By Beth Brosnan
When Livia De Oliveira Costa first arrived at Suffolk, she knew one thing for sure: “I didn’t want to live in a bubble.”
College students in Boston “are surrounded by real-world issues like income disparity and the lack of affordable housing,” she says. Costa didn’t want to look the other way. She wanted to work for change.
And that’s how, on a cool day last fall, she found herself planting trees in East Boston.
Costa had never swung a shovel before—but then again, the chance to learn new things was what first brought her, as a volunteer with Suffolk’s Center for Community Engagement, to Eastie Farm.
A series of seven community gardens scattered throughout East Boston, Eastie Farm provides neighborhood residents—many of them immigrant families from Central and South America and Southeast Asia—with greater access to fresh produce, as well as welcome pockets of green space.
“At Suffolk, I study issues like environmental justice and food insecurity,” says Costa, now a junior majoring in international relations, whose own family emigrated from Brazil. “At Eastie Farm, I get to see these issues firsthand and meet people affected by them.”
Return to Table of Contents
Planting seeds of change: Livia De Oliveira Costa (center) at work in one of Eastie Farm's community gardens in East Boston, along with Suffolk volunteer Mabasa Masunungure (left) and greenhouse manager Will Hardesty-Dyck. Photographs by Michael J. Clarke
features
This spring, Costa is a program leader at the farm, where she’s teaching a fresh crop of Suffolk volunteers how to step outside the bubble and connect with community. Most weeks she finds herself volunteering more than her required share of hours, just for the chance to hang out with others who are “nerdy about the environment”—and for the feeling that comes from confronting big issues head-on and chipping away at solutions.
“This work,” she says, “makes me hopeful.”
Experiences like this have been powering the Center for Community Engagement for 25 years now. Since its founding in 1997 as S.O.U.L.S. (short for Suffolk’s Organization for Uplifting Lives Through Service), the center has attracted thousands of student volunteers like Costa, who’ve devoted hundreds of thousands of hours to working with community organizations in Boston, across the country, and around the world. One tree planted, one meal served, one child taught to read at a time, that service has changed those communities for the better—and changed how those students see the world and given them tools to help mend it.
“Experiential learning at its finest” is how Tim Albers, the center’s associate director from 2009 to 2017, describes the center’s impact. “The chance to work alongside a community and hear from them directly about the issues they face—that’s irreplaceable,” he says.
“As a political science major, I’m always talking about issues,” says senior Gloria Bouquet. “This is hands-on. If there’s an issue you care about, you can work on it directly—and work with communities who are impacted by it.”
This spring, she led an alternative spring break trip to Minneapolis, where students met with community organizers working to advance racial justice in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
This commitment to the greater good has twice earned Suffolk recognition from the Carnegie Foundation as a Community Engagement Classified Institution, a distinction held by fewer than 500 US colleges and universities—and one of only 75 to be so recognized as part of the most recent cohort in 2020. This spring, when the center hosted its 25th annual Service Day, hundreds of Suffolk students, staff, and faculty spent the day serving meals at the Boston Rescue Mission, sorting through donated children’s clothing at Cradles to Crayons, and doing cleanup work along the Boston Esplanade. And on April 13, volunteers and staff past and present turned out to officially celebrate the center’s 25th anniversary.
Suffolk University President Marisa Kelly describes the Center for Community Engagement as “a tremendous force for good—not only for the many community organizations our students work with, but for our students themselves. Community engagement teaches them to look for the ‘why’—the root causes of inequities our country faces, and for ways they can make a difference.”
Yvette Velez, MA '02, has a good vantage point from which to survey the center’s evolution and influence. Today she’s the center’s associate director for community partnerships, but back in 2000, she was one of several AmeriCorps/VISTA volunteers who worked with the fledgling center during its early years. Its growth, she says, has been both people-powered and mission-driven.
“Everyone who has ever been a part of the center has contributed to its impact,” she says. And while the center just turned 25, she adds, Suffolk’s deep engagement with Boston and surrounding communities “goes back to the University’s founding—it’s part of our fabric.”
Adam Westbrook, the center’s director since 2018, points to another bright thread running through that fabric: a shared belief that a Suffolk education “is about more than just getting a good job. It’s about becoming a good citizen. And showing up for your community is part of leading a good life.”
Lighting the spark
When S.O.U.L.S. launched in 1997, it didn’t have an office on the Suffolk campus or a line item in the budget. What it had was good timing and a core group of true believers.
Suffolk had opened its first residence hall the year before, and with it came a growing call for more student activities, including community service. Kelly Dolan, BA ’00, then freshman class president, gave an impassioned interview to The Suffolk Journal that lit the spark that would lead to S.O.U.L.S.
“Kelly’s basic message was that when you bring students to the heart of Boston, they need more ways to engage with each other and with the surrounding community,” recalls co-founder Sherry (Mattson) Noud, MPA ’99, then a staffer with the Office of Enrollment and Retention Management. “She really got people talking.”
And the administration was listening. President David Sargent, Dean of Students Nancy Stoll, and Noud’s boss, Dean Barbara Ericson, recruited Dolan and a handful of other students to serve on a steering committee, joined by Noud and Tom King, the assistant director of student activities.
The group hammered out a plan for a service organization that would offer an alternative spring break service trip and a campuswide service day—programs that continue to this day. They forged early partnerships with Jumpstart, the national nonprofit that recruits college students to prepare children from under-resourced communities for kindergarten, and with the Paulist Center, a Catholic church that adjoins the University campus where Suffolk students continue to serve meals at the Wednesday Night Supper Club.
Funding initially came from Massachusetts Campus Compact, part of a national nonprofit that fosters partnerships between colleges and their surrounding communities, and which also partners with Americorps/VISTA. And so, inadvertently, did the group’s name. “The grant application was due, and we still didn’t know what to call ourselves,” Noud says with a laugh. With the deadline bearing down fast, a student suggested Suffolk’s Organization for Uplifting Lives Through Service, or S.O.U.L.S. for short.
“We all thought it was a mouthful,” Noud says, “but it did describe what we were trying to do.” (The name stuck in various permutations until 2014, when it was officially changed to the Center for Community Engagement.)
Under the leadership of Carolina (Garcia) Comella, who served as director from 2005 to 2016, S.O.U.L.S. grew in size, scope, and impact. It moved out from under the wing of Student Activities to become its own center, complete with University funding and two full-time positions.
And that center quickly became a campus hub, “a home away from home for students who believe in this kind of work,” Comella recalls. “I never felt like I was going to work. I felt like I was going to see my second family.”
During her tenure, the range of the center’s programming increased; so too did the number of community partners (today there are close to 80). And by collaborating with faculty in both the College of Arts & Sciences and the Sawyer Business School, she helped expand the number of service learning courses—and the number of students exposed to service work.
“Not every student thinks that service is for them, but when you put it in an academic setting, that validates its importance,” she says. “When students take a service learning course, they often discover how powerful an experience it can be.”
As its alternative spring break trips grew in popularity, S.O.U.L.S. added a winter break trip to El Salvador. Suffolk had developed a special relationship with the country after Massachusetts Congressman (and Suffolk Law alumnus) Joseph Moakley helped investigate human rights crimes during the country’s civil war. The ties he forged there provided S.O.U.L.S. with a network of local partners, who hosted them on a series of trips from 2007 to 2014.
“Those visits yielded so many ‘a-ha’ moments,” Comella says now. “We learn so much from the communities we visit, and from each other.”
Current director Westbrook couldn’t agree more. Getting out of your own environment, he says, “can open your eyes to injustice. You’ve seen what inequality looks like in another country—now what does it look like in Boston?”
The center now offers trips devoted to issues like racial justice, affordable housing, and LGBTQ and reproductive rights. Before anyone gets on a plane, student leaders spend a semester meeting weekly with trip participants, to study the community they’ll be visiting, explore the issues its residents live with—and consider what it means to enter a community that is not your own.
“There’s a long history of richly resourced colleges coming into communities and thinking they have all the answers,” Westbrook says. “We’re trying to teach students to be more responsible, to recognize that these communities already have knowledge and norms and resources, no matter who they are.”
These are lessons that senior Matthew Lopes, a global business and accounting major, saw up close when he led an affordable housing trip to Denver in March, where he and his team worked with Habitat for Humanity. “What you see pretty quickly is that we’re all very different,” he says. “We come from different backgrounds and perspectives—and yet we all want a lot of the same things.”
This May, the center is launching its newest international trip: a 10-day environmental service trip to Spain, in partnership with Suffolk’s Madrid campus.
Discovering common ground
Building opportunity: Through Habitat for Humanity, Suffolks students have helped build affordable housing across the country and around the world, from El Salvador to Myanmar. Above, Kira DeFranza, BA ’22, works on a 2019 Habitat for Humanity project.
“Everyone who has ever been part of the center has contributed to its impact,” says Associate Director Yvette Velez (below left, with Director Adam Westbrook).
Under the leadership of Carolina (Garcia) Comella (center photo, left, with Erin Bessette, BA ’13), who served as director from 2005 to 2016, the center grew in size, scope, and impact. Today students like Calysta Koppenhaver (left photo) and Brooke Harvey (right photo) volunteer with close to 80 community organizations and nonprofits.
Signature programs include (clockwise from upper left) Suffolk Votes, a voter education and registration program (led this year by senior Sayeeda Rahman), and alternative spring break trips like this one that took students to Minneapolis to study racial justice issues. Photo left: In September 2013, alternative spring break leaders traveled to Boston’s North End for a neighborhood clean-up—part of the center’s year-round approach to team-building and service learning.
From its earliest years, the center has placed a premium on developing student leaders.
Students don’t just punch in and out as volunteers; they also hold work-study positions as office assistants and project leaders for ongoing service partnerships. Students in the Service Scholar Program commit to working up to 300 hours per academic year; in turn they receive both intensive on-the-job training and $5,000 in wages and tuition remission—the latter being an especially critical factor for students who might not otherwise be able to afford to participate in service work.
As a service scholar with Suffolk Votes—the voter education and registration program launched in 2012 by Comella, Albers, and Political Science Professor Rachael Cobb—senior Syeeda Rahman created an ambitious strategic plan for the entire academic year, including the fall midterm elections.
A political science major and veteran political campaigner, Rahman brought a packed résumé to this role. “I’m not afraid to talk about being a liberal—that’s really important to me,” she says. “And I also really believe that everyone should be able to express their voice and vote, even if they don’t agree with me. We need a culture of respectful democracy. The more people who are registered to vote, the more representative our democracy will be.”
Between September and Election Day, Rahman and her team of Suffolk Votes ambassadors did voter outreach to more than 1,000 Suffolk students. They visited classes, worked social media, and held tabling events every Tuesday and Thursday to make sure students had the information they needed, from how to register and vote absentee in their home states to the hours and locations for local polls.
“There are a lot of different variables that go into voting that can feel like barriers to college students. Suffolk Votes works to remove those barriers,” says junior Reegan O’Brien, a political science major. Coming from peers, the message carries more weight, she adds. “We can say frankly, ‘You need to do this. It’s important.’”
“Our generation has a reputation for complaining and not caring,” adds freshman Andrew Gomes, also a political science major. “I don’t think that’s true—we do care. I want students to understand that if they care, voting is one of the most important things they can do.”
As graduation approaches, Rahman is focused on recruiting more student leaders. Suffolk Votes has taught her so much, she says: How to work with peers; how to talk with deans. How to organize; how to be creative. How to get comfortable asking for things, even when the answer is no. “You learn how to become a community leader,” she says. “That’s information I want to pass on.”
Lessons in leadership
Like the trees that Livia De Oliveira Costa planted in East Boston, the seeds that S.O.U.L.S. and the Center for Community Engagement have planted over the past quarter century have taken root. Today, the center’s alumni/ae are helping run nonprofits around the country.
“S.O.U.L.S. was the core of my education—it’s the whole reason I became what I am,” says Lina Cañon, BA ’13, now director of finance, operations, and development at chica project, a nonprofit serving Latinas and young women of color. As an immigrant from Colombia and first-generation student, she says that being mentored by Comella—herself an immigrant from Venezuela—“meant everything. It showed me what was possible.”
Erin Bessette, BA ’13, counts the two years she spent as a Jumpstart volunteer at Roxbury’s Sunnyside Preschool among her fondest Suffolk memories. “I was living a very busy, over-extended college life,” she says, “and coming into that classroom just centered me. It reminded me that kids are the key to building a resilient society.”
While she was busy helping the children improve their language and literacy skills, Bessette learned some crucial lessons of her own—namely that “too often a ZIP code determines a child’s outcome,” she says, “and that’s completely unacceptable.” Today, as the senior program director for Boston’s Jumpstart office, Bessette is working to address that inequity, calling her work “a journey I’ll be on the rest of my life.”
Out in California, Deborah Searfoss, BA ’10, draws a line between her S.O.U.L.S. experiences and the work she does today with unaccompanied refugee children as program director at Compass Connections in the San Francisco Bay area.
That line runs through El Salvador, where she helped build a septic tank in a rural village on a S.O.U.L.S. service trip, through Everett, Massachusetts, where she taught English and citizenship classes to Central American immigrants. “I learned to love grassroots nonprofit work, where you’re on the ground and can see how the things you do can change a community,” she says.
And Suffolk, she adds, “helped me become the person that I am. Literally every one of my professors took a genuine interest in me, as a person as well as a student. They taught me my values, and the value of community.”
Service comes full circle
The center’s annual service days sends hundreds of Suffolk volunteers to community organizations like Cradles to Crayons (above left) and Community Servings (top photo, right). Since 1998, Suffolk has partnered with Jumpstart (lower photo, right), the national nonprofit that recruits college students to prepare children from underresourced communities for kindergarten.