Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) attended the SCALE conference last weekend on Nov. 7 at University of New Hampshire (UNH) Manchester. SCALE stands for Student Citizens for Active Leadership and Engagement. Other colleges that attended were Rivier University, New England College, Keene State College, Saint Anselm College and Merrimack College. The conference was put on by Campus Compact for New Hampshire.
The morning started off with a warm welcome from Elle Tibbitts from SNHU. She introduced the keynote speaker Alex Fried, an alumni from UNH and was the co-founder of UNH Trash 2 Treasure. He is now the founder and director of Post Landfill Action Network.
Throughout the day, there were many workshops to choose from. Options ranged from alumni involved in Higher Ed, Non-profit, and AmeriCorps. Also, school staff members, alumni, and students organized some workshops together too.
Allison Valentine, an alumni from SNHU, conducted a session titled, “Turning Passion into a Career.” Elizabeth Richards, a professional staff member from SNHU’s CCEL, did a workshop titled, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Peer Supervision.” Also working in SNHU’s CCEL, Kelly Hobbs conducted a workshop titled, “Building Social Discourse: How to engage your peers in conversation that matter.”
These were all designed to give students helpful and useful information that they could take back to their colleges and apply in daily life and decision making.
To wrap up the day, SNHU students Elle Tibbitts and Lauren Macdonald, presented their workshop titled, “The Roadmap to Action.” This started off with talking about human trafficking and how it’s not just in foreign countries but right in front of us. It happens everywhere and more people need to gain awareness of this issue so we can start taking preventative actions. If nobody knows, then nobody can help. The group then played a game to show how everybody has to work together as one to reach a goal. Without one part of the group the goal could not be completed.
Kirsten Spooner a senior at SNHU said, “I am grateful that I was able to attend the Scale conference because I was able to collaborate with students from other schools who have similar passions as me to focus on social issues and to educate our peers about them. My favorite part was networking with Americorps vistas as I will be a graduate taking my next steps and Americorps has always been an interest to me since I’ve been involved in community service and active citizenship.”
