Darby Ray maintains a connection between Bates College and the community

LEWISTON — Darby Ray has a strong focus on community involvement.

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

Community has been a big part of her life and career.

Rae grew up in a small town in central Florida, where she was raised to be active in the community.

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

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

“Then I moved here to Maine 13 years ago, took a job at Bates College, doing what I most wanted to do, which was thinking about how colleges and universities can be positively involved in communities, in which they are located,” Ray said. “My job is to come together with others and think about what it means for a college to be involved in the community.”

A simple definition of community engagement: a collaborative process that involves people, organizations and governments working together to solve problems affecting their community.

About 4,000 colleges and universities in this country do not have a good reputation in their communities. Some preferred and adopted the isolationist policies of the local community, erecting a fenced wall around the campus.

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

Ray said Bates College made that turnaround several presidents ago, during Donald Harvard’s tenure from 1989 to 2002.

“One of the things that (Harvard) really wanted the college to do was to kind of break out of the Bates bubble and realize that it is part of a larger community,” Ray said, “and that we benefit tremendously from the community, in where we find ourselves again.”

Many people in Lewiston and Auburn may not know that Bates students spend much of their time in the local community. They are in public school classrooms, assisting teachers and conducting research. They are based at Blake Street Towers, helping the elderly and disabled.

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

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

More than 800 college students attended a community vigil on October 29, 2023, at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, where members of the Bates College Crosstones performed a cappella.group, sang a touching rendition of “Run to You” by Pentatonix.

For some Bates students, the process of engaging with the community happens quickly. Part of what a freshman student wrote in an article published last year in the campus newspaper, The Bates Student, reads: “I learned by walking 20 minutes from my dorm downtown to buy a bagel at the food market in Lewiston. It’s not often that people feel unsafe, and the students I volunteer with at the Tree Street Youth Organization say the people here are full of unique backgrounds and culture. Definitely, I learned to dig deeper into the community around me – not to accept it for what it seems at first glance.”

The idea, Ray says, is to have permeable boundaries “so that our students understand that being truly educated is having enough knowledge and wisdom to know what you don’t know and how being involved in your community can help.” to grow you throughout your life and develop you into a more complete person.”

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

“I would like to see more Lewiston residents involved in Bates athletics and arts and culture activities,” she said. “There are so many free things happening on the Bates campus that are open and welcome.

Bates has twice been honored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for his community activism. Only 157 colleges in the country have received this award.”

Rae said the best part of her job is being the matchmaker who is “able to match the wants of the community with the needs of the college, combine those two things, and just see what emerges when the college and the community come together.”

The worst part of her job?

“I might get impatient,” she said. “The worst thing is that it takes time for change to happen, and I’m the one who wants things to happen now.”

In Ray’s world, free time is rare, but when she has a chance to sneak away, she likes to go camping.

“I like to sneak out of work at 3:30 on a snowy day, grab the dog, run to Sherwood Forest in Auburn and walk in the snow,” she said, “just for, well, just for an hour. A good, difficult hike.

Ray has also written a book, Work, which offers insights from Christian scripture and tradition and examines their implications in the complex, globalized world of work.

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