Darby Ray keeps Bates College and the community connected

LEWISTON — Darby Ray is all about community involvement.

It’s practically in her blood, and it’s in her position at Bates College in Lewiston, where she is director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and professor of community engagement.

The community has been a big part of her life and career.

Ray grew up in a small town in central Florida, where she grew up to be actively involved in the community.

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

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

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

A simple definition of community engagement: a collaborative process in which people, organizations, and governments work together to address issues that impact their communities.

The approximately 4,000 colleges and universities in this country don’t have a great track record with their communities. Some have favored an isolationist policy from the local community and have erected a fence wall around the campus.

A 2007 report from the University of Maryland Democracy Collaborative 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 pivot a few presidents ago, during Donald W. Harward’s tenure from 1989 to 2002.

“One of the things that Harward really wanted the college to do was break out of the Bates bubble and realize that it was part of the larger community,” Ray said, “and that we benefit tremendously from the community in which we’re established.”

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

“Our students make brunch every Sunday (at Blake Street Towers),” Ray said, “and sit down with those people and have breakfast, so they contribute in the form of breakfast.”

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

More than 800 students from the college participated in the community vigil on October 29, 2023 at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, where members of Bates College performed Crosstones, an a cappellagroup, sung a moving rendition of “Run to You” by Pentatonix.

For some Bates students, the process of community involvement happens quickly. Part of what a freshman wrote in an op-ed published last year in The Bates Student, the campus newspaper, reads: “I learned by walking 20 minutes from my dorm to downtown to get a bagel at Forage Market that Lewiston doesn’t often feel unsafe, and from the students I volunteer with at Tree Street Youth, what stands out is that the people here are full of unique backgrounds and cultures. I have undeniably learned to dig deeper into the community around me – to not take it at face value.”

The idea, Ray said, is to have porous boundaries, “so that our students realize that what it means to be truly educated is that you have enough knowledge and wisdom to know what you don’t know, and how to be involved in your community can help you. allows you to grow throughout your life and transforms you into a fuller person.”

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

“I wish more Lewiston residents would take advantage of Bates athletics and the arts and culture events here,” she said. “There are so many free things happening on the Bates campus that are open and welcome.

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

Ray said the best part of her job is that she is a matchmaker who is “able to match the needs of the community with the needs of the university, and put those two things together, and just see what happens is created when the university and the community come together.”

The worst part of her job?

“I can get impatient,” she said. “The worst part is that it takes time for change to happen, and I am someone who wants things to happen now.”

Free time is rare in Ray’s world, but when she can sneak away, she likes to go for walks.

“I like being able to sneak out of work at 3:30 on a snowy afternoon and grab my dog ​​and run to Sherwood Forest in Auburn and walk in the snow,” she said, “just to , you know, just for an hour. Good, tough walk.”

Ray has also written a book, ‘Working’, which offers insights from Christian scripture and tradition, and considers its implications in the complex, globalized world of work.

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