Kallick Awardees

The Kallick Community Service Award provided by Deborah Kallick, is awarded to students who have completed 100+ community engagement hours over the course of the academic year.

SPRING 2023 RECIPIENTS

Mapping Street Vending Regulations and Citations in the IE

Neha Basu has completed over 150 community service hours as a research fellow at the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice (IC4IJ) through the CASA program. She has been doing legal research into SB 946 and 972 and their implementation at the local ordinance level, organizing and mapping vendors’ individual citation records, and also assisting with interviews with street vendors around the IE. Her project aims to counter dominant narratives that paint street vendors as criminal and threatening, as well as shine light on the legal and economic violence vendors face. The internal citation map Neha has created will aid organizers in understanding the citation and enforcement landscape in the area, and the public-facing map will help provide people not as familiar with street vending and unjust citation practices a broader idea of the geographic details and scale of these citations, giving vendor supporters a stronger, data-backed perspective. This project was supported by Tessa Hicks Peterson, Scarlett Duarte, and Paulina Gonzalez from Pitzer, and Jessica Alcocer and Lyzzeth Mendoza from IC4IJ.

Week Writing Workshop (3W)

Jesus serves as one of 6 coordinators for the Weekly Writing Workshop, or 3W for short. The goal and mission of 3W is to help elementary and middle school students develop and grow their creativity and confidence in writing through individualized support, community, and carefully crafted lesson plans. 3W works in partnership with the nonprofit organization Uncommon Good. Through Uncommon Good he provides tutoring to a demographic of underprivileged low income Latinx students in the broader Claremont, Upland, Ontario, Montclair, and Pomona communities. As a coordinator, Jesus works alongside the other coordinator for his designated age group of 4th-5th graders. He works collaboratively with the other coordinators to select the writing theme per semester (this semester being poetry) , creating weekly lesson plans, and coming up with effective ways to engage students in a creative way with writing that will help them grow their writing skills. During class he guides and teaches the class for about 1 hour and the second hour he floats around the class and provides 1 on 1 assistance and guidance to students and helps mentors with any questions they may have. Each class involves community building aspects, a lesson on a writing strategy, grammar lessons and free writing time on the topic discussed that day. Additionally, another responsibility as a coordinator is having a mid semester check-in with the mentors of the program to gauge input on how the semester is going and which improvements we can make to the lessons. Overall his role entails helping students develop their writing skills and engage with writing in a fun and exciting manner.

Mindfulness and Mental Wellness for Young Athletes

In the summer of 2022, Marissa led a project titled “Mindfulness and Mental Wellness for Young Athletes.” While working as a coach at a summer tennis camp, she also facilitated mindfulness sessions for children, teaching them crucial emotional regulation skills that could be applied both on and off the court. The sessions covered breathing techniques, visualization, body scans, and coping strategies for dealing with anger or stress. Marissa was intrigued by the intersection of her passion for athletics and mental health care. She is thrilled to have reached more than 50 young athletes with this program and is eager to continue exploring how sports can be used as a tool to teach children valuable skills that can improve their mental well-being.

Research Assistant at the Global Mental Health Lab

During this school year, Marissa volunteered as a research assistant at the Global Mental Health Lab, where she primarily focused on a project that explored an online intervention designed to improve the daily well-being of college students. As a research assistant, she recruited participants, reviewed past literature, and assisted in writing the literature review for this study. Her passion for making mental health care more accessible drove her enthusiasm for this project, as she recognized its potential to have a significant impact on future research and the development of mental health resources for college students.

Pomona Unified School District Peer Counseling

District. In this position, she met with elementary school children who had been caught using drugs. In general, the consequence for drug use at elementary schools is suspension. However, suspension fails to address the root challenges that may underlie drug use. Therefore, through counseling, Marissa was able to teach children about the harmful effects of substance use while also addressing the underlying emotions and challenges that each child was experiencing. Marissa’s efforts also involved developing a streamlined outline for conducting these counseling sessions, which future volunteers and interns can utilize to help more children who are struggling with drug use.

Path2SEED Employment Readiness Program

Over the course of the Spring 2023 semester, Zhané collaborated with Starting Over Inc., a local non-profit organization in Riverside that aims to assist formerly incarcerated and homeless people in achieving independence and self-sufficiency. During her time at Starting Over, Zhané worked with her supervisors, Melinda Johnson and Tamara Ruffin Martin, on the first rendition of an employment readiness program called Path2SEED. Her primary responsibility was creating a reentry resource guide for Riverside County. To do so, she employed community-based participatory research methods learned through CASA, including surveys and focus groups with Path2SEED participants, to ensure the guide is applicable to the reentry experience in Riverside County. Reentering society after incarceration presents significant challenges for many individuals, such as finding employment, housing, and rebuilding relationships. Access to resources and support is crucial for overcoming these obstacles and reducing recidivism rates. By creating a comprehensive resource guide, Zhané and Starting Over aim to address these challenges and increase the likelihood of success for those seeking to start anew.

Community Service with Foothill Family Shelter

Isabella has been volunteering in the pantry at Foothill Family Shelter in Upland, CA. She has helped with hygiene kits, food bags, and clothing orders. She also has been volunteering as a Blood Donor Ambassador for the Red Cross by checking in blood donors and answering their questions. Lastly, she has been an elementary school student tutor to a student who is a part of Tutors for a Cause.

CASA Internship- HdV Community Composting

Through the Pitzer CASA program, Stryder had the opportunity to work with Huerta del Valle Community Gardens, helping to launch a small-scale community composting program as part of the Ontario TCC Grant. Most of his tasks involved event planning, canvassing, and mulching and planting. He used a CBPAR framework to conduct research on how to plan, organize, and hold events through a CBPAR framework, using the Composting program as a guide. His research also focused on the promise of doing so in community gardens like Huerta. He is grateful to his research partner Grace Hill, all the folks at CEC and CASA who made the experiences possible, and for the deep connections to the people and land at Huerta; connections that he cherishes and were a formative part of his experience so far at Pitzer academically and beyond.

Adelanto Water Justice Project, and TJ/RJ Collective

Olivia Rosenberg-Chávez is a graduating Pitzer senior, majoring in Political Studies with a minor in Spanish. This past year, Olivia has spent countless hours organizing in and around the Claremont Colleges: through the Transformative and Restorative Justice Collective, the 5C Prison Abolition Collective, and as a Robert Redford Fellow. While interning for the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice (IC4IJ), through the CASA Pitzer program, Olivia was a part of forming the Adelanto Water Justice Coalition; a group fighting for water justice in the Inland Empire. She has also spent the past few years doing student organizing work on campus, doing political education on prison abolition in her respective student groups, and building up communities of care on campus. As an organizer with the Care First Campaign, Olivia has helped build and shape the campaign to implement a politic of radical care in classroom spaces and at the 5Cs more broadly. Olivia hopes to use this award to further the campaign, traveling to the National Women’s Studies Association to discuss and share radical pedagogies of care.

Advocate Intern for Haven’s Future and Global Mental Health Lab

Yusi volunteered as an advocate intern for Haven’s Future, an organization dedicated to provide resources for youth and families in need to achieve social justice, and to support them throughout the process of the Children and Family Services System. Yusi completed a series of in-depth interviews with previous social workers and families to assess their needs and provide emotional support. She gathered qualitative data on the effects of extremely high caseloads for social workers in San Bernardino County CFS to eventually bring to the California government. As a research assistant for The Global Mental Health Lab at Pitzer College, Yusi is working on a 3-year longitudinal research project with Professor Marcus Rodriguez and researchers in China examining the efficacy of online dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)-based intervention and peer support in improving mental health of college students. She also helped Professor Rodriguez prepare DBT training materials given to local professional counselors.

Self Help Legal Access Support

For the past semester, and going into summer 2023, Will Warrick has been volunteering at the Self-Help Legal Access Center at the Pomona Courthouse through Neighborhood Legal services of LA County. Through the many hours spent at the center this semester, he has interacted with many members of the Pomona Community, in particular lower-income folks who do not have access to expensive legal resources, in order to help them proceed with legal action as necessary. His work has focused on helping litigants with filing restraining orders and responses to eviction notices in addition to giving steps for other legal proceedings.

FALL 2022 RECIPIENTS

As a Hive Human Centered Design Summer Fellow, awardee Daniel Bonilla was able to collaboratively create The Humanity Project along with Perce Alvarez, CMC ‘25. This organization started with the need for a larger conversation regarding inclusive sexual education. This is a result of the taboo and often debated topic of human health. At the heart of this project, they wanted to emphasize the importance of this project highlighting human needs and topics; it is a human problem, not a “gay” one. The Humanity Project aims to create resources for sexual health and a safe space for conversations that are inclusive to all sexualities and gender identities, with a particular focus on marginalized and BIPOC youth who face unique struggles within the LGBTQIA+ community. They hope to bring together a community of youth and college students who are empowered, feel represented, and take pride in knowing their health. The Humanity Project covered and is continuing to cover topics including LGBTQ+ sex education and HIV prevention, sexual health stigmas, aromantic and asexual identity, and so much more. Through their organization, they have been able to amass over 43k views and thousands of engagements across various platforms. Daniel also created a final compilation video as part of our submission of the project. Their work, along with the other Hive Fellows, was showcased on the cover of the Pitzer website, and across all of its social media platforms. Their goal was to not stop at just the Claremont Colleges but to offer resources and a safe space for anyone who can find them in the digital world. Throughout this summer and into this semester, they connected with over 5 community organizations across Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire. This list included Amplifier, ICUC, Uncommon Good, Riverside Pride Center, QRC, and a few more. Daniel is proud that this project is allowing for a larger conversation to take place and is making the digital space a much safer place for queer-identifying students.

The Different Facets of Community Care

Mae Garland engaged in two different, yet equally rewarding, forms of community service in the year of 2022. The first initiative Mae dedicated time to was a community-based compost collective located in Isla Vista, Santa Barbara called the Isla Vista Compost Collective (IVCC.) She worked with community members, legislators, and other members of the IVCC to plan events, secure funding, engage in outreach, and turn food waste into rich compost. Next, Mae mentored students through an organization called “Children Youth and Family Collaborative.” This mentorship took place at Ganesha High School, which is located in Pomona.

Research Assistance with the Global Mental Health Lab at Pitzer

Over the course of the summer and semester, Huei Ming has been working as a research assistant with the Global Mental Health Lab and has had the opportunity to work on many varied and impactful projects. Under the guidance of Professor Marcus Rodriguez and former lab manager Yilin Li, she has worked on several projects concerning online mindfulness interventions that can potentially create accessible mental health care for hundreds of individuals in both the USA and China. She has also had the fortune of working on a poster presentation for the ABCT that outlined how self esteem mediates the relationship between parental validation and stress, which could be used as a launching pad for many future studies about parental validation. Over the summer, Huei Ming also conducted a small qualitative research project concerning the state of work place wellbeing post lockdown.

Jornalerx Film

During the Spring 2022 semester, Jansikwe worked with the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center to create a short film highlighting the struggles of jornalerxs, or day laborers, in San Bernardino. Due to their immigration and socioeconomic status, day laborers are one of the most vulnerable groups to exploitation by employers and harassment from police. The group of Jornalerxs that work at the Home Depot in San Bernardino recently faced a police raid, in which
many of them were harassed and left with thousands of dollars in unjustified tickets. Jansikwe’s film, Jornalerx, brings to light the injustices that many undocumented workers face, as they are overworked and underpaid by employers.

Barbara Drake and Julia Bogany Archive

During the summer of 2022, Jansikwe worked with the Community Engagement Center at Pitzer College to digitally archive the work of two Tongva Elders, Julia Bogany and Barbara Drake, who recently passed away. For about two months, Jansikwe, along with two other indigenous Pitzer students, went through the hundreds of documents, photographs, videos, projects, presentations, curriculums, and lesson plans that had been collected by Pitzer faculty over the years, and organized it into one collective spreadsheet. Through our work, we were able to preserve the knowledge that Julia and Barbara so generously shared, and ensure that it could go back to the Tongva community.

Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe

This semester, Jansikwe is working with the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe through her Media Arts for Social Justice course with Professor Gina Lamb. She and her classmate work with the
tribe twice a week and have worked to secure a $10,000 grant for the tribe as well as organize their website, take portraits of tribal council members, document important events, and create
videos to feature on their social media and website.

Alaina Neuburger, PZ’ 24

The People’s Pitzer and Partnership with the NAACP-Pomona Valley

Alaina practices community engagement work as a Program Assistant for The People’s Pitzer (TPP), an initiative run out of the Community Engagement Center that focuses on civic engagement as a key component in advancing legislative policy and social change within our communities. This semester TPP worked on many projects, including a texting campaign reminding Pitzer students to register to vote, weekly newsletters to Pitzer students, faculty, and staff highlighting community organizing and political issues, a Civic Engagement Funding Award application to provide up to $200 to support students’ civic engagement/community organizing efforts, sending a letter from Pitzer’s president about the importance of voter engagement, and sharing resources and helping publicize a Writing Center workshop writing letters to elected officials. Alaina also serves as a member of the NAACP-Pomona Valley Voter Engagement Committee, Collegiate Voter Connections. The branch’s Voter Engagement Committee “works to increase nonpartisan student voter registration and participation at ten local colleges and universities,” including the 5Cs.

Pitzer-Tongva Archive

Through Pitzer’s Comunity Engagement Center as a Native Indigenous Initiatives Student Intern, Sara worked on Cataloging and archival work for the Tongva community. This Archive includes all photos, videos, documents, student papers, as well as research that relates to the 5 C’s institutional interactions with the Gabrieleño/Tongva tribes. This work became ever important after the passing of Tongva Elders Julia Bogany and Barbara Drake as they were the dominate community partners between The Claremont Colleges and the Tongva. Sara cataloged hundreds of entries over the course of the Spring and Summer terms in 2022. This Archive allows the Tongva tribe to have confidential access to their history and an insight into both Julia Bogany and Barbara Drakes interactions with the Colleges.

Synthesis of Passions

Over the summer and fall of 2022 Danika Petit has been working with the Global Mental Health Lab on numerous projects. These projects have varied from looking at self compassion interventions, mindfulness based interventions, peer support, as well as looking at how self-esteem mediates the relationship between negative parental validation and stress. However she wishes to fuse her passion for accessible mental health research with her investment in developing fundraisers for beneficiaries who support people living with HIV and AIDS. These beneficiaries focus on overall client care and reducing the cost for antiretroviral therapy (ART). So keep a lookout next semester for educational events and fundraisers surrounding HIV and AIDS! “Fight.Fund.Educate”

Trauma research project: Over the summer, Pratya interned at Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry as a part of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. During her time there, she assisted in the World Trade Center Family study. She was trained to administer structured clinical interviews for study participants, many of whom were present in the vicinity of the attacks. One of the primary reasons she was drawn to this study was because of its long-term implications for trauma-informed care and policies. Hearing about the extent to which the attacks had impacted participants’ lives was symbolic of how trauma lives in people’s bodies for years, and up to decades, in this case. The ultimate purpose of this study was to work with school boards and other institutions to revise their mental health policies in order to better support individuals suffering from the long-term effects of traumatic events.

Mommy and Me: Art, Literacy and Movement to Foster Connection and Prototypes Art Group:

In co-creation Annie Nunez and Crystal Rodriguez have been using art, literacy and movement to foster connection between Mothers and their children at Prototypes Women’s Center. They have been holding space for the mothers and children to spend leisure time together reading books and making art. Prototypes Art Group is a group facilitated by Arlo Van Liew and Crystal Rodriguez and this group is an intentional recreational space for creativity for the women who are clients at Prototypes Women’s Center.