Meet our 2025 National Bonner Summer Interns! Michael Deem Jr. from Rider University brings his expertise in film and storytelling, while Spelman College's Olivia Gray focuses on advancing educational equity. Oberlin's Joseph (JP) Liddy contributes his experience in event coordination and community building, and Centre College's Kayla Rogers brings her passion for policy advocacy and civic engagement. Together, these talented student leaders will support the Bonner Foundation's mission while gaining valuable professional experience in the nonprofit sector.
Maranda C. Ward, Ed.D., MPH, Spelman College Bonner Scholar ‘02 Alum has been awarded Campus Compact’s Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement. Dr. Ward is the assistant professor and director of the Equity Department of Clinical Research and Leadership at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
TCNJ’s Bonner Community Scholars Program launched 20 years ago, it started with just 12 Bonner Scholars — students who commit to 300 hours of community service annually in exchange for needs-based scholarships. Now, with close to 100 participants each year, the TCNJ program is one of the largest and most successful in a nationwide network of Bonner college programs.
In celebration of Elaine Wheeler's retirement, we honor her invaluable contribution to the Bonner Foundation. Her commitment and mentorship have been instrumental in our growth as a Foundation and the Network we have today. As she embarks on her retirement, we celebrate her legacy of dedication and look forward to the path she has paved for us.
With over three decades sharing campus examples, guides, and documents to download, the Bonner Foundation is excited to announce a recently updated Bonner Resources Wiki.
This summer, the five National Bonner Summer Interns at the Foundation — Anu Baskar (George Mason ‘24), Camila Guayasamin (The College of New Jersey ‘24), Dominique Dore (University of Houston ‘22), Mikaela Chin (High Point University ‘24) and Selah Ndouta (Capital University ‘22) — worked with the Foundation staff to refresh the look of the wiki’s homepage and, more importantly, update campus examples and other documents.
They devoted particularly attention to the Bonner Program Management and Community-Engaged Learning sections. In addition, Mikaela and Dominique also created a short video on how to navigate this wealth of knowledge.
Ancito Etienne ’17 is spending the summer gathering data, crunching numbers, and making the case for public investment in hunger relief and conflict resolution around the world.
He has a summer internship with Mercy Corps, an international aid organization that helps people whose lives have been impacted by global conflict. Mercy Corps’ Policy and Advocacy team will use Ancito’s research to advocate for reform in food aid and peacebuildng activities.
Experiential learning through community engagement is a long term investment. Sometimes the payoff takes decades because Guilford College's stewardship is built on the idea that some good things can't be measured by quarterly returns or academic semesters. Bonner Center for Community Service and Learning and its student coordinators and teams of student volunteers have run some community sites for years, long enough for refugee and immigrant children who were tutored by Guilfordians to have grown up ready for college themselves.
A lot of preparation went into the Berea Hunger Games last month which was the first of what will be an annual fundraising event dedicated towards raising funds for Syrian refugee relief. According to Matt Walker, senior Bonner Scholar who has been working on the event since last year, “We tried to incorporate fundraising and awareness-raising into events that we know that a lot of people can get interested in.” Walker added, “We are trying to reach out to that crowd that might not think they are really invested in social justice issues and show them that they can be.” Walker and his colleagues were pleased to raise over $500 from the entire event.
North Carolina Campus Compact, a statewide network of colleges and universities committed to community engagement, has recognized Ben Randazzo ’16 for his outstanding leadership and service.
Ben has received the 2015 Community Impact Award, an honor given to one student leader at each school in the network.
As a Bonner Scholar, Ben has been a leader and an advocate for service. In 2014 he served as lead coordinator for the National Bonner Congress held at Guilford College, a role that led to a summer position at the Bonner Foundation in Princeton, N.J. In the absence of a staff coordinator, he has recently taken on even more responsibility for the Guilford Bonner program.
Rashaun Bennett '16 has received two nationally competitive fellowships that will further support his aspirations for a career in public policy. Selected from more than 600 applicants, he is among 58 winners of a Harry S. Truman Scholarship and is the fifth Davidson student to receive the award in the past eight years. He joins Richmond Blake (2008), Darrell Lamont Scott (2009), Alexandra Francis (2011) and Haley Hardie (2014).
Dec. 3 was a big day at Allenbrook Elementary School in Charlotte. The school hosted its first-ever student art show, and unveiled a large wall mural created through Davidson College connections. Bonner Scholar Morgan Mercer '18 worked at Allenbrook last summer as an Education Scholar. Among other duties, the school administration asked her to envision ways of "enhancing student culture." Mercer settled on the idea of a large wall mural, and obtained a Bonner Community grant to fund the project. Mercer's friend Stuart Robertson '15, who last year painted a large mural in the Alvarez College Union, agreed to work on the Allenbrook mural as well.
The Lindsey Wilson College Bonner Scholars Program has won an online contest to help its members fund and operate a kitchen to serve the area's needy.
Lindsey Wilson learned Monday afternoon that it won an online contest held March 7-14 for a grant from the Campus Kitchens Project, a national organization that empowers student volunteers to fight hunger in their community. Lindsey Wilson will receive $6,000 to start a kitchen that will be housed at Columbia United Methodist Church.
The kitchen will begin serving two or three meals a week to area needy residents sometime in September, according to LWC Director of Civic Engagement Amy Thompson-Wells.
For the fourth consecutive year, Berea College has been selected for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for engaging its students, faculty and staff in meaningful service that achieves measurable results in the community...CELTS is home to ten student-led community service programs, a Bonner Scholars Program and the academic Service-Learning Program. All of these programs are based on a model of leadership development that provides students with opportunities for training, mentoring fellow students and managing programs themselves. The service programs include mentoring and tutoring programs, Habitat for Humanity, an environmental advocacy program, and a program that serves the Spanish-speaking community, among others. Service-learning courses are taught in more than twenty disciplines across campus. Community partners include non-profit agencies, community-based organizations, and schools.
This semester, I have served.
I have served myself by traveling to Ireland, a country I could only dream of before this experience. I have served Emory & Henry College by piloting a new program in partnership with International Partnership for Service Learning (IPSL) that incorporates service-learning into study abroad experiences. More importantly, though, I have been able to serve the Dublin, Ireland, community.
As in life, business often comes down to just a few moments. For a small throng of budding Oberlin student and alumni entrepreneurs, or “Oberlineurs,” one such moment happened in the Bertram and Judith Kohl Building on January 31.
The entrepreneurs participated in the third annual LaunchU venture accelerator and pitch competition. Evolved out of Oberlin’s signature Creativity & Leadership Program, LaunchU provides resources, training, advisors, connections, and investment capital to help start, accelerate, and grow Oberlin student, alumni, and faculty ventures.
Jeri Howell, a Spanish major at Centre College, is spending her summer getting to know some of these workers through an internship at the Backside Learning Center (BLC), a non-profit organization created to enhance the lives of backside workers at Churchill Downs through education, life skill resources and community-building.
‘Hero’ is a Greek word meaning “to protect and serve.” Stetson University has had her share of heroes and that service is at the core of the spirit that connects Max Cleland ‘64, Stetson’s Bonner Program and senior biology major John Massey, the second recipient of the Max Cleland Award for Excellence in Public Service.
A recent Fulbright Award will allow Chisama Ku Penn ’16 to bring together all of her interests. Penn will serve as a Fulbright English Language Teaching Assistant at a college for teachers in Argentina for the upcoming academic year, beginning March 2017. The Fulbright program is the U.S. government’s flagship international exchange program and funds selective teaching and research experiences.
While most of his classmates were adjusting to being away from home, Emory & Henry alumnus Henri Fitzgerald was juggling a college education and raising a family.“I was a parent for most of my time at Emory & Henry, so my family was very important to me,” said Fitzgerald. “I wanted to set a good example, so I tried to excel at everything I tried. This included being a father, husband, athlete, volunteer and good citizen.”
Almost six years ago, I sat down to write two short essays for my City Year application, and today I decided to revisit those essays before writing this one. While the lower quality of my writing from six years ago was not unexpected, I was pleasantly surprised that I still fundamentally agree with several key ideas in those essays.
In 2006, many 15-passenger vans arrived in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Faculty, staff, and student volunteers from campuses around the country, including Macalester College, responded to the disaster by mucking out houses, cutting back overgrowth, and helping people find a way home.
SPARTANBURG, S.C. – When Yves Engelmann got his acceptance letter to Wofford College, the young man from Rwanda who had never stepped foot in South Carolina – much less onto the Wofford campus – read it in disbelief. That was nothing compared to when he read the subsequent letter from the college’s Bonner Scholars program telling him his entire four-year college career would be paid for in full.
