Access to Education, Opportunity to
Serve
By Wayne Meisel, president, Corella and Bertram
F. Bonner Foundation
“Being a Bonner scholar is not merely a duty
but a fulfillment,” proclaimed Stormy Gillespie,
a member of the first class of bonner scholars, in front
of a small group of distinguished educators from a diverse
group of schools. It was from that gathering at the
boone tavern in Berea, Kentucky, that the Bonner scholars
program was born.
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Bonner Foundation President
Wayne Meisel gathers with Bonner leaders from
California State University–Los Angeles.
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The Bonner Foundation, over the course of its history,
has provided in excess of $200 million to champion the
goals and efforts of the Bonner Program and campuses
that support community engagement. The Bonner Scholars
Program is a multiyear service-based scholarship designed
to identify students with significant financial needs
and then encourage them to attend college and provide
support for them. The Bonner Leader Program, an expansion
of the Scholars Program, uses federal work–study
funds, AmeriCorps Education Awards, and institutional
support to create scholarship stipends for students
involved in community service.
While in school, Bonner scholars engage in intense
and transformative service activities. Rather than have
a work component as part of their financial aid package,
Bonner scholars fulfill a service expectation and receive
financial support to help cover the cost of their education.
Currently, more than seventy-five colleges and universities
participate in the Bonner Scholars and Bonner Leader
programs. These schools range from large public institutions
like the University of New Mexico to small liberal arts
colleges like Spelman College.
First and foremost, the Bonner Scholars Program is
about access. Almost all students in the program have
demonstrated considerable financial need. The program
is designed to support students who want to make a significant
commitment to community service and connect service
activity to their academic experience. Rather than have
the service activity oriented toward an individual student,
the Bonner Program puts the community back
into community service as students move together
in their service journey.
The program is based upon a four-year student developmental
model that provides a series of expectations, challenges,
supports, and outcomes that guide students’ leadership
throughout their time in college. These activities are
organized around six focus areas, which all students,
including those who are not Bonner scholars, can integrate
into their engagement. These areas, described as our
“common commitments,” are social justice,
civic engagement, spiritual exploration, community building,
diversity, and international perspective.
Through a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education, the foundation has worked with
two dozen campuses to develop an academic journey that
transcends a course-by-course service-learning experience.
This multiyear interdisciplinary model parallels and
integrates with Bonner’s cocurricular student
development model. By taking courses that address the
complexities of politics, poverty, and global issues,
students connect their service with a focused understanding
and practice of civic engagement, including political
participation and public policy. These models are described
more fully in Ariane Hoy’s article in this issue.
The second goal of the Bonner Scholars Program is building
a campus culture of service. In defining the success
and progress of the relationship between the foundation
and the campus, the focus is not on the individual students
that par-ticipate in the program. Instead, a school
is evaluated on the culture of service and the level
of infrastructure that supports the culture of service.
Rather than promote a service culture that focuses narrowly
on the Bonner scholars, our hope is that campuses create
a climate with the motto “Everybody, Everyday.”
Finally, schools in the Bonner Program are expected
to create community service centers that lead and manage
the activities on campus. These centers provide leadership
opportunities for students by allowing them to serve
in key roles at community agencies. The center staff
members work to connect the students’ community
roles with other levels of student organizing and involvement.
The centers also encourage faculty to develop service-learning
courses through such vehicles as mini-grants, workshops,
and conferences, and through support from the Bonner
network.
The foundation also works to identify financial and
other resources to which a community might not otherwise
have access. Within the Bonner Program is a community
fund that generates $100 for every student in the program.
Thus, if there are one hundred Bonner scholars at a
particular institution, that community fund has access
to $10,000 annually.
Beyond this, the foundation offers grants of up to
$10,000 a year to local agencies that engage campus
resources in addressing local poverty challenges, especially
around hunger. We work with schools to identify and
obtain resources they might not know about or be eligible
for on their own. In addition, campuses in the Bonner
Program receive encouragement and support to partner
with community agencies to secure significant funding.
The Bonner Program has its origins in liberal arts
colleges. We were inspired and compelled by campuses
like Berea College in Kentucky for its commitment to
low-income students, Concord University in West Virginia
for its involvement in the Southeastern Appalachian
region, Oberlin College in Ohio for its longstanding
commitment to social justice, and Morehouse College
in Atlanta for its tradition of educating leaders. All
of the campuses that were involved from the start were
schools that demonstrated a desire and ability to be
an academic, cultural, and economic presence in their
communities. Since its founding, the Bonner Program
has reached out to dozens of colleges and universities
that are representative of the diversity in higher education.
At the tenth anniversary of the Bonner Program in 2000,
I challenged participants to work for the creation of
fifty thousand high-quality service-based scholarships
throughout the country by 2010. Clearly not all of these
would be connected to the Bonner Scholars Program, but
hopefully, the experience of the Bonner Foundation would
inspire others to develop, implement, and sustain similar
types of programs. Our intent is to expand a movement,
not build an empire. In support of this goal, we have
made all of our resources and tools freely available
on our Web site and our trainings and conversations
open to all those interested in our work.
Recently I was asked to give a talk to the Council
of Europe. The topic was “Fostering Democratic
Values in Higher Education.” At first I was taken
aback by the assignment, questioning what I knew about
the subject. What I began to understand is that all
the different ways we have come to identify and describe
our work—volunteering, service, service learning,
community leadership, and civic engagement—are
the elements of a healthy democracy. In fact, democracy
is the stronger word because it connects the many forms
and phases of our work both to the founding vision of
America and to its future. The Bonner Program and the
campus-wide community service centers that come out
of this work offer us the hope of fulfilling democracy’s
promise.
