Darby Ray keeps Bates College connected to the community

LEWISTON — Darby Ray is committed to community involvement.

It’s practically in her blood, and it’s in her position at Bates College in Lewiston, where she is director of the Harvard Center for Community Partnerships and professor of community engagement.

Community played a big part of her life and career.

Ray grew up in a small town in Central Florida where she was raised to be actively involved in the community.

“My dad was the mayor of the tiny town where I grew up and my mom ran a daycare,” Ray said. “My siblings and I were very involved in our community from a young age.”

Ray earned a bachelor’s degree in religion from Sewanee: University of the South and a master’s and doctorate in religion from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She then taught at Millsaps College in Mississippi for 16 years, where she was also a community engagement leader.

“I moved here to Maine 13 years ago, got a job at Bates College doing what I most wanted to do, which was thinking about how colleges and universities can positively engage with the communities in which they are located,” said Ray . “My work is about connecting with others and thinking about what community engagement means for the university.”

A simple definition of community engagement: a collaborative process involving people, organizations, and governments working together to address issues affecting their community.

About 4,000 colleges and universities in this country they don’t have a good track record in their communities. Some preferred and adopted the local community’s policy of isolationism, building a wall around the campus.

A 2007 report by the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland found that colleges and universities “have a vested interest in building strong relationships with the neighborhoods surrounding their campuses.”

Ray said Bates College made such a pivot several presidents ago, during Donald W. Harvard’s term from 1989 to 2002.

“One of the things that (Harvard) really wanted the university to do was to kind of break out of the Bates bubble and realize that it’s part of a larger community,” Ray said, “and that we benefit tremendously from the community in which we live.” re-locate.”

Many people in Lewiston and Auburn may not know that Bates students devote the majority of their time to volunteering in the local community. They are in public school classrooms, helping teachers and conducting research. They operate from Blake Street Towers and help older and disabled people.

“Our students do brunch (at Blake Street Towers) every Sunday,” Ray said, “and they sit down with these people and eat breakfast, so they contribute to breakfast.”

Bates students work with the Good Shepherd Food Bank, Trinity Jubilee Center, Central Maine Medical Center, St. Mary’s and with Big Brothers and Big Sisters or other organizations in the Twin Cities.

More than 800 college students participated in a community vigil on October 29, 2023, at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, where members of the Bates College Crosstones a cappella grupa, I sang a moving rendition of Pentatonix’s “Run to You.”

For some Bates students, the community involvement process moves quickly. Part of a freshman’s statement in an opinion piece published last year in the campus newspaper, The Bates Student, reads: “By walking 20 minutes from my dorm to downtown to buy a bagel at the Forage Market, I learned that Lewiston I don’t often feel unsafe, and from students , for whom I volunteer at Tree Street Youth, you could say that the people here come from unique backgrounds and cultures. I have clearly learned to delve deeper into the community around me – not to take it as it appears at first glance.”

The idea, Ray said, is to have porous boundaries “so that our students realize that a real education means having enough knowledge and wisdom to know what you don’t know, and how involvement in the community can develop you throughout your life and transform you into a more complete human being.”

As a professor of civic engagement, Ray knows that for the process to be successful, it has to go both ways.

“I would like to see more Lewiston residents enjoy the Bates sports competitions and artistic and cultural events here,” she said. “There are lots of free things happening on the Bates campus that are open and welcome.

Bates has been recognized twice by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for her community involvement. Only 157 universities in the country received this distinction.

Ray said the best part of her job is being a matchmaker who “can combine the desires of the community with the needs of the college, put those two things together, and just see what comes out when the college and the community come together.”

The worst part of her job?

“I can get impatient,” she said. “The worst thing is that change takes time, and I’m a person who wants everything to happen now.”

Free time is rare in Ray’s world, but when she can get away, she likes to go on a trip.

“I like on a snowy afternoon to be able to sneak out of work at 3:30, grab my dog ​​and run to Sherwood Forest in Auburn and hike in the snow,” she said, “just to, you know, just for an hour. Good, hard hike.”

Ray also wrote the book “Working,” which offers insights from scripture and Christian tradition and considers their implications for the complex, globalized world of work.

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