Week of Action Events in Vermont

Castleton State College, Castleton:

• Student forum “Students Being Heard” – opportunity for students to raise concerns and issues on both the campus and the larger community. A Student Action Delegation created the afternoon of the forum will follow this up. (Estimate 250 participants)
• The Student Action Delegation will meet at a dinner and creation a presentation for the Castleton Town hall meeting on March 10th. (Delegation size of 12 or so)
• Delegation will be in conversation with the student body through a section of the student newspaper that will be the “Students Being Heard” page for continued action on campus and in the larger community.

Middlebury College:

Events planned by the Social Action winter workshop.

Southern Vermont College:

Hunger Banquet followed by speaker panel/conversation, educational poster campaign, and student meal donation drive. Sponsored by the Office of Service Learning, the Global Issues class and the Community Service Club. This will be the campuses first Hunger Banquet and will be followed by a conversation about how hunger relates directly the local community of Bennington, VT.

University of Vermont:

• Over 150 students, faculty and staff from various departments within the University of Vermont will be spending a day serving the Burlington community. Work will range from organizing and clean-up at local non-profits to working with youth and senior citizens, to painting and construction with community agencies. In addition to the hands-on work that these volunteers will be doing, the event will also include a key-note address on the topic of civic engagement above and beyond the act of community service, and representatives from local agencies will be educating volunteers on the political and social forces that affect their work and the clients they serve. Following the event, participants will return to campus for lunch and a formal reflection on the
work they have done and the agencies with which they have served. For more information, contact: Carrie Williams, Graduate Assistant for Community Service, UVM Office of Student Life, Carol.Williams@uvm.edu

• Engaging the UVM Community: Civility, Service and Dialogue –
A meeting of students from 15 of the major student organizations on campus that have been involved in contentious, heated, public attacks on each other and on the work of the student groups. This is the first in what hopes to be a series of dinners to bring together students involved in this very tense situation on campus. The dinner hopes to begin conversations to allow students to see some commonality and to create an action plan designed to address the issues raised at the dinner. Additional resources are being brought in to sustain the program.

• UVM and Burlington: Creating a Sustainable Community -
A committee consisting of a sustainable community development class, additional interested students, faculty, student groups and community members, have create the beginnings of a visual plan for UVM to become an international leader as an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable university. The visual plan was originally created as a service-learning project of a sustainable development class. The visual map as already been distributed on campus with a method for collecting student input on the plan. The second stage of the plan will be unveiled during RYV week and will include a public policy forum style dialogue to maximize student knowledge and input outside of the students and student groups already involved in the creation of the plan. This event will be the kickoff for a series of presentations ranging from classes to the university President’s office to the mayor’s office and including a state-wide campus greening conference at UVM in April. For more information, contact: Carrie Williams, Graduate Assistant for Community Service, UVM Office of Student Life, Carol.Williams@uvm.edu