmouth talent could be geared towards socially impactful careers. In this section, we profile alumni that have done just that—as educators, journalists, advocates, and in a myriad of other ways.

They exhibit how a first-class education can be leveraged to drive social impact in the real world. For all of them, key to their respective paths was the formative experiences they had as students on campus.

The Educators

A Principal’s Principles

By Bill Hammond '83

At Snyder High School in Jersey City, I entered the school through a metal detector. Permanent subs queued in the main office waiting for their assignments, ready to fill in for the 20% of the teachers who were absent on any given day. (About 30% of the students were absent, too.) I had been given clear instructions: Never bring a wallet or watch to school and always travel with a partner to the teacher’s lounge. Fire drills happened at 2:55 p.m. on any random day. Called Rapid Dismissal Days, the drills were conducted with the expectation that everyone would just go home.

This was the spring of 1981. Along with nine other Dartmouth undergraduates, I spent that term participating in the Tucker Foundation’s Jersey City Internship. Despite the challenges surrounding education at Snyder High School, I found that once I closed the classroom door, the students were eager to learn. Some had struggled to master fractions for years, but they were delighted to delve into calculus’s derivatives. One student had recently moved from South Africa, navigating a new school in a new country, trying to make new friends. Given the right environment, however, all students can learn. When I taught in New Hampshire and was principal in Vermont, I promoted the following ideas to help students develop as thinkers and citizens.

Cultivate a Culture

As an elementary school principal, I had a mantra to guide our collective decisions: "What is best for student learning?" We promoted academic learning, certainly, but we also encouraged learning how to work in a group, how to persevere, how to be a friend, how to treat other people well, and how to treat yourself well.

We strove to keep kids active, to help them care about their learning, and to nurture wonder. Kindergarteners picked pumpkins at Cedar Circle Farm, then experimented with them in their classroom. (Do pumpkins sink or float? Does the size of the pumpkin matter?) Second graders hiked from the source of Blood Brook to its mouth, waded into the brook and caught caddisfly larvae to ascertain the brook's health. Fifth graders canoed on the Connecticut River, visited Hanover’s water treatment plant, and paddled to Gilman Island to hear Abenaki stories about environmental stewardship.

Share What We Know With Each Other

When I visited classrooms, I noticed when students were wholly engaged. Then I looked at what the teachers were doing and asked if they would present their ideas at the next faculty meeting.

At the end of the day one Friday, an inspiring teacher put on a piece of peppy music, and students went into action. They cleared their desks. They cleaned the classroom. They prepared their backpacks. In the 2 ½ minutes that the march played, they completed all their tasks. At the next faculty meeting, the teacher shared her technique, and I asked if anyone else used music for teaching, and learned that kindergarteners listened to an Addams Family tune to learn the days of the week: "Days of the Week [clap] [clap]. There’s Sunday and there’s Monday…" In preparation for the faculty meeting, I did some research on the impact of music on the brain and on long-term learning, and I shared that information with our teachers.

Share Leadership, Especially with Students

Our school culture teams tapped young talent and energy. With my graphing calculator, I randomly selected the two students from each grade, from second to sixth. We had boys and girls, strong and weak scholars, students with disabilities.

In three half-hour meetings, plus a little extra time to polish ideas and collect information, our teams brainstormed, developed, and implemented ideas to improve the school. Innovations included creating a mascot, organizing recess Winter Olympics, and hosting a therapy dog. Every three months, the membership rotated, so we had a fall team, a winter team, and a spring team. That meant that each year, 30 students were introduced to informal leadership training.

What, ultimately, were the benefits of the school culture team? It taught students leadership, that we trusted them to develop and implement ideas, and that all of us are responsible for improving our communities. Older students and younger students came together to share strategies. Interestingly, many of the most popular suggestions came originally from the second and third graders.

Keep the Community Involved

For some parents and community members, coming into a school can be intimidating. So, when I was principal at Marion Cross School in Norwich, Vt., I set up my desk across the street, in the parking lot of Dan & Whit’s general store. For a day in the summer, I welcomed parents and passersby to stop by to talk about school and learning.

Looking Back…and Ahead

In Jersey City, many from our Dartmouth group witnessed inequities within education, law, and medicine. Beyond merely recognizing pressing problems, we tried to make positive, systemic change. When the Vietnam War dominated discussions in the 60s and early 70s, a trove of young people became teachers to recapture the narrative

about what it meant to live life well and to challenge the next generation to improve our country and our culture.

In the face of new attacks on public education, we may be at a similar tipping point. It’s my hope that threats to open-mindedness and free expression in our schools will encourage passionate young people to become teachers, to uphold and defend those values.

In "The World Is Flat," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman posited that “People don’t change because you tell them they should. People change because they tell themselves they must.” Will it be altruism or will it be frustration or will it be prudence or will it be necessity that instigates our change?

Yes.

Empowering Rural Youth

By Jennifer Botzojorns '87

On an outdoor basketball court in rural Vermont, a group of smiling children sat together with food spilling off their paper plates. I plopped down next to two enthusiastic boys. One was laughing as he wolfed down three heavily buttered rolls nestled beside a large piece of chicken. The second, having finished off his chicken, munched on juicy slices of watermelon and a couple ears of corn.

The picnic was part of an end-of-the-year reading celebration for all 60 students who attended a pre-K-through-five elementary school. Their librarian had procured a grant from the Children’s Literacy Foundation, a small organization which supports free programs for libraries whose patrons include underserved children. CLiF serve nearly 85% of the communities in New Hampshire and Vermont.

When I asked the two boys about books they’d read that year, there was an enthusiastic exchange in a 5th-grade-sort-of-way over whether "Bobby vs.Girls," by Lisa Lee, or "Frindle," by Andrew Clements, was better. The first boy explained that Lee’s main character gets into "ridiculous" situations. In Clements’ book, a character named Nick Allen decides to change the word "pen" to "frindle”; the second boy laughed about how silly it was to give a pen a different name and how equally silly students and even the principal’s responses were to the linguistic experiment.

As the meal was wrapping up, I asked where the trash was. “Oh,” he said, “cobs and watermelon rinds go in the

"While some who seek to make a social impact choose to operate in a worldwide setting, curbing global hunger, for example, or combating climate change on a large scale, public sector educators try to bolster one child at a time, secure one composting grant at a time, employ one dedicated librarian at a time."

compost. Do you compost?”

“Yes I do, at home. Where is the compost?”

They led me around the corner to a brand-new roofed composting station with spacious bins and extra room for shovels and wheelbarrows. The first bin held a batch of completely rotted compost. The boys launched into how microorganisms make the stuff get REALLY HOT. They explained why I could not put the corn cob in THAT bin (pointing at it). It was ready for the garden, 50 feet away. From over at the raised beds the farm-to-school teacher waved. “Isn’t the stuff in that first bin beautiful?” she shouted.

This snapshot of a school visit is one of many I cherish, looking back over my career in public education. I enjoyed leaving my desk fairly often to remind myself of why it’s important to take on the challenges all public school leaders face. Emotionally charged struggles over legal and budgetary matters, policy debates, state and federal mandates, logistical concerns—they all come at school administrators from every direction, all at once. As many of us say, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. One must stay driven by both mission and vision, committed to the betterment of our world. One must also be able to seize the right moments to zoom down to the roots of an organization, recognizing and appreciating the work of colleagues but making changes when necessary.

While some who seek to make a social impact choose to operate in a worldwide setting, curbing global hunger, for example, or combating climate change on a large scale, public sector educators try to bolster one child at a time, secure one composting grant at a time, employ one dedicated librarian at a time. As a school leader, your job is to support and encourage both children and adults while meeting a myriad of their logistical needs.

My own career is deeply rooted in my Dartmouth experience. Even though, as a student, I could not predict the future, it is clear to me now how my undergraduate years lay the groundwork for my present self. Education professors Ted Mitchell and Faith Dunne impressed upon me the importance of education as a bulwark of our democracy. They made me write, write, and write some more, with the aim of crystalizing belief and purpose. The Dartmouth Outing Club and the ski team built stamina, relationships and camaraderie that fostered collaboration, hard work and adventure. Advocating in campus demonstrations for free speech,

Bill Hammond '83, MALS '90, is an educator and a 2017 National Distinguished Principal Award recipient. An active participant through the Tucker Foundation, he continues his engagement with various Upper Valley nonprofits.

education, and divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime taught me that voice matters.

During my final year at Dartmouth, I participated in a three-month foreign study program based in Kenya. One of the faculty leaders, Nelson Kasfir, a professor of government, then set up a subsequent internship for three of us who travelled to rural western Uganda and lived for several months in a canvas tent. We worked with women to help document the economic benefits of the crafts they produced. All this taught me the importance of expanding my horizons to learn more about all citizens of the world, especially mothers, who all too often go unnoticed as they create opportunities for their children.

The chance to build a bright future for the next generation knows no boundaries. For me, social impact lives in the small footprints of two children, loving and celebrating books and taking pride in a new compost bin, regaling in the quirks of characters from the pages and marveling at microorganisms enriching the soil. These children will carry lessons from this close-knit, supportive school community to whatever they choose to do with their lives. By providing high-quality, free, and deeply engaging schooling for all rural and underserved families, we welcome them into a democracy that depends, now more than ever, on their educated participation.

Jennifer Botzojorns '87 is a former superintendent and a past recipient of Vermont Superintendent of the Year. She serves on Vermont’s school redistricting task force.

Building Bridges to Better Jobs

By Kermit Cook '00, Thayer '01

"Hello. May I speak with Haley please?"

"Hi. This is Haley. How can I help you?"

"My name is Kermit, and I’m with Penn Foster. I’m just calling to say congratulations. I see that you graduated from our high school, and it’s a tremendous accomplishment!"

"Oh my gosh, thank you for calling. Penn Foster was the best decision I ever made for my daughter and me."

"Wow, that’s really great to hear. Would you tell me some of your story?"

"I was a teen mom and had to drop out of my high school. Coming to Penn Foster meant I could graduate high school while also working full time to support my daughter. I got promoted to manager at my job and was rewarded with a raise as well. I am now in college for dental assisting to further my career. If it wasn’t for Penn Foster’s flexible program, I wouldn't be where I am today!"

Penn Foster Group graduated more than 80,000 learners from our high school and career college last year. Every month, one of the highlights of my role as CEO is calling a few of those learners to offer congratulations and to hear their stories. I spoke with Haley for 15 minutes about her experiences and dreams. Every story like hers fuels our commitment to keep innovating and finding better ways to help our students learn.

Our Mission

Penn Foster was founded in 1890 by Thomas Foster in Scranton, Pennsylvania to provide training designed to help coal miners secure safer jobs. More than a century later, our mission remains fundamentally the same: to provide radically affordable, flexible online education that equips learners with the skills and credentials they need to get and keep good jobs.

Traditional high school and higher education, while valuable for many, do not meet the needs of all. The learners we serve are typically working, caring for family, and earning less than $50,000 per year. Over 14 million adults in the United States have not graduated from high school, and millions more lack a post-secondary degree or certification.

We are here to empower those learners.

Building Flexible, Affordable Pathways

We help learners complete their high school diplomas and train to be medical assistants, electricians, veterinary technicians—among many other jobs—allowing them to learn on their time and at a tenth of the cost of traditional schools. Make no mistake—learning this way is not easy. How many web-based courses have you started but not completed? I know that my own personal pass rate is not great. To meet learners where they are, our solutions need to be radically affordable and they must provide valuable, high-quality, engaging learning.

Our success is fueled by a culture of learning and innovation that is fully focused on student outcomes. We pair that culture with meaningful investment in technology and instructional design. For example, we’ve developed a research-based learning design framework that drives better completion rates, and we rely on machine learning-based data models to predict engagement and create more personalized educational experiences.

Aligning With Employers Drives Sustainable Scale

Equally important, we invest deeply in relationships with employers, because our ultimate measure of success is that our graduates possess the skills and credentials that open doors to better jobs. Even the best learning experience is meaningless if it does not align with workforce needs. As a result, we develop our training programs alongside employers like the Michigan Primary Care Association, Ford Motors, and Banfield Pet Hospitals.

Our goal is to support 150,000 learners each year in earning credentials that lead to secure, rewarding employment. The foundation of this ambition is our

our alignment with employers. They help shape our programs and they hire our graduates. As a result, learners gain skills that translate into higher wages and a rapid return on their investment, often within the first year. This cycle of employer trust, student success, and economic return creates the commercial engine that enables us to scale and continually invest in new innovations.

"Even the best learning experience is meaningless if it does not align with workforce needs."

Haley’s graduation is just one of thousands of stories that show what is possible when education meets learners where they are. Her achievement is more than a credential; it’s a gateway to stability, opportunity, and pride for her entire family. At Penn Foster, we see this transformation every day, and it reaffirms our belief that affordable and flexible pathways are not a luxury but a necessity. If we continue to remove barriers and open doors, we can help countless learners cross bridges to better jobs and brighter futures.

Kermit Cook '00 Thayer '01 is CEO of Penn Foster Group and an education technology investor. He serves on the board of The Linsly School in Wheeling, WV.

Enabling Choice-Filled Lives

Alex Bernadotte '92 in conversation with Henry Do Rosario

This conversation originally appeared in the DCSI podcast "All the Difference." It has been edited and shortened for print.

Henry Do Rosario: What is the social challenge that you're trying to tackle right now, Alex?

Alex Bernadotte: The social challenge that I’m tackling is economic mobility. We know that in the U.S., a college degree is key to social and economic mobility. According to the Pew Charitable Foundation, individuals with some college education but no degree earn 18% more than their peers with just a high school diploma. Those with a bachelor's degree earn 62% more than those without one. What's more, college graduates are also reported to experience a better quality of life and better mental and physical health. They're more engaged civically. We know that a college degree matters. However, even though we're sending more young people to college, only 16% of

students from the lowest income quartile can expect to earn bachelor's degrees by their mid-twenties, versus 62% of their higher-income peers. That gap is what keeps me up at night. How can we ensure that students who get into college earn degrees that allow them to change their economic and personal prospects, secure meaningful employment, and lead choice-filled lives?

Henry Do Rosario: What do you mean by a “choice-filled” life?

Alex Bernadotte: Everybody describes it differently, but when I think about what my Dartmouth degree has allowed me to do…it's allowed me to dream. It's allowed me to make decisions about my professional and personal life. It's allowed me to consider different options as I think about who I want to be in the world. It's allowed me to provide for my family. It's allowed me to engage civically. It’s allowed me to break the cycle of generational poverty for my family. It’s allowed me to pursue joy. It's allowed me to feel physically safe. It's allowed me to take care of my emotional well-being. And so, for me, a choice-filled life is a life of opportunity, a life of joy, a life of dreaming. And a life of community. That's what we want for students because we believe that choice is the ultimate privilege.

Henry Do Rosario: So how are you tackling this issue?

Alex Berndadotte: I'm the founder and CEO of an organization called Beyond 12. We are a national tech-enabled nonprofit that works specifically to help first-generation students and students from under-resourced communities earn college degrees that they can translate into meaningful employment and choice-filled lives. We do that through a coaching platform that combines three elements. The first: human coaches who work with students virtually while they’re in college. Our coaches are “near peers.” They are recent college graduates who themselves were the first in their families to go to college, so they understand firsthand the challenges our students face on their road to earning a college degree. They are full-time employees. We recruit, hire, and train them, and they're responsible for a caseload of students for two years.

The second aspect of our model is an app called My Coach, where we download the academic, financial aid, and events calendars from the institutions of higher ed that our students are attending. We translate all of that into a video-based to-do list that's augmented by evidence-based push notifications to remind students of the activities, deadlines, and behaviors that lead to success.

The third component of our model is a backend analytics engine powered by machine learning, which allows us to predict which students need help and when, and then prescribe the right type of support. Working in partnership with both high schools and colleges, we're serving about 96,000 students across the country. We aspire to serve a million students by 2030. And we're well on our way to doing that.

Henry Do Rosario: Why has this work been important to you?

Alex Bernadotte: I do this work because it's very personal. I was a first-gen college student here at Dartmouth. I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and my parents moved to the United States in search of better opportunities for me, their firstborn, and for themselves, as many immigrants do. They left me in the care of my beloved late grandmother, Mommy Claire, who took care of me, and who, by the way, passed away three years ago at the age of 105.

Mommy Claire was awesome. And so much of why I do the work I do is because of the values she instilled in me. I remember as I was growing up in Haiti without my parents, she explained that they were absent because they were ensuring opportunities for my success. And success, Mommy Claire shared, meant that I had to do well in school. That was my part of the deal.

Henry Do Rosario: What was your pathway to Dartmouth?

Alex Bernadotte: The concept of college was an abstract thing we discussed, but we didn't really understand what it took to get there or how I was going to get there. One day, my mom overheard a group of doctors talking about where they were sending their kids to college. I was in the seventh grade. She came running home that day and said, “You have to go to this thing called an Ivy League. You have to go to this place called Dartmouth.”

So I worked really hard in school and was very successful because I wanted to honor their sacrifice. When those college acceptance letters started coming in, we were ecstatic.

When I landed at Dartmouth, we traveled to Hanover in a caravan that was 10 cars deep that included my mom, my dad, my younger sister, my grandmother, my younger cousins, my aunts, my uncles, and family friends. Because I was the first to embark on this journey, we all wanted to be a part of it. And in some ways, we all needed to be a part of it.

Henry Do Rosario: At the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact, we're hoping that we're preparing students to become changemakers. I'm wondering if you have any advice for students right now who are thinking about addressing a social issue in some way through their careers.

Alex Bernadotte: Do the research. If there is something that you are interested in, understand the organizations that are tackling it. Get to the bottom of the issue, speak to constituents. Immerse yourself in whatever that issue is. Solutions that are co-created and co-designed with constituents will be significantly more effective than those imposed upon them. The second piece of advice is take the leap. Just do it.

Alexandra Bernadotte '92 is founder and CEO of Beyond 12, a nonprofit supporting underrepresented college students. Inspired by her first-gen Dartmouth experience, she leads social innovation efforts that serve thousands of students.

Listen to the full conversation here or look up "All the Difference" wherever you get your podcasts

Following the

Issues

The Power of Local News: 'Focus on Where You Are'

Geeta Anand '89 in conversation with Charlotte Albright

This conversation has been edited for length.

Charlotte Albright: Welcome home, Geeta Anand. Tell us a little bit about what you were like when you went to Dartmouth as a Dartmouth student. Can you turn back the clock for us?

Geeta Anand: I was like so many of the undergraduates I meet: someone who was idealistic, who was interested in many, many things, who was looking for a way to have an impact in the world and trying to figure out what that pathway would be.

Charlotte Albright: While you were a student at Dartmouth, you wanted to make a difference in the world beyond campus. Were you also thinking ahead to how you might do that after graduating?

Geeta Anand: Unlike so many students today, I wasn't thinking that far ahead. It was before the days of summer internships. People did them, but they weren't viewed as fundamental building blocks to a career. So I was just thinking immediately what I was interested in. I was a student activist, and so when I got here my freshman fall, there were protests against apartheid and against investment in South Africa. That seemed like a clear route to having an impact. So I got involved in that.

And then as I got closer to graduating and thinking about what I wanted to do longer term, I began to think about whether it was medicine or whether it was journalism, and finally landed on journalism because it seemed like a path to use what I was actually really good at, which is writing, and actually interested in doing, which is researching and having conversations with people.

Charlotte Albright: I know you wrote for The Dartmouth, but as a professional journalist you really cut your teeth somewhere else, right?

Geeta Anand: I worked for The Dartmouth a bit, but I didn't park myself there day and night, which the editors of The D did. I did a few articles and as I was graduating and looking around for a job, I saw a job advertised at a free weekly newspaper on Cape Cod. It was headquartered in Yarmouth, and I reached out to that editor and found myself driving down to Yarmouth, a place I'd never heard of, for an interview.

Charlotte Albright: And from there you went to the Rutland Herald, which is a statewide paper of record.

Geeta Anand: Yes, it was an excellent statewide paper covering Vermont, covering state government really well, and covering communities in the Rutland area and southern Vermont really well.

Charlotte Albright: After that, a big leap, yes?

Geeta Anand: The big leap was to the Boston Globe. At the Rutland Herald, I began reading other publications and seeing great investigative journalism. A story I did for the Rutland Herald ended up getting picked up by the Wall Street Journal and became a front-page narrative. And I looked at how that was written and I wanted to write like that. I wanted to have the time for long investigative stories that a bigger paper would give me. So I reached out to the Boston Globe.

Charlotte Albright: What was your beat?

Geeta Anand: The job I loved the most and spent the most time on there was covering Boston City Hall. I fought hard to be assigned to cover Boston politics, and then I went on to also cover the state house because I thought those were the beats that were the heart and soul of the Boston Globe.

Charlotte Albright: So there's really a pattern here, starting even in Cape Cod, of holding elected officials accountable.

Geeta Anand: Yes. Being interested in politics and in government and in holding elected officials accountable as a way of having an impact.

Charlotte Albright: That happened in a big way at the Wall Street Journal, which earned you a Pulitzer. What was that story about and how did it come about?

Geeta Anand: I was on the biotech beat and the CEO of a biotech company was accused of insider trading with Martha Stewart. These were in my first few days on the biotech beat. It blew up into a huge story. Everyone was covering it. I did a long piece looking at the CEO's career

and how he ended up being accused of insider trading and I looked at the many institutions he had worked at and his questionable activities along the way.

Charlotte Albright: Having earned those kudos, you could easily have stayed in New York and risen through the ranks at the Wall Street Journal. Instead, you went to India. Why?

Geeta Anand: I've always balanced the many parts of my life: my journalism, my career, but also child-raising and care of my parents. And at the time my parents were struggling, and I needed to find a way to support them. I got the idea of moving back to India, where I grew up, and moving my parents there with me. In India I would be able to hire caregivers to help me take care of them and I would be able to afford a place large enough so they could live with me too, as well as my two kids. So it was really a decision to support my parents, and it was possible to convince the Wall Street Journal to move me to India, to cover India. So I managed to continue to do meaningful journalism covering India and to find a way to take care of my parents.

Charlotte Albright: You came back to the U.S. to become dean of journalism at Berkeley for five years. Which makes me wonder if you see journalism itself as both learning for the journalist, and also an education for your audience. Because a lot of the journalism you've done has educated people to the point where some of them might take action about some of the things that you've uncovered.

Geeta Anand: That's a great way of putting it. I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes. This is one of the most amazing things about journalism: you're covering things you often know nothing about at the start of a story. And by the time you finish reporting the story, you're quite an expert on the story. You have to be, if you are to figure out how to tell it accurately within a context that you explain clearly. Yes, you are also trying to educate the public as they read the story, making sure they understand what this issue's about, why it's important, what's happening, and who the players are, so that they can actually use it to do something about it.

Charlotte Albright: By the time you did take the job about five years ago at Berkeley, your profession had changed dramatically. You were teaching students about a profession that was very different from the one you entered. What are some of the things that you think young journalists need to know about the lay of the land now?

Geeta Anand: The business has changed. Publications like the one that I'm editor of now, VTDigger, are philanthropically funded. That's a huge change. Audience engagement is so important. That's a big change. Previously you just wrote stories and didn't actively think about how to engage people in reading them or viewing them. Also, the forms of journalism have changed so much. Now, journalism is so much more visual. Video journalism, vertical videos, TikToks, they're all really interesting and important ways of sharing stories.

Charlotte Albright: You've really come full circle, all the way around the world, back to New England. Here you are at VTDigger as Editor-in-Chief. What is that job and why did you take it?

Geeta Anand: I took it because it's meaningful and interesting and brings me back to journalism at its most vibrant and most engaged. When I was at the Rutland Herald, if my story was wrong or someone didn't like it, they picked up the phone and they called me, or they just showed up in the newsroom to argue with me. That is just democracy and journalism at its best.

VTDigger is very similar. We have a really close relationship with our audience. It's widely read in Vermont. It's really respected as an independent source of news. It's fair. And I just couldn't think of a more interesting way of spending the next few years of my life than bringing that journalism to a community and helping it grow and get better and helping the reporters do the most interesting, ambitious stories that they can.

Charlotte Albright: You've recently lunched on campus with other Dartmouth-affiliated people who have also pursued careers in journalism, many at the highest levels. At this lunch did you talk about why, even though we don't have a journalism program per se here, Dartmouth graduates so many good journalists?

Geeta Anand: That's a good question. Whether it's through the Center for Social Impact, the Tucker Foundation, The Dartmouth, or international fellowships through the Dickey Center or the Rockefeller Center, I think Dartmouth nurtures students and encourages them and gives them pathways to impact. It also gives them confidence that they can figure things out. Journalism requires ambition and a confidence that you can be thrown into any story and you can figure out the path forward.

Charlotte Albright: Is that because the liberal arts are foundational at Dartmouth? Would you say that liberal arts are also foundational to journalism?

Geeta Anand: Yes, I think it's because the liberal arts are so strong at Dartmouth. I think they're foundational. I'm not saying you can't become a journalist without it, but if you do have that strong liberal arts education, it helps you so much with critical thinking and with just knowing a little about a lot of topics.

Charlotte Albright: So you're back, and we’re hoping you'll come to campus again. If you were to encounter students, for example, or maybe visit a class, have you thought about the sorts of advice that you might give students who, like yourself, want to make a difference in the world, perhaps through journalism? How should they get started?

Geeta Anand: This is self-serving entirely, but I would suggest they get started at small news publications where they can actually get involved in reporting stories and get to know communities well and understand how democracy works and be engaged with it. I think it's a

pathway toward any career, because you're learning so much about writing and gathering information and critical thinking. It’s also a pathway toward not being depressed at this moment in the world. It's a way to have a voice, not to feel like you're stuck and to really understand and appreciate our democracy.

Charlotte Albright: There are so many people in journalistic outlets these days who are lamenting the state of American democracy, and who worry aloud about the future of journalism. Are you one of them?

Geeta Anand: I'm an optimist. There are certainly lots of reasons to be worried, but I'm also a historian. There have been other moments in history similar to this. This isn't the most astonishing thing that ever happened. So having historical perspective is important, and then focusing locally, not getting distracted obsessively with what's happening at the national level. Certainly it's of concern, but it’s important to focus on what's happening in your town, in your city, in your state. There's so much else going on—so much constructive action. So I would say, get up. Focus on where you are. Stop ranting and raving about what's happening on the national scene and do something through journalism or through any other constructive activity.

Geeta Anand '89 is editor-in-chief of VTDigger and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She previously reported internationally for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Leading a More Compassionate Approach to Homelessness

By David Woody '77

The neighborhood where I grew up, in Lockport, N.Y., embraced powerful extremes. Families characterized as middle-class lived alongside those struggling to take care of basic needs, including having enough to eat. Our neighborhood was beset with various types of violence, and some families lacked the means to shield themselves from harm and manage the trauma left in its wake.

In the 1960s, federal policies such as urban renewal and school busing created deep neighborhood divisions. At the same time my father, a steel worker, became an advocate for low-income housing. That’s when I began to choose values I would embrace and try to live by, hoping, as my father did before me, to help make life better for other people. I am honored to say that there is in my hometown a housing complex named for my dad, honoring his passion for making shelter more affordable for his neighbors.

The desire to pursue social work grew from my Dartmouth experience, deepened by the critical thinking skills and inspirational mentoring I gained from coursework across several disciplines. At Dartmouth, I learned that building trust is foundational to empathetic service, and that healthy relationships are critical to launching vulnerable people on pathways to success that they create for themselves.

Working with the unhoused over the past 20 years has been a respectful pilgrimage, as I have grown to understand the multiple entries to becoming unsheltered, the external systems that complicate self-sufficiency, and patterns of trauma which can limit the ability to make good decisions. Creating an environment where change happens demands a mixture of leadership, vision, and access to resources needed for long-term transformation.

Because the shelter I shepherd in Dallas is a home for recovery and not simply a temporary space in which to prevail, our team encourages an unhoused individual, in a safe and secure environment, to contemplate “what might my exit from homelessness look like?” In addition to meals and clothing, our organization offers physical and mental health services, employment and educational programs, criminal justice support, and even kennel space for a companion canine. Our goal is to create and maintain an oasis of services in one space, with professional staff focused on empowerment. Helping guests carve out pathways toward homes of their own— that’s what we try to do every day.

Of equal concern is our surrounding community. The unsettling sight of people forced to live on the streets affects all the residents in our neighborhoods. Modeling compassion has grown to be extremely difficult in the current environment. This community-building work must remain a priority, so that those acquiring the tools to sustain a home of their own will be received as renewed and respected members of a shared society. That's why we commit ourselves to educating community members through presenting data, describing what success and failure look like, and offering tangible opportunities to become immersed in the experience of giving back.

Compassion is the tie that binds us all, as we repair and strengthen our fractured communities.

Not just where I live, but where you live, too.

is an advocate for citizens and social planners crafting strategies to reduce poverty in the greater Dallas community and implementing models that treat others with dignity and respect.

The Advocates

Reflections on a Career in Advocacy

By Janos Mar ton '04

A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, I was in a packed van driving through the night from Hanover to Washington, D.C. for the first march protesting the American invasion of Afghanistan. Students were barely back on campus after 9/11, and the protest trip came together so quickly that most of us were meeting for the first time. We didn’t know it then, but that van ride would spawn new campus organizations, romantic relationships, and lifelong fr iendships. For me, that anti-war protest was par t of a political awakening that led to a career in social justice advocacy

Growing up in New York City as a first-generation American, I was conscious of racial justice issues before I got to Dartmouth, but would never have pegged activism as a viable career path. Today I serve as the Chief Advocacy Officer of Dream.Org, a national nonprofit committed to closing prison doors and opening doors of opportunity. I oversee campaigns and programs relating to criminal justice reform, climate policy, and economic opportunity across the United States. There is no question that my four years at Dartmouth set me on the journey I’ve been on ever since, fighting for justice across the country.

At Dartmouth, I served as student body president, wrote for the Free Press (a long-defunct liberal alternative paper), organized with the Dartmouth Greens (a long-defunct lefty environmental group), and followed in the footsteps

David Woody III '77 is president and CEO of The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center in Dallas. He

From left, Jan Malcolm '77, David Woody '77, Corey Hirokawa '95, and John Brett '00 at the 2024 DCSI Breaking the Mold Conference

of many students before me, getting caught up in the excitement of the New Hampshire Presidential Primary. But those years weren’t just about hanging out with fellow leftist activists. I got a lot out of debating conservative students, whether on stage, in print, or during cocktail parties, those conversations sharpening my skills more than would have been possible on an entirely liberal campus. Even though I vehemently disagreed with what some of my conservative classmates believed, we shared a passion for politics and policy. The real challenge at Dartmouth was getting a sometimes apathetic majority to engage at all, which, these days, is also an obstacle to change in the "real" post-collegiate world.

Upon graduation, I stayed involved in organizing, my work taking me on adventures to places as far-flung as Mississippi, South Dakota, and Las Vegas. I returned home to earn a law degree, and used it to pursue civil rights and anti-corruption work. A decade ago I found my true calling in criminal justice advocacy, managing the Close Rikers campaign, shutting down the country’s most notorious jail complex. Since then I’ve worked at the ACLU, run for office, and been named to the national Council on Criminal Justice.

I think the 19-year-old student on that van ride would have been surprised, but pleased, to find out how things turned out. But for today's students passionate about advocacy, pursuing such a career is getting murkier. The legal industry, a longtime springboard into civil rights, is facing upheaval. Large philanthropic foundations, the main financial backers of nonprofit advocacy, are retreating in the face of political hostility. The move towards remote workspaces is making it harder for young professionals to learn from experienced colleagues. Even the New Hampshire primary, perfect for Dartmouth students interested in politics, is being phased out of relevance in 2028.

That said, students and young alums interested in advocacy should consider the advantages they have over preceding generations. Online community and 24-7 connection allows activists to find each other easily across the country, even the world. Centuries of history and decades of strategy are stored a few clicks away. And while social

"I say to students and young alums, trust your gut, and stay committed to what you believe in."

media contributes plenty of negativity to the world, it also allows individuals to build massive audiences (even monetize them) in furtherance of advocacy. For innovative young people, there’s less gatekeeping than ever to pursue their passions.

Expressing dissent in this country has always come with risk, and young people today feel that pressure, perhaps more acutely than ever. But American history has taught us that the sentiments of young protesters branded as

naively idealistic or radical often turn out to be morally righteous and the correct course of action in the rearview mirror. Standing by your values requires courage, patience, and the ability to find joy in resistance.

So I say to students and young alums, trust your gut, and stay committed to what you believe in. Brushing off a corporate life, with its instant six-figure salaries and promises of additional zeroes is easy enough when you're young and free. In the years to come, the tradeoffs may come to feel more real. But there is no price worth a clean conscience, a life lived to the fullest.

That's the energy that carried me through four years of Hanover, and keeps me moving today.

Janos Marton '04 is chief advocacy officer of Dream.Org and a longtime criminal justice reform leader. He also serves on DCSI’s board of advisors.

Reimagining a Better America

By Maya Wiley '86

This interview originally appeared as an online article for Dartmouth’s Call to Lead Campaign in 2021 under the title "Our Country Needs a Fundamental Reimagining."

A need for leadership in crisis

We need bold, transformational leaders—leaders who recognize that systemic racism in the U.S. goes much deeper than the police brutality we have seen and can reimagine a society that values everyone, especially the disadvantaged and oppressed. We also need leaders who will make those imaginings real.

Demonstrators across our country want fundamental change. That requires government and people sitting down and actually talking things through.

We also need to do a better job problem-solving together as a society. For example, on the topic of policing, we need to be willing to ask the questions, “If we had no police department, what would that look like? How would you feel safe? What does civilian-controlled policing look like?” Those are the questions that government should be asking, but is often afraid to ask real people.

Becoming an activist at Dartmouth

Looking back, Dartmouth absolutely shaped me as a leader. I spent my formative years in a large Black community in D.C. and went to an all-Black public school. The racism I encountered at Dartmouth was not something I had dealt with before. I remember the first

incident: I received the Dartmouth Review and it had an article that was a tirade against affirmative action. It basically said that if you didn’t have a certain SAT score, you were not qualified to be there and were lowering the quality of a Dartmouth education. Because of moments like that— passive aggression, aggressive-aggression—I thought about transferring. But I remember my mother reminding me, “You’re not leaving because you said this was something you had to learn to deal with.”

So I became active on campus. I joined the Afro-American Society. I helped found an all-Black sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement. I also had a terrific experience studying abroad, staying with a middle-class French family in Lyon who had very liberal views on race, in a place that had a lot of racial tension between the French and Algerians. But an important part of my social and emotional growth at Dartmouth was finding my support networks. The faculty were a huge part of my educational experience—they were also very supportive. I learned how to stay at Dartmouth, to remain true to what I cared about, and appreciate it as a positive growth experience. That is something I draw on all of the time. Because leadership is challenging.

Support in an Unlikely Place

I took a course with a politically-conservative professor, Rogers Elliott, in psychology called Law and Society. Professor Elliott was very conservative and we got into some major debates in class about affirmative action and whether white people are perfectly able to identify Black people appropriately at a criminal trial. We disagreed a lot, and he loved these debates. One day he told me, “I’m going to write one of your law school recommendations.” I didn’t ask him, he just did it. It was a wonderful surprise. Here was a white male conservative telling me this. That was incredible. Professor Elliott’s class taught me how to confront and maintain my sense of self and my values. He taught me a very important lesson: life is not always about agreement, and there are people in the world you can disagree with and still find a relationship with them. This lesson has guided me throughout my life.

Digital Equity

One real, immediate need this country has is better internet access, particularly for disadvantaged and immigrant communities. That need has been heightened during the pandemic. At The New School, I created the Digital Equity Laboratory so graduate students could engage in solutions to this problem, working with community and government partners. They worked on research and implementation projects in Detroit and New York with Black, Latino, and Asian communities to create what we call a “digital sanctuary” where people have broadband access.

You look at a city like Detroit, where there is a history of lack of investment because it’s a Black city. You see it clearly as you cross the city line and suddenly there’s no broadband. But you see people self-organizing to create community wireless networks and learning how to maintain them. In my earlier experience working on broadband access for

people of color as counsel to Mayor DeBlasio, we brought government together with the communities that were solving these problems themselves. These are solutions and conversations that don’t happen unless they’re organized.

Working with the NYPD and the public

One of my most rewarding and complex leadership experiences was chairing the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board for the New York Police Department. It is an independent oversight agency that reviews wrong or unfair. I had to really sit down and say, “All right. Let me think about whether that’s true.” It was very challenging, particularly when policing has so many issues and there was so little trust or relationship between police and the community. It was a great challenge to learn to build solutions around very charged issues. But in the end, what mattered most and could not be compromised was justice.

"To those who have been given much, much is expected."

This saying is core to me—it’s an ethos that both of my parents instilled in me. They showed me how important it is to put everything that has been given to you in action to make other people’s lives better.

This is the time we need leaders to take action. The demonstrations we’ve seen this past year show, I think, that people are demanding a more active, democratic conversation with government, to talk together to address inequity and racial injustice.

I am considering a run for mayor of New York because the world's greatest city deserves bold, transformational government. We need to create a New York where we can all afford to live with dignity. We do that by bringing more, and more diverse, voices to the table to be the city that has it all: all races, all religions, all types of people; where no matter who we are or how we see ourselves, we can find a home here in the city that never sleeps but always dreams. We can rise from the ashes of the twin pandemics of the coronavirus and of systemic racism by redesigning our programs and policies in ways that make them innovative and responsive to all of our communities.

I owe a lot to my Dartmouth experience. My time at Dartmouth taught me how to stay true to myself and my values. It also taught me how to build bridges with those with different perspectives. Maybe most importantly, my time at Dartmouth taught me the importance of drawing on the bonds of community to find strength, courage, and inspiration.

Maya Wiley '86 is president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights. A civil rights attorney and policy advocate, she was the first Black woman counsel to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and a 2021 mayoral candidate. Wiley also led the New School’s Digital Equity Laboratory.

Changemakers Gallery

The DCSI podcast, “All the Difference,” is for those interested in social-impact careers and what is happening at the cutting edge of addressing society’s greatest challenges. Our title is taken from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” in which he concludes, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Interpretations of that final line vary, but one thing is certain: There is more than one road to a meaningful destination. Through conversations with Dartmouth College alumni who have leveraged their professional lives for the common good, we chart what those roads can look like. Below are previous podcast guests, a gallery of Dartmouth changemakers.

Current Episodes:

Serving the public’s health with Jan Malcolm ’77

Bridging the gaps with David Woody ’77

Keeping the faith with John Brett ’00

Advocating for change with Janos Marton ’04

Developing community with Laura Gillespie ’86

Tech for good with Zak Kaufman ’08

Responding to health emergencies with John Lawrence ’76, MED ’80

Funding global health with Marc Sépama ’17

Conserving nature with Sue AnderBois ’05

Change through policy with Oliver Edelson ’18

Voting solar with Sean Garren ’07

Creating “good jobs” with Warren Valdmanis ’95

Building choice-filled lives with Alex Bernadotte ’92

Fighting energy poverty with Rose Mutiso ’08

Listen here

Sue AnderBois being interviewed by Henry Do Rosario

Illuminating a Bright Future for Social Impact and Public Service

From the pathways alumni have taken to drive concrete changes in the world, in this final section we move outward to examine big-picture ideas and trends shaping social impact work, and how they might guide us toward a better future.

Some thought leaders from the Dartmouth community comment on the frontiers of social innovation, impact investing, and technology. Others explore the evolving relationship between the private and public sectors. We conclude with a conversation between Senator Angus King Jr. ’66 and his son, Angus King III ’93, a candidate for governor of Maine in next year’s election, on what public service means in this fraught political moment.

We hope their wisdom and vision not only illuminate a brighter future but also inspire all of us to carry Dartmouth’s tradition of impact into the years ahead.

What’s Your Start Agenda?

By Jim Bildner '75

Effective change efforts, whether activist movements or social enterprises, must focus beyond just the problem or symptom they want to eliminate.

In 2017, sociology professor Kenneth Andrews argued in the New York Times that successful social movements needed to do three things well: create cultural awareness and draw attention to a problem ("stop energy"); disrupt things by socializing the change they seek to create, making it "more costly to support the status quo;" and organize the implementation of the desired change. Doing only one or two of these things, Andrews stated, will ultimately impair the movements' ability to create lasting change. As Liz McKenna, an assistant professor at Harvard's Kennedy School has emphasized, "Social movements often operate over years, decades. The most successful ones build a resilient community or ecology of organizations that can shift power over time rather than an episodic mass mobilization."

"In a time of ever-present societal challenges, human capital is often our most precious resource. "

Seven years later, social movements have for the most part proven this theory to be right. While it's never the intended outcome of those initiating "stop energy" efforts (a term first coined by Dave Winer), initiatives that only organize around the "stop" often end with that stage. Why? Stop energy is relatively easy to initiate because it doesn't require consensus on why something is bad. "Start energy," or what I refer to as a “start agenda,” is much harder because it requires agreement not only on what policy or action you dislike but also consensus on what should replace it. While we see this often in what political scientists refer to as "vetocracy" (defined by Thomas Friedman as "a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions"), the dynamic is less recognized in social movements.

While much research has focused on social movements' effectiveness, few have applied these same tactical requirements to social enterprises who must also do the same three things: identify what they want to stop; socialize receptivity for their solution to build adoption; and organize to implement these solutions at scale.

As investors assessing our portfolio, we spend considerable time understanding the problem an organization is trying to fix and the constraints they want to eliminate. We focus equally on what the organization sees as the solution and

who needs to adopt and fund it. These organizations know not only what they want to stop, but also what they want to replace it with, avoiding the trap of just focusing on stopping something.

Social movements and enterprises that merely focus on the symptom they want to eliminate—whether homelessness, inequity in criminal justice, or health access—rarely can replace the condition they want to stop. While they bring attention to the problem, they often fail to deliver a lasting alternative solution.

One clear example of combining stop energy with a start agenda is Worth Rises, which describes itself as “a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches.” Targeting the predatory correctional telecom industry, they targeted their stop energy on Securus, a web-based visitation system which charged incarcerated individuals as much as $1 per minute for phone calls. They pressured the company directly and, through their investor base, effectively forced the company to default on over a billion dollars in debt, putting its future in jeopardy.

Worth Rises' success came from their simultaneous approach to their start agenda. Building on early wins in New York City and San Francisco, they ignited a trend in state legislatures to outlaw punitive telecom rates and provide free communication services in state prisons. Five states have now passed such legislation. Worth Rises also advocated for the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, expanding the FCC's authority to regulate the correctional telecom industry. The new regulations are expected to save incarcerated people and their families over $500 million annually.

Other nonprofits have focused on reducing homelessness. While many past efforts targeted officials to stop homelessness, few detailed a start agenda. DignityMoves and Pallet are equipping cities with housing alternatives beyond simply banning encampments. DignityMoves provides solutions that include sourcing capital for construction of interim emergency housing and identifying wraparound case management services. Pallet helps cities deploy emergency housing and employs a workforce who has experienced homelessness, designing "villages" that accelerate transition to permanent housing and employment.

Another example, Recidiviz, dedicated to reducing incarceration, decided to pursue alternatives to traditional prison reform advocacy approaches. Instead, it works with state corrections agencies to build software that identifies individuals ready for safe release and streamlines the paperwork, helping corrections staff move eligible people through the system efficiently. Their data-driven start agenda works with agencies motivated by staffing shortages or shrinking budgets. This fidelity to the start agenda— implementing solutions regardless of the sponsor's motivation—illustrates what Andrews described as the power of building an imagined organizational culture and capacity to create real change.

In a time of ever-present societal challenges, human capital is often our most precious resource. Deploying it intentionally means thinking through all three of Andrews' requisite tasks—the stop energy to focus on the problem, the alternative solution to replace what you stop, and a clear sense of who needs to adopt the solution. Anything short of this may not have the impact you want, and worse, it might perpetuate the very thing you want to stop.

Editor’s note: A longer version of this article by the author appeared originally in the online publication of the Stanford Social Innovation Review under the title “What’s Your Start Agenda?” on Sept. 10, 2024.

Jim Bildner '75 is CEO of Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and adjunct lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School, focusing on private capital's role in public challenges.

From Hype Cycles to Enduring Value

By Warren Valdmanis '95 and Michael O’Leary

Sometimes, victory tastes like defeat.

When we began our work in impact investing a decade ago, there were two sides to the debate. One side believed in impact. The other in the invisible hand.

One side—the side we were joining—believed that investors should target both financial return and positive social and environmental impact. The other believed that investors should remain focused solely on profits, trusting the invisible hand of the market to handle the rest. To them, meddling with business for broader social or environmental concerns was sacrilegious to capitalism and borderline un-American.

Today, the debate is not so clear.

Both political parties now engage in heavy-handed industrial policy. Both parties use subsidies, taxes, tariffs, and investments to shift the economy around the impacts they care about: lower prices, better jobs, AI dominance, fewer emissions, domestic manufacturing, more traditional energy, outcompeting China. We may debate what impacts matter most, but we’re rarely debating whether companies have impact worth focusing on.

The astonishing rise and sudden fall of the broader sustainable investing movement over the last decade has masked this deeper change: The invisible hand is dead.

And yet the United Nations still estimates a funding gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of roughly $30 trillion. Whatever we’ve accomplished by winning this debate, it’s taken us only a hair closer to closing this gap.

Over the past decade, the two of us have helped launch five different impact investment businesses. We experienced many successes, but also booms, busts, and a lot of hard lessons. Here’s one: The future of impact investing is no longer about winning debates. It’s about building better companies.

The Easy Part: Boom and Bust

From 2015 to 2020, the amount of money flowing into sustainable investment funds skyrocketed, from less than $20 billion per year to more than $150 billion globally. But by 2025, those flows had reversed, with investors pulling over $50 billion out of sustainable funds annually. Assets in sustainable funds have shrunk by more than a third from their peak.

Why? Because most of this money went into funds with a weak theory of change and an even weaker investment thesis.

A vast majority of all sustainable investments have relied upon some version of screening. Decide your filters—no to coal, yes to renewables, yes to more women on boards —and presto: an “impact portfolio.” For many investors— and their financial advisors, who profited from the shift— that scratched the itch.

But as we wrote in our book, "Accountable: The Rise of Citizen Capitalism," this approach does more to lower the carbon emissions in your portfolio than in the atmosphere. At best, it rearranges existing capital as you sell shares to some other investor. At worst, it creates the illusion of progress while real problems fester.

If a weak theory of change explains part of the declining interest in sustainable funds, the bigger driver is more familiar: performance chasing. In 2019 and 2020, ESG funds outperformed broad benchmarks by three to five percentage points. Investors rushed in. But when interest rates rose and energy prices spiked, fossil-heavy portfolios surged while many ESG funds lagged. Investors rushed out.

Sustainable investing may get moralized, but it follows the same pattern as every other theme. When performance is up, money floods in. When it dips, money heads for the exits. This doesn’t mean the underlying ideas are flawed— it just means markets are prone to hype cycles.

The lesson isn’t to abandon impact investing. It’s to remember that if impact investing is a thesis on how to build great companies, then we must stop mistaking passive screening and performance chasing for long-term value creation.

The Hard Part: Building Better Companies

The real work of impact investing is in building and transforming companies. And that requires three things: innovation, time, and leadership.

1.Innovation

A nice mission that doesn’t generate cash is philanthropy, not investing.

So how can a company compete in a cutthroat market if it has all these other social and environmental concerns? How can it just pay workers more without it hurting profits? How can it sell “greener” products that cost more or are inferior to traditional alternatives? The answer is simple: It can’t.

That’s where innovation must come in.

The companies worth backing are those powered by some impact-driven innovation that allows them to outcompete—delivering products that are better, faster, cheaper—while also driving positive impact.

Increasing wages must be paired with other workforce programs that improve productivity and retention in order to ultimately drive greater long-term profit. Greener products must outcompete alternatives on the purchasing criteria consumers already care most about —it’s got to be greener but also cheaper. Or last longer, taste better, or drive faster.

Impact investing works when companies use innovation to embed impact deep into their core value proposition.

2.Time

Reaping the rewards of this innovation, however, can take time. The right way to maximize near-term profits may in fact be a style of slash-and-burn management. But if you care about building enduring value— financial and social—you need patience.

For years, impact investors have been dogged by the claim that companies must make a trade-off between short-term profits and impact. We can now say definitively that they do. But it’s the same trade-off companies make between short-term profits and funding new research, building a new factory, or hiring new talent. It’s the trade-off between sure cash now and more—but less certain—cash in the future. It’s the trade-off of investing.

Unfortunately, markets can chronically undervalue long-term benefits of any type, especially if they seem to have a social or environmental aim. Thinking in terms of impact is, at bottom, about enforcing a long-term lens that gives time for impact-driven innovation to bear fruit.

3.Leader ship

Over the last decade, impact was more often said than done.

Even as companies put out hundred-page Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports and signed net-zero pledges, they rarely made the significant long-term investments required to transform themselves around impact-driven innovation.

Metrics matter. Incentives matter. But leadership matters more. Without leaders who truly believe in impact and build their companies around it, frameworks become games to be hacked and

sustainability just one more passing fad to tout when it’s hot and toss when it’s not.

The investors who succeed will be those who can identify, back, and support leaders with real conviction and staying power.

The Next Chapter

Hype cycles come and go. The future lies in building better companies with the conviction of authentic leaders, the patience of long-term capital, and the power of innovation to marry profit and impact.

This is the charge facing the next generation of leaders coming through universities or climbing the corporate ladder today. Forget the invisible hand. If they can harness the power of capitalism and direct it with discipline and purpose, it will be through their hands that we forge an economy that is more sustainable, equitable, and prosperous.

Michael O’Leary is an impact investor and co-author of "Accountable: The Rise of Citizen Capitalism." He was previously an investor at Bain Capital, Engine No. 1, and L Catterton.

Warren Valdmanis '95 is a social impact investor, co-author of "Accountable: The Rise of Citizen Capitalism" and founder of Future of Work Partners, a valued internship site for DCSI students. He also serves on the DCSI’s Board of Advisors.

The Role of Markets and Government in Social Impact

Dartmouth Social Impact Review's conversation with Andre w Samwick and Charles Whee lan This conversation has been edited for length.

DSIR: How should governments and private markets work together to improve welfare?

Samwick: You don’t find prosperity without thriving private markets. Markets are very good at combining capital, labor, and land to meet human needs in ways that maximize efficiency. They create incentives for innovation, drive productivity growth, and channel resources to where they can be used most effectively. But markets on their own are not enough. They can’t deliver redistributive outcomes. They don’t solve free rider problems, when individuals benefit without contributing to the cost of services and resources. Nor do they account for externalities like pollution. That’s why we need vibrant public institutions alongside markets—to provide public goods, enforce

sensible regulations, and ensure fair taxation. Without that, the benefits of markets will be unevenly distributed.

Wheelan: Yes, and governments do things markets simply cannot. They set the rules of the game. Think about enforcing property rights or levying taxes: No private actor can credibly take that on. The profit motive is incredibly powerful. It’s what gives us extraordinary innovation: smartphones, new medicines, logistics systems that connect the world. But the same profit motive can be dangerous. If the rules aren’t clear, firms will offload costs onto society. That’s why you need referees. Done right, markets and governments complement one another. Done poorly, you get monopolies, corruption, or inequality that undermines social trust.

DCIR: Where do you see markets falling short?

Wheelan: Externalities—when some private behavior imposes a public cost—are the textbook example. If you can dump waste into the river and save money, you will— unless someone stops you. That’s why the Cuyahoga River once caught fire. Carbon emissions are the ultimate externality: The costs are borne by the planet, but the benefits are captured privately. Markets on their own will not solve climate change. It’s the classic collective action problem. Another area is information asymmetry. Consumers simply can’t know everything they need to make informed choices, whether that’s the safety of a new drug or the solvency of a bank. In those cases, government has to step in.

Samwick: I would add that the nature of contracts is crucial here. Markets function beautifully when contracts can clearly specify what’s expected. For building a road, you can outline quality standards and hold the contractor accountable. But for something like running a prison, it’s much harder. How do you measure humane treatment? How do you capture the long-term social costs of incarceration? Private provision becomes far more problematic in those cases.

DSIR: What innovations excite you at the intersection of markets and government?

Samwick: Social impact bonds are one interesting experiment. They try to align private incentives with public outcomes. The challenge is measurement. If you can define the outcome precisely and hold the private provider accountable, you can potentially harness private capital for public good. But if you can’t measure impact well, the model falls apart.

Wheelan: I’d point to infrastructure. Governments are fiscally constrained, and yet infrastructure is fundamental and often has built-in revenue streams—like tolls, water fees, or electricity payments—that can attract private capital. With the right regulatory oversight, private investment can play a huge role in modernizing infrastructure. We already see this in public-private partnerships. Of course, the details matter. If the rules are poorly written, you risk either gouging consumers or saddling taxpayers with losses.

DSIR: Why can’t markets alone ensure something like

airline safety?

Samwick: Because markets don’t naturally coordinate complex systems at scale when the risks are catastrophic. With airlines, the FAA sets uniform rules so that safety doesn’t become a point of competition. Without regulation, one airline might cut corners, putting pressure on others to do the same, and eventually you have a race to the bottom. That’s not acceptable when lives are at stake.

Wheelan: I don’t want to personally assess the airworthiness of a plane before boarding. Consumers can’t evaluate those risks themselves. That’s why you need referees with real authority. It’s not anti-market to say that —on the contrary, regulation in this case makes the market viable. Without safety standards, consumer trust would collapse and the airline industry wouldn’t function at all.

DSIR: Should government be run like a business?

Samwick: In their financial operations, governments are fundamentally about collecting and reallocating resources. The goal is redistribution in ways that improve on the status quo. Efficiency matters, yes, but government is not a business. It doesn’t exist to maximize profit; it exists to improve collective welfare.

Wheelan: Governments aren’t businesses. But, like businesses, governments need clear strategies, priorities, and efficient operations. Where possible, governments should contract with private providers for specific, measurable services—like plowing snow or running a municipal golf course. But we should not confuse the mission. Government’s purpose is broader: It’s about creating the conditions for markets to thrive and society to prosper.

DSIR: How have your views evolved over time?

Wheelan: Over the years, I’ve grown more impressed by the dynamism of markets. During COVID, supply chains proved remarkably resilient, delivering goods under extraordinary pressure. That was the private sector at its best. But I’ve also become more troubled by persistent failures: homelessness in wealthy countries, climate inaction despite overwhelming evidence, widening inequality. These are problems markets alone won’t solve. That realization has made me more appreciative of the role government must play in setting the rules.

Samwick: I came of age during the Reagan era, when the mantra was that markets solve most problems and government is often the problem. That mantra started us on a path toward removing government not only from market activities where its actions might be harmful but also from its more fundamental role of setting and enforcing sensible rules for market structure and conduct. What we’ve learned is that political dysfunction can be just as damaging as market failure. I’ve become more skeptical that government can get even the basics –budget and regulatory policy – right.

DSIR: Would you both agree that however markets or government function at a given moment, individuals have power to drive social change? If so, what advice would you give Dartmouth students who want to create impact?

Wheelan: First, get involved in politics. If you care about climate change, health care, or inequality, you need to be part of shaping the rules. Politics is messy and frustrating, but it’s where the big levers are. Second, don’t demonize the private sector. The clothes you wear, the medicines you take—all of that comes from private enterprise. Markets provide enormous good. Recognize that and work to improve them.

Samwick: My advice is to be intellectually broad and collaborative. The problems we face are complex and interdisciplinary. You won’t solve them alone. Build networks, learn to work across boundaries, and don’t be afraid to take on challenges that require collective action. The real progress comes when people bring different perspectives and expertise together.

DSIR: Looking ahead, what gives you optimism?

Samwick: What gives me hope is that thriving markets remain a constant source of prosperity. They are necessary, though not sufficient, for human flourishing. If we can maintain the vitality of markets while strengthening our institutions, there is enormous potential for progress.

Wheelan: I’m optimistic because we’ve only scratched the surface of what the private sector can do to solve public challenges. With better rules and smarter regulation, markets can be an extraordinary force for good. We just need the political will to set those rules.

Andrew Samwick is the Sandra L. and Arthur L. Irving ’72a, P’10, professor of economics, former director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center, and former chair of the Department of Economics.

intelligence” was coined by Dartmouth mathematician John McCarthy, and the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a two-month workshop, laid the foundations and set the agenda for AI research for ensuing decades. In the 1960s, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System and the computer language BASIC, which enabled students in non-scientific fields to program computers.

Many decades later, the Susan and James Wright Center for the Study of Computation and Just Communities was founded to continue Dartmouth’s tradition of innovation in computing and artificial intelligence by examining the social, political, and environmental impacts of new computer technologies. Launched in 2023, it was created by a generous gift from Sally and William Neukom ’64, who named it in honor of their dear friends, the late James Wright, the 16th president of Dartmouth, and Susan DeBevoise Wright.

I was delighted to be appointed the inaugural director of the center which, in the past two years, has emerged as a hub for interdisciplinary research and teaching about some of the most urgent moral and social challenges facing us in the digital age. I had the great privilege of knowing Bill Neukom, who, sadly, recently passed away. He was a true visionary who cared deeply about global justice, thought creatively about how to foster it, and dedicated his life to bringing about more equitable and just communities. His passing is a deep loss, but his legacy will live on in the students we support, the cutting-edge research we pursue, and the values we champion.

Charles Wheelan is faculty director of Dartmouth’s Center for Business, Government, and Society, and founded Unite America, which works to foster government bipartisanship.

AI: Both Friend and Foe to Just Communities?

By Susan Brison

At Dartmouth, innovation in computation and artificial intelligence has deep roots. In fact, the term “artificial

In an era when computer technologies are reshaping every facet of life—medicine, law, communication, governance —the Wright Center is asking probing questions. What are the social impacts of these new technologies? What are people around the world getting out of these technological advances? Who is benefitting? Who is being harmed? The benefits of AI are incalculable, but so are the harms, and, at this stage of development, neither the benefits nor the harms are distributed equally. If some people are getting their labor exploited while others, mainly those of us in the U.S., are benefiting enormously from all these new tools, what can be done to address these inequalities?

To answer such urgent questions, and to brainstorm solutions to pressing problems, we are bringing faculty and students together in a wide variety of ways. The center has been organizing public lectures and faculty workshops while integrating this programming into new courses that place ethical reasoning at the center of technical education, inviting students—many of them computer science and engineering majors—to confront the moral dimensions of the technologies they will go on to design and deploy. Such courses grapple with urgent issues such as free speech online, cyberharassment, surveillance, and algorithmic injustice. Students learn that while algorithms are often touted as neutral tools that remove human bias, in practice they can entrench inequalities by reinforcing stereotypes based on race, gender, and other categories.

Because the impacts of AI know no boundaries, the Wright Center’s reach extends far beyond Dartmouth’s campus into global policy and justice debates. At the World Justice Forum in June 2025, I participated in a panel titled “AI and the Rule of Law,” raising questions about how AI might be harnessed to support democracy and justice, and exploring possible incentives for the tech industry to prioritize these aims. The center has also hosted faculty workshops, including one called “The Personal and the Computational,” which brought together scholars from around the world to examine how digital technologies intersect with the most intimate dimensions of human life: identity, selfhood, speech, and agency.

I come to this work from an academic background in philosophy, which is often regarded as a highly abstract discipline, unconnected with daily life and the problems of actual human beings. But in my view, philosophy provides us with invaluable tools for critically evaluating problems in the real world and imaginatively envisioning solutions to them. Of course, problems concerning the social impact of AI are impossible to tackle without engaging with my colleagues in computer science. Neither can computer scientists and engineers address them without talking to their colleagues in humanities and in the social sciences.

Mark Zuckerberg’s motto for Facebook, until 2014, was “Move Fast and Break Things.” The explicit call to break things has since been dropped, but the imperative to “move fast” survives as Meta’s motto, defined by Zuckerberg in 2022, as "acting with urgency and not waiting until next week to do something you could do today.” At Meta’s scale, he continued, “This also means continuously working to increase the velocity of our highest priority initiatives by methodically removing barriers that get in the way."

Removing barriers sounds more constructive—at least to me—than breaking things. But sometimes we need to wait more than a week, or a month, or a year, to anticipate the damage that might come along after the barriers are removed. As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of Dartmouth’s workshop laying the groundwork for the transformative effects and untold potential of AI, let us also investigate and acknowledge the challenges unbridled technology may pose to our most cherished values. That, too, is foundational to the mission of a liberal arts institution.

Susan J. Brison is Dartmouth’s Susan and James Wright Professor of Computation and Just Communities, and professor of philosophy. She also directs the Wright Center for the Study of Computation and Just Communities.

How Can Public Service Weather Turbulent Times?

A conversation with Sen. Angus King Jr. '66 and Angus King III '93

Their conversation has been edited for length.

Angus King III: What is it that drove you to serve?

Angus King Jr.: When I was a teenager, John F. Kennedy was elected president. And one of the things he said that stuck with me was, “From those to whom much is given, much is required.” As I learned later, that's a quote from the Bible, from the gospel of Luke. The other quote that I remember from him in those days is “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” And I was imbued with the idea that public service was cool, exciting, and ultimately satisfying because you were doing something for other people. And that’s what I've tried to do in various capacities throughout my life.

Angus King III: I started with a similar quote. My boss at the White House often said that once you've been able to make your family warm, you need to contribute to the community wood pile. And I've always thought that that was a great way of thinking about the world. And when you're fortunate in the education that you've received and the career that you've had, you need to look around and see how you can contribute back, and that's what's driving me today.

Angus King Jr.: And one of the difficulties and problems I have in the current environment is a decline in respect for public service. People who dedicate their lives to serving others, whether they're answering the phone at the Social Security Administration or serving in the military or trying to take care of disabled veterans—these are public servants. And the word servant is there for a reason. And we're at a time now where it seems the philosophy that's being pursued is “Every man for himself. And if you waste time working for other people, you're some kind of sucker.” I hate that attitude.

Angus King III: Agreed. I think one of the challenges of our time is the cynicism that has crept in, or been injected in so that people don’t believe our essential institutions do any good for anybody. The reality is, government is just the response to and execution of our collective needs, doing good things for people, doing the things that fundamentally we can't do as individuals. We are stronger as a community when the foundation is that we're all in this together.

Angus King Jr.: One really interesting way to look at this is to go back in history to about 1910 when the federal government used about 8% of GDP. Today, it's a little over 20.

What were the big problems in 1910? Elderly people in poverty, children working in factories, factories treating rivers as open sewers. All of those things ultimately were fixed by government. And the people who say, well, we believe in helping other people, but it's only through private charity? The truth is, that's what 1910 looked like, and it wasn't a very pretty picture.

Angus King III: There are limits to private charity. I mean, philanthropy is a huge and important part of how we take care of each other and our communities, but it can only go so far. And, fundamentally, government is there to do the things that we cannot do either as individuals or through a philanthropic activity. And, philanthropy isn't going to pave the roads, isn't going to pick up the garbage, and it isn't going to take care of people when they're old or sick or hungry.

Angus King Jr.: That's why public service is so important, though it shouldn't be seen as the whole answer either. In other words, I don't like it if somebody says, well, government can do all this. I mean, there's a place for private service. And by the way, you don't have to be in the government to be doing public service. You can be working for a nonprofit. You can be raising money for the children's cancer program.

Angus King III: Let’s talk for a minute about polarization right now, and how it’s driving us further and further from solutions that would work for a majority of Americans. I think it probably starts with gerrymandering, which obviously has been around for a long time, but seems to be on an accelerating curve, with what people just did in Texas with a mid-season adjustment, and other states following suit. That drives people to a place where they've got to be as conservative or as liberal as they possibly could be depending on their district. And you end up with people who are rewarded only for being as partisan as possible, and are punished for being in the middle, for being seen to compromise. Not long ago there were around 100 congressional seats that were tossups; today it’s less than 20, and that makes any sort of compromise solution harder and harder to reach.

Angus King Jr.: I agree with that. And I want to follow-up because what I see in Congress is the primary system, whether it's Democratic or Republican, tends to favor those who favor the base. It's difficult for a moderate to win a primary, without paying close attention to who it is that's going to vote in the primary. And nationwide, the average turnout in a primary is 21 percent of the voters in that party. Who is that 21 percent? On the Democratic side, they're going to be the most progressive. On the Republican side, they're going to be the most MAGA. And the result is, and I've seen this in the Congress, you get people who come here, and they are worried about losing a primary, not because of their position on abortion or gun control or gay rights or whatever, but because they're viewed as not sufficiently hostile to the other side. You can lose your primary if you're viewed as someone who tries to solve problems and listen to the other side. That's a very dangerous place, and it results in a situation

such as we had this year in the Congress where there was no bipartisanship whatsoever.

Angus King III: We’ve spoken about the importance of education and institutions. Let's talk a little bit about the one that we share, Dartmouth College, and the role that higher education can play in civic life. I remember sitting one evening in Rocky when Mike Dukakis came to speak to our class and talk about not just the presidential campaign, but really the importance of public service. He was wonderful.

Angus King Jr.: And if he'd been half as good in the presidential campaign as he was in that class, he would have been president.

Angus King III: He'd have been president twice. It's that kind of exposure to people like that, people who are genuinely inspirational, that is such a key part of a Dartmouth education. The opportunity to engage with people like that, the opportunity to see the New Hampshire primary every four years and get to know different presidential candidates, but then understand the practice and theory from your professors alongside—that kind of education is, I think, irreplaceable and an opportunity that Dartmouth really has, to build a new generation of folks who get engaged and make a real difference in public service.

Angus King Jr.: Well, what I hope Dartmouth doesn't lose touch with is the importance of teaching. The importance of professors who engage with the students, who stimulate their thinking.

Angus King III: Clearly, we're both lucky to have been there.

Senator Angus King Jr. '66 is Maine’s independent U.S. senator focusing on national security, clean energy, rural broadband, and opioid crisis solutions.

Angus King III '93 is a renewable energy executive focused on solar, wind, and natural gas. He previously worked in affordable housing and the Clinton White House. He is currently running for governor of Maine.

Photographed by Xioran (Seamore) Zhu '19. Sen. Angus King Jr. meets with Dartmouth students

We’re grateful for all the partners in impact that enable DCSI to realize its mission of educating Dartmouth students to be transformative leaders for the common good. All of our initiatives are supported in one way or another by the generosity and expertise of individual alumni and alumni classes. We thank them for sharing our passion for supporting the next generation of changemakers. Our work would also not be possible without the talent of our amazing staff team and alumni advisory board members listed below. They are the real levers turning passion into action for our students.

Current DCSI Staff – Anna Leversee, Beck Waghorne, Cass North, Chloe Jung ’23, Henry Do Rosario, Madeleine LaPenta, Nancy Gabriel, Sai Waters, Tracy Dustin-Eichler ’79a, and Tyler Dobson.

2025-26 DCSI Advisory Board Members – Alejandro Cruz ’04, Andrew Marino ’91, Chitra Narasimhan ’92, Janos Marton ’04, Jennifer Kochman Marrus ’89 (Chair), Meridith Sopher ’92 P’28, Michael Berger ’14, Michelle Davis ’92 P’23, Pamela Donovan Gehret ’81 P’11, Pam Haering ’87 P’24, Robin Shaffert ’82, Stephanie Welsch-Lewin ’88 P’17 THP ’17 P’20, Todd Gomez ’86, Warren Valdmanis ’95, and Zachary Kaufman ’08.

We also extend gratitude to our students, who challenge us and bring us hope each day. In them we see the possibilities and promise of a more equitable future.

Finally, we thank the hundreds of community agencies and partners at the heart of our work, along with the thousands of dedicated changemakers across the globe that are working every day to create sustainable, thriving, and just communities.

Thank you for reading.

Stay connected and get involved by contacting us at center.for.social.impact@dartmouth.edu.

Photo by Robert Gill. Jesse Rowland ’29, Yankai Wen ’28, and Mubeen Chaudhary ’29 prepare apple crates at Riverview Farm in Plainfield, N.H., as part of the farm hopping trip. They spent the afternoon helping out at the farm, which is near the Connecticut River two towns south of Hanover, and where they were also camping.