Author: Blythe

Well, yes, reading and talking and participating. Honors is inviting popular speaker, veteran communications strategist and award-winning writer and editor, Jay Walljasper to give a talk on the status of the commons. What is the commons, you ask? That is exactly the place at which we will begin. Here’s the deal:

1. Find at least three friends who want to participate with you
2. Download the brief essay available here
3. Everyone in your group reads the essay and meets to discuss it
4. Attend the Thursday, November 8th talk with Jay Walljasper in LSB 001 at 8pm
5. Take a picture of your group at the talk to show you participated
6. Enter three civic engagement hours online and attach a copy of the photo as the supervisor’s approval signature

 

It’s that easy and you will be helping to spread a discussion we want to share with the Honors community. Community building, meaningful conversation, interactive dialogue….that’s civic engagement!

Contact Karen kjhall@syr.edu if you need help getting started!

Honors student Michael Hu set up a Learn To Be an online tutoring chapter here at SU. Here’s the information you need to get involved:

Learn To Be is a non-profit volunteer organization that offers free online tutoring through our virtual whiteboard system to under-served students throughout the United States. There are currently 16 chapters across the country and ours at Syracuse was started in the Spring of 2011. In that time, we’ve partnered with Say Yes to Education to assist with the Syracuse City School District and received the Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement and Scholarship. 

 Currently, we are looking to recruit interested students to tutor for our innovative organization. The uniqueness of LTB is that we work around your schedule in the convenience of your dorm/house. Not only that, but this is an excellent resume booster and counts as volunteer service.

 If you’re interested in finding out more information please feel free to check out our website at http://www.learntobe.org/su For those of you who may not be able to tutor and are still interested in helping out with establishing local partnerships, we are always welcoming members to help staff our chapter. Thank you for taking the time to read this message, if you have any further questions feel free to contact me.

 Leann Miles  408-823-9074  ljmiles@syr.edu

Carolina Jimenez worked with Rebar, an art and design studio which seeks to beautify the environment with large public art displays.

Carolina wrote about her experience with Rebar:

“This past summer I completed an apprenticeship at Rebar, a public art and design firm in San Francisco. I played a small role in a project in DC co-produced by the DC Office of Planning called a Cultural Art Crawl meant to showcase the diversity of an often overlooked neighborhood, and I was also placed on a project for a public arts wind sculpture in San Francisco. I worked on a model for the project and also completed various studies on how the blades could be shaped.

“This experience helped me realize that civic engagement comes in various forms. Design can be used to such ends as celebrating the culture of a community; it can be used in small scale projects, not only clients with large budgets. The wonderful thing about design is that by thinking creatively you can get so much more out of your resources than what they appear to possess at first glance.”

Amanda Shaffer volunteered for the Lions Club of Cranbury, a charitable organization that is one of many Lions Clubs International, a volunteer organization that spans 207 countries and involves 1.35 million volunteers, who help out in schools, hospitals, and senior centers, and many other community outlets. Amanda channeled her artistic skills in her volunteer work, creating collages that displayed volunteers at work, which she said was an eye-opening experience.

“Through making collages [for the Lions Club of Cranbury], I learned that I could use my art skills to benefit others. There are many different ways of helping the community, and this experience has shown me that civic engagement is not just volunteering in soup kitchens. I will try to find more activities that pertain to my area of study in the future.”