The Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP) is pleased to welcome its newest member, Hamilton College. SHECP is a collaboration among 26 colleges and universities that integrates classroom study of poverty with summer internships and co-curricular activities.
“I am so pleased that SHECP has invited Hamilton College into this distinguished group of colleges and universities,” said Suzanne Keen, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty. “All the SHECP colleges strive to integrate experiential learning with a rigorous academic framework, and Hamilton faculty have already responded with enthusiasm to the curricular development challenge. SHECP’s network of community partners is unrivaled in quality and in commitment to battling poverty and inequality on the ground.”
Founded in 1793 as the Hamilton-Oneida Academy and then chartered as Hamilton College in 1812, the school is one of America’s first liberal arts colleges. The college seeks to enable its students to effect positive change in the world.
“Hamilton College has a successful, two-century history of preparing students for lives of meaning, purpose, and active citizenship,” said Dr. Brett Morash, SHECP Executive Director. “Their addition to the consortium will enhance the breadth of our programming by expanding opportunities to study the meanings, causes, and consequences of poverty across a wide range of disciplines.”
As a consortium member, Hamilton will offer students the opportunity to participate in the SHECP Summer Internship Program. This eight-week program pairs students with nonprofit organizations that work to strengthen impoverished communities.
Students are matched with agencies that fit their intellectual interests in order to develop professional experience and skills for future civic involvement and employment. This past summer, SHECP interns provided more than 36,400 hours of service to 96 agencies, in 21 different geographic locations.
Hamilton’s participation in the program will be administered by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center, which supports initiatives and provides resources that enable students and faculty to engage in public service and public policy through research, service-learning, lectures, discussion, and practice.
“This alliance will also help us to identify a wider range of internship opportunities—in veterans’ affairs, legal services, health and wellness, food advocacy, among other areas—while providing a communal living experience and pre-internship training and post-internship conferences that will help our students connect their academic work with their internship experiences,” said Levitt Center Director and Professor of Philosophy Marianne Janack. “We appreciate this significant expansion of the opportunities we will be able to offer our students.”
To learn more about SHECP and how you can support its mission to transform poverty studies, visit shepherdconsortium.org.
About the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty: The Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP), is a consortium of colleges and universities that are committed to the study of poverty as a complex social problem, by expanding and improving educational opportunities for college students in a wide range of disciplines and career trajectories. SHECP institutions support undergraduates toward a lifetime of professional and civil efforts to diminish poverty and enhance human capability. For more information, please visit ShepherdConsortium.org, or follow us on Twitter at@TheSHECP.