Stay up-to-date with the latest happenings, initiatives, and community involvement opportunities. Explore our diverse range of events, news articles, and updates as we strive to promote active citizenship and foster meaningful connections within our community.
Learn, Serve, Grow: Welcoming Sewanee’s New Students through Service and Community Building
This August, Sewanee launched an innovative First Year Experience (FYE) program, deepening students' connections to each other, mentors, and the community. The Office of Civic Engagement led the "Learn, Serve, Grow" track, where first-year students immersed themselves in service projects with local partners, like Mountain T.O.P. and Sleep in Heavenly Peace.
Students Award $30,000 Through Community-Based Grantmaking Process
This semester, students in CIVC 400: Capstone in Collaborative Change partnered with the South Cumberland Community Fund to lead a hands-on grantmaking process, awarding $30,000 to nonprofits across the South Cumberland Plateau. Students reviewed applications, conducted on-site interviews with community leaders, and worked collaboratively to make funding decisions. Grants supported eight organizations addressing critical needs such as housing, healthcare access, food systems, emergency response, and youth engagement. The experience culminated in a community celebration breakfast at St. Mary’s Sewanee, where students presented awards and reflected on how the process reshaped their understanding of philanthropy and community-led change.
Cultivating Dialogue: From Classrooms to Communities
Amid growing division on campuses nationwide, Sewanee’s Dialogue Across Difference Program continues to create spaces for meaningful, transformative dialogue. During the Advent 2025 term, the program advanced this work through courses, workshops, national symposiums, and student leadership initiatives grounded in Director Dr. Lydia Reinig’s scholarship on public dialogue and deliberation. Highlights included Dr. Reinig’s invitation to present at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Leadership Symposium, expanded collaboration with the School of Theology, and student participation in the national SNF Ithaca Dialogue on civil discourse. Through initiatives such as Indigenous Talking Circles, Dialogue Ambassadors, and upcoming Dinner & Dialogue events, the program demonstrates how listening across difference strengthens community and helps build a shared future.
From Sewanee to the World: 9 Outreach Journeys of Service & Community Building
To say our University outreach trips are transformative experiences is an understatement. For decades now, Sewanee students, faculty, and staff have ventured out into new communities to work on short-term service projects while also working to build long-term relationships. Our outreach trips during the 2024-2025 academic year were no exception. New trips and new communities were added, while teams returned to communities that feel like family.
Empowering Students Through Community-Engaged Learning
Another cohort of Community Engagement Learning (CE-L) Faculty Fellows collaborated during 2024-2025 to continue strengthening the connections between Sewanee and the broader community. With support from OCE, the Bonner Foundation, The McCrickard Fund, and the Office of the Chaplain, Max Dahlquist (Geology), Eric Ezell (Environmental Studies), Lucía García-Santana (Spanish), and Clarissa Peterson (Politics) each taught a course with a CE-L component, devised a project to support CEL on campus, and engaged in dialogue with the Faculty Fellows for Purpose and Career.
Cultivating Connection Through Dinner & Dialogue
In today’s fast-paced world, where schedules dominate and distractions are endless, the simple act of sharing a meal and engaging in meaningful conversation has become a rare gift. At Sewanee, Dinner & Dialogue is designed to rekindle the power of connections—one plate and one conversation at a time.
Class of 2026 Bonners and Canales Search for Solutions to Social Problems
In November of 2018, the Bonner Foundation introduced a new set of student workshops to the Bonner network meant to bring “a more comprehensive understanding of civic and community engagement.”
The following spring, our Bonner and Canale Juniors (C’20) completed the first set of issue briefs, setting the stage for our students to see and engage with research and analysis as a deep form of service. Fast forward to 2025, and the current class of Bonner and Canale Juniors (C’26) collaborated on four issue brief topics.
2025 MLK Day of Service
When the Sewanee community commits to coming together to build community and do good work, nothing will stop them, not even frigid temperatures of ten degrees with wind chills well below zero!
Imagining CE-L: Projects and Ideas Within and Beyond the Gates
Aligned with the vision of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual curiosity and provides the tools to offer answers to major problems, community-engaged learning (CE-L) is a potent instrument for individual and collective growth. More and more Sewanee colleagues have embarked on this adventure in recent years, designing CE-L courses that have moved faculty and students across campus to expand their participation on and beyond the Domain.
Dialogue Across Difference Program Updates from Fall 2024
The Dialogue Across Difference Program (DxD) continues its work infusing opportunities for meaningful dialogue across campus and equipping students with skills to have constructive conversations. The Advent 2024 semester was a busy time for DxD.
Carey Fellows Participate in Community-Engaged Learning Course
During Advent 2024, the Carey Fellow Junior Cohort (C' 26) completed a 5-week consulting project with Housing Hub TN. The purpose of this affordable housing study was to deliver analysis and findings to inform organizations working to expand affordable housing opportunities on the South Cumberland Plateau.
During Advent 2024, the capstone course for the Certificate in Civic and Global Leadership, taught by Politics Professor and OCE Director Amy Patterson, took a different form. Instead of students completing a consultancy report for a community partner, students worked with their community partner to write a grant for capacity building for their organization. (All students were Bonner/Canale students who had served at a site for several terms.)
The interdisciplinary Certificate in Civic and Global Leadership began in 2017. Over time, it faced challenges with enrollment, focus, and student interest. As a result, a group of faculty and OCE staff met during Spring and Summer 2024 to propose revisions to the certificate. These were approved by the Curriculum and Academic Committee during fall 2024.
For the second year in a row, the Office of Civic Engagement, specifically the outreach & service-away programs, was excited to offer a Finding Your Place (FYP) class for first-year students at Sewanee. FYP students arrived two weeks before other first-year students in order to immerse themselves in learning about self, place, and what it means to live, work, and serve in community. The program teaches students to think critically about how each of us fits into, affects, and is affected by the different places in our lives.
The ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge (ALL IN) recognized The University of the South for its nonpartisan democratic engagement efforts that fostered high levels of student voter engagement in the 2022 midterm elections. The University of the South received the highest voter registration for a 4-year institution in 2022 in the Tennessee campus voting challenge, reflecting its commitment to ensuring that nonpartisan democratic engagement is a defining feature of campus life.
The Office of Civic Engagement is pleased to introduce our new Bonners and Canales for the 2024-2025 academic year.
In the spring of 2024, the Bonner staff faced a new and daunting challenge. The applicant pool for the class of 2028 Bonner Leaders had doubled in size, while at the same time the students in that pool displayed greater experience as servant leaders in their high school communities.
AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, provides opportunities for Americans to serve their country domestically, address the nation’s most pressing challenges, improve lives and communities, and strengthen civic engagement.
Here at Sewanee, the South Cumberland Plateau AmeriCorps program located in the Office of Civic Engagement, supported by Volunteer Tennessee Service Commission, and in partnership with South Cumberland Community Fund, collaborates with more than ten organizations, including the BetterFI, Growing Roots, Mountain T.O.P., and SPARQ (Arts in the Burg), to tackle issues such as financial literacy, music and art education, pre-kindergarten literacy, food insecurity, and housing accessibility, among others.
On the 9/11 Day of Service, SCP AmeriCorps members, students from Sewanee's Bonner and Canale programs, and volunteers through the Pathways to Civic Engagement program came together to honor the historically underrepresented St. Marks Community Center and Garden.
At the end of September, Katie Goforth, the Director of Community Development, retired. She has been a member of the Office of Civic Engagement (OCE) since November 2018, when she began directing the VISTA program. She worked for almost three years helping VISTA volunteers build capacity with local partners, and she was instrumental in the continued success of that program.
The Office of Civic Engagement and the South Cumberland Community Fund announce that a new director of community development, Mandy Bouldin will began her role as of October 14.
More than ninety students, faculty, staff, and community members participated in the DebateWatch between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on September 10, 2024.
Operating under the South Cumberland Summer Meal Program through a partnership with Sewanee Dining, service members distributed free shelf-stable meals to children 18 and under at seventeen recurring sites in Franklin, Grundy, and Marion counties. Over the course of 8 weeks, 71,356 meals were given out, along with over 500 children’s books and 400 craft activities, increasing food availability and alleviating the “summer slide” in learning during the summer months when schools are closed.
Meet our dedicated Summer Meal Associates, who came together from various backgrounds to make a lasting impact on the South Cumberland Plateau. This year’s cohort included Sewanee students, local community members, and college students from across the region, all united in their commitment to serving the community. Their efforts extended beyond meal distribution to support a diverse range of local organizations, contributing to both immediate relief and long-term community growth.
The Office of Civic Engagement is proud to congratulate our students for the awards they received at commencement! Here we list students who received awards and had served as Bonner or Canale service interns, Outreach trip leaders, and/or Dialogue Ambassadors.
During the 2024-2025 academic year, four faculty members will serve as faculty fellows working to promote community engaged learning in their courses and on campus. The fellows are Maxwell Dahlquist (Earth and Environmental Systems), Eric Ezell (Earth and Environmental Systems), Lucia García-Santana (Spanish), and Clarissa Peterson (Politics/African and African-American Studies).
Through their participation in the Bonner and Canale program, students received training to engage in and lead capacity building projects while applying this knowledge through shared work with local community partners. Their work this year led them to design programming, organize events, develop marketing materials and social media campaigns, manage volunteers, lead workshops and classes, and write grants.
Nearly a decade ago, the Office of Civic Engagement partnered with the South Cumberland Community Fund (SCCF) to create the Philanthropy Internship Program, a unique civic engaged learning opportunity to develop students as active global citizens advancing economic, social and environmental well-being through engagement in philanthropic activities.
South Cumberland Community Fund (SCCF) has a unique relationship with the Office of Civic Engagement. The organizations share a director of community development, Katie Goforth, who oversees the SCCF community development committee, the SCCF grants committee, and the OCE’s philanthropy internship program. Additionally, the OCE’s director Amy Patterson serves on the board of SCCF. These professional ties connect the two organizations in ways that increase capacity, collaboration and resource sharing.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, seven different outreach trip experiences allowed students, faculty, and staff to engage with people from all over the world and from all walks of life, working together to serve a variety of community-identified needs and projects.
The Dialogue Across Difference program continues in its work to foster opportunities for students, seminarians, staff, and faculty to engage in meaningful dialogue, deliberation, and civil discourse. During the Easter 2024 semester, our work continued to expand with the growth of Dinner & Dialogue, a community-engaged learning course in the Rhetoric program, the onboarding of a Canale Intern, and an invitation to the SNF Ithaca Initiative National Student Dialogue at the University of Delaware.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, Bonner service intern Stewart Miller conducted community based research with the support from the Gessell Fellowship for Research in Social Ethics. A junior American Studies major, Miller examined the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) law, which went into effect in fall 2023.
In November of 2018, the Bonner Foundation introduced a new set of student workshops to the Bonner network meant to bring “a more comprehensive understanding of civic and community engagement.”
The current class of Bonner and Canale Juniors, C’25 collaborated on five issue brief topics. The topics addressed challenges our community partners have encountered as barriers to their work, shared with our students to explore in more depth.
During 2023- 2024, Kate Cammack (Neuroscience/Psychology), Jennifer Matthews (Theatre), Katy Morgan (Psychology), and Sid Simpson (Politics) served as Community Engaged Learning (CEL) Faculty Fellows. With support from OCE, the Bonner Foundation, the McCrickard Fund, and the Office of the Chaplain, each taught a course with a CEL component, devised a project to support CEL on campus, and engaged in dialogue with the Faculty Fellows for Purpose and Career.
During National Service Week, spanning April 21st to 27th, the SCP AmeriCorps program members emerged as beacons of community support and solidarity across the South Cumberland Plateau. Their unwavering commitment to service manifested in diverse projects to bolster the capacities of organizations vital to our communities.
In the spirit and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., around 200 students, faculty, staff, and community members came together to work side-by-side and serve together in unity.
Accessible from the door to the basement of Carnegie Hall (room CL008), the Student Supply Closet is a space designed to help any undergraduate and seminarian students access any items that they need and otherwise have limited access to.
During the Advent 2023 semester, students at Sewanee: The University of the South participated in their Civic and Global Leadership Capstone Projects. This diverse group of students undertook initiatives close to their hearts, showcasing a dedication to making a positive impact on both local and global communities.
In partnership with the Office of Civic Engagement, the fellows will each teach a community engaged learning (CEL) course, design and implement a project to further CEL at Sewanee, and mentor a faculty member who will teach a CEL course in the next academic year.
In a special ceremony held at Convocation Hall on November 16th, students of the Philanthropy Internship Program awarded $30,000 in grant funding to local nonprofit organizations and government agencies.
During the fall 2023 semester, the Office of Civic Engagement, with support from the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, offered a course in FYP. This new and different path for FYP allowed students to not only take a deep look into Sewanee’s history but also to partner with the city of Selma, Alabama.
VISTA alums from across the country returned to the Mountain November 10th-12th to mark the end of a nine-year chapter: the sunset of the South Cumberland Plateau VISTA Project.
Dinner & Dialogue continues to bring together students, seminarians, staff, and faculty for shared conversations about what we hold dear while creating space for meaningful connections with folks from across campus. Two events were held in the Advent 2023 semester, with nearly 50 members of the campus community in attendance at each dialogue.
South Cumberland Plateau AmeriCorps members came together on Oct 28, 2023, in recognition of Make a Difference Day, to proudly participate as a community partner in Mountain T.O.P.’s annual Fall Festival, helping to provide shoes, coats, winter gear, and boots for children and families across the South Cumberland Plateau.
The Office of Civic Engagement is pleased to introduce our new Bonners and Canales for the 2023-2024 academic year.
In honor of 9/11, the SCP AmeriCorps program observed a day of service and remembrance. SCP AmeriCorps members reached out across the plateau to support a variety of community endeavors.
In commemoration of Constitution Day 2023, Sewanee Votes!, the Office of Civic Engagement’s voting initiative, hosted a “Dessert and Democracy” event where a group of 30 students engaged in conversation centered around individual’s values as they relate to the Constitution and our current political state in the US more broadly.
The annual AmeriCorps Summer Program is a short-term, intensive ten-week community service program to directly support anti-poverty efforts on the Plateau, focusing on alleviating child hunger and reducing summer learning loss.
Before studying abroad, Adri Silva, C’24, had never competed in gymnastics. But that didn’t stop her from joining her host university’s team in Ecuador and coming home with two medals from a major international competition.
Thanks to the Biehl International Research Fellowships, four Sewanee students spent the summer undertaking transformative research journeys across three continents.
One student’s work in her hometown near Sewanee exemplifies the immeasurable impact a unique Sewanee service program has had on local communities and on the students who serve them.
For over two decades, the philosophy professor and (now former) director of the Office of Civic Engagement has been at the center of efforts to push Sewanee’s academic and co-curricular offerings out of the ivory tower and into the community, where they can make a real difference.
For more than 10 years, the University Office of Civic Engagement has nurtured a unique classroom-community symbiotic relationship on the Plateau. Recently, founding director Philosophy Professor Jim Peterman stepped down passing the torch to Politics Professor Amy Patterson. What is the OCE? Where did it come from and where is it going?
Olivier Mbabazi (Bonner student leader) and Angus Pritchard have been awarded the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for 2022-23.
