To Rest on the Road Does Not End the Journey

By Fran Czuk

Dr. Tamea (Johnson) Evans ’93 displays in her office a picture, made for her by a patient, featuring a quote that sums up much of her life path: “To rest on the road does not end the journey.”

For Evans, life has not been a straight, continuous road from start to goal. Rather, her path has been full of twists and turns, breaks and pauses, and jumps to new paths that ultimately led her to where she wanted to be: providing community-based health care in a neighborhood that traditionally has faced barriers to care.

“My husband always says, ‘God put you on this weird journey that you never would have had if you’d gone the straight and narrow and followed all the rules,’” Evans said. “Every time you did, you felt like you bumped your head, so you would find a new path, and that new path gave you all these neat experiences. It ultimately put you right back where you wanted to be in the first place.”

Her winding way started with a misconception that brought the Flint, Michigan, native to Kalamazoo College in 1989.

“When I took the ACT, there was a box to check if you wanted public or private institutions,” Evans said. “I didn’t know what that meant. I was studying government at the time and I thought, well, I seem to like private things better, so I picked private. Then everybody else started getting information on Michigan State and Michigan, and I’m getting Hope College, Adrian and Kalamazoo College. I had no clue about those schools.”

She started visiting them regardless. K’s high acceptance rate into medical school stood out to Evans, who wanted to be a physician.

“I was one of those first-generation, rule-following, let’s-find-the-right-path students,” Evans said. She envisioned four years at K promptly followed by medical school and a physician job. Her path, however, was not to be so straightforward.

“I think about half our class wanted to be in health sciences when we came in,” Evans said. “I jumped right in there and every quarter it seemed like half the people had disappeared. I was thinking, okay, I’m not going to make it.”

While she struggled with the intensity of the short terms and the rigorous science curriculum, Evans loved K and learned invaluable lessons from the liberal arts approach.

“K was a great learning space,” Evans said. “One of the things I loved about Kalamazoo was that we got to take other kinds of courses that were not necessarily what you were majoring in, and that’s the part about my college experience that I can tell other people didn’t get. It was that enlightenment of yourself—lux esto, be light. I really hold that near to heart because I think sometimes, we get very narrow in our focus, and K forced me to broaden my horizons.”

A community-based education course and a first-year course on critical thinking, neither of which Evans would have taken on her own initiative, taught her about herself as a learner—lessons she would return to again and again throughout her life.

Another course at K changed Evans’ view of literature.

“I hated literature my whole life until I took a class at K,” Evans said. “It wasn’t interesting to me; I couldn’t appreciate it because I never saw myself in it. In that class, I finally got to read stories that centered me as a Black woman. Then I could appreciate other people’s stories more and I began to understand why we need literature.”

Evans went on to win a literature award from Randall Robinson, a lawyer, author and activist known for founding TransAfrica and opposing apartheid in South Africa, who spoke on campus in 1992.

“He is a quiet, powerful force,” Evans said. “He gave one of the most phenomenal speeches about media, how the way we receive information in America is not truly news, and he gave us ways to read the news from a more worldwide perspective. I have never looked at the media the same since.”

At the time, students were required to attend a certain number of Liberal Arts Colloquium Credit events by the time they graduated.

“My husband talks about this sometimes, because he would never get his done,” Evans said, laughing. “They would bring in speakers on various topics you probably never considered. You would oftentimes be like, oh, I don’t want to go to this because it’s not a topic I’m interested in. It was another one of those enlightening experiences because you needed your credits, so you would go to them anyway, and you would always learn something new. It would make you go places you never expected to go.”

Author and activist bell hooks, who spoke on campus in fall 1989, was an LACC highlight for Evans.

She was the original source of an idea Evans heard from Jeanne Baraka-Love, director of minority affairs and a mentor to Evans during her time at K.

“Dr. Love said it like this,” Evans said. “Every day of your life, you would come home and sit down to dinner and your whole family was Black. Now you come to school and that’s not the case—and that goes for white students as well—the world is not just your family. Now you’ve got to figure out how to navigate that space. I think that’s what school is about. Everything’s not going to look like it did at home; your table is now the table in the cafeteria. Who are you going to sit with and get to know? I feel comfortable walking into all kinds of rooms, and it starts in those places like K.”

Baraka-Love played an instrumental role in bringing Evans to that place of comfort.

“When you are one of eight black students in a class, you need someone to help navigate that space,” Evans said. “Dr. Love was one of those people. She helped me affirm who I was and know that I should be comfortable in my own skin, no matter what that skin looked like.”

A rule follower by nature, Evans credits K with shaping her into someone willing to break the rules when necessary, which enabled her to diverge from the K-Plan when she needed to rest on her college journey.

“I was having some struggles and I felt like I wasn’t in a space where the structure of the K-Planwas helpful for me,” Evans said. “I didn’t go on foreign study. I ended up taking an internship and taking organic chemistry at Western Michigan University. For that class, K was too fast-paced for me and I needed to slow down.”

Evans recognized what she needed because K had taught her what kind of learner she was.

“I was determined that I wasn’t going to fail the class just because of the way it was structured,” Evans said. “I had to do it my way. I did one course at Western and that gave me the confidence to come back and tackle K again.”

Evans completed her Senior Integrated Project (SIP) at Upjohn Farm on how milk components changed the effectiveness of antimicrobials used to treat bovine mastitis. The SIP helped her land an internship after graduation, as well as jobs testing water and working as a microbiologist.

Resting on the road

Evans marvels now that it was so common at K to graduate in four years and to go on to post-graduate school.

“I think that speaks volumes,” Evans said. “The focus was going on to bigger and better.”

With that in mind, Evans took the MCAT—and did not do well. As a first-generation college student, she did not know how to prepare for the entrance exams into medical school.

“Even though K prepared me to be a great thinker, you just don’t know what you don’t know,” Evans said. “I was never going to ask, because that was my nature back then. I made a lot of assumptions and went with them. I didn’t know a lot about process, like how to study for the MCAT. I winged it a lot.”

When she performed poorly on the MCAT, Evans started looking for a job. During that process, she visited a community health center in Kalamazoo.

“It was my view of how I wanted health care to be,” she said. “It was like one-stop shopping in the Meijer fashion. I thought, well, maybe I’m not meant to be a physician in one of these places; maybe I’m meant to run one of these places. I wanted to help people, whatever the journey was going to be; I thought maybe I was going to help the world in a different way.”

The desire to work in community health felt like a religious calling for Evans, like God had set her on that path, and she sought to be open to however that might look.

She married her college sweetheart, Rodney Evans ’93, who had a daughter, and they added another daughter to their growing family.

“I didn’t know what to do at that point,” Evans said. “I still wanted to help the world but I didn’t know how that was going to look as a mom.”

Evans became a stay-at-home mom while her husband earned a master’s in public health and an executive M.B.A. He got a job in Clarksville, Indiana, on the border with Kentucky, and the Evans family settled on the Louisville side of the Ohio River. When Evans was ready to return to work outside the home, she applied for a water company job, a path that eventually diverted her back to the medical field in two unexpected ways.

The first was through a chance encounter on the sidewalk as Evans was looking for the water company’s office.

“This young woman was passing me, and she said, ‘Oh, I just quit that job. Here, contact this person,’” Evans said. “She was probably a 30-something-year-old Black woman, and she looked at me and she said, ‘Because I’m going to be a doctor.’ It intrigued me and we ended up swapping numbers.

”It was during the interview for the customer service job at the water company that Evans saw a poster with the quote, “To rest on the road does not end the journey.” That resonated with Evans. She returned to it later, at an employee evaluation where her boss told her that while she was the best worker he had ever had, he could not promote her because she had taken time off to care for her daughter when she got sick.

In the meantime, her predecessor in the job, that chance sidewalk meeting, had become a friend and confidant.

“She’s a force and we just vibed and truly connected,” Evans said. “We would have these conversations and when I got angry about the job, she was like, ‘Girl, we should just study for the MCAT.’”

Being denied a promotion despite excellent work proved to be the push Evans needed. She quit the job, and the two friends prepared for the MCAT together. Both would eventually become physicians.

“I might have been 26 when this all happened and I felt old,” Evans said. “I’m not saying I was, but I felt at the time like I had lived a lifetime and had done more than the average bear as far as what I had been exposed to.”

Evans opened her medical school entrance essay with the quote from the poster, “To rest on the road does not end the journey.”

“That does express exactly how I felt,” she said. “My story was not the traditional story. Medical school was relatively easy for me, which I would never have guessed and I still, to this day, thank K for that. K taught me to be a critical thinker and a great self-teacher and I realized that when I got to medical school .”

Continuing the journey

Evans earned her medical degree from the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Afterward, Evans worked for a federally funded health clinic in Richmond, Kentucky, where she saw firsthand the gaps in care. Patients could not afford to see a specialist. When gas prices were high, they could hardly afford to get to one medical appointment.

“They would pay a sliding fee to see me and get all their labs,” Evans said. “If they needed to see a specialist, there was just no way they could. The barriers to their care were so great.”

Diabetes was a common problem among patients Evans saw, and an area where she felt weakest in her knowledge and abilities. Seeing the need of her patients, she committed to learning more and became a diabetologist.

“The place that I felt the most vulnerable in knowledge, I ended up having to learn so well that I became very good at managing diabetes,” Evans said. Eventually, she became the state champion for diabetic self-management, education and support. She now trains doctors in that programming so they can teach patients to be self-learners and manage their diabetes.

After Richmond, Evans worked in a diabetes center and in primary care before taking leadership of the medical team at a new University of Louisville Health Urgent CarePlus facility that opened in July 2021 in west Louisville’s Parkland neighborhood. The facility offers both primary and urgent care. Evans serves as the primary care physician and diabetologist.

“It comes back to that place in Kalamazoo where I thought I could be the community health person,” Evans said. “I don’t take anything for granted—good, bad. When my patients are struggling, I always tell them, I never lose, I only win or I learn. That’s how I had to go forward because life always throws you curveballs. It was a tough journey to get here but it was worth every moment.”

While Evans loves Louisville, she says it has a long history of redlining—discriminatory loan and insurance practices that segregate neighborhoods and contribute to structural racism. The establishment of the Parkland Urgent Care Plus was an act of anti-racism by the former president of the University of Louisville, Evans said.

“She wanted to have community partnerships and have a provider here that could reach out to the community in a way that maybe other providers don’t do,” Evans said. “I’m in that space where I’m a physician, but I’m also doing administrative and community-based things that are needed to break down social determinants of health, like transportation.”

As with her experience in Richmond, transportation is a huge barrier to specialized care for her patients in Louisville. Evans is currently working with a donor to endow a fund that will provide transportation to patients who need it. In addition to providing care and seeing patients, she meets with community members and donors, leads discussions on topics such as depression and quality measures, seeks out grant money, and helps plan and execute initiatives.

Recently, she has been working with the Department of Public Health regarding a grant they received to help with equity in west Louisville.

“They’re moving into things like economic or entrepreneurial equity that help people build wealth and improve health by having more wealth,” Evans said. “I get to dabble in spaces where we can really problem solve to improve the health of the people in the area.”

Reflecting on her path

Tamea and Rodney Evans have three children; the youngest is in college and the oldest has three children herself.

All her children have attended historically black colleges and universities, though one did apply to Kalamazoo College before making a different choice. Although Evans wishes at least one of her children would have gone to K, she hopes maybe one day one of her granddaughters will.

“I’m a lover of Kalamazoo College and I try to send tons of people,” Evans said. “I tell them about K, hoping that for one kid it will spark some interest in going there.

“I hope, if someone’s interested in Kalamazoo College, they take a hard look past the surface. I learned from K that diversity isn’t always about color or race; it’s diversity of ideas that make the world better, and I know with certainty, K was one of the most diverse places for ideas that I’ve ever been.”

She is still in touch with some of her classmates from K.

“My allies in life as a Black person, that are white, mostly come from K,” Evans said. “I never thought of needing allies when I was young. But as I got older, I realized you need white allies as we fight injustice. And almost all of them come from Kalamazoo College, because I think it was a place where you had to go to some uncomfortable places.”

Evans has sought out schools and communities for her children that live up to that vision of diversity.

She reflects, “My K experience was broadening, and I attribute a lot of that to lux esto. You have to be light to the world and you can’t do that if you don’t have anything to share. You’ve got to be able to shine light in places that people don’t think to look.

“K shaped a lot about me. I look back and realize a lot of who I am came from Kalamazoo College. It has had a handprint in a lot of my life.”

A student-athlete, then known best in cross country and track circles, attended his first residents’ meeting at Hoben Hall as a first-year student in fall 1972. In that meeting, a young Bruce “Frisbee” Johnson announced he was putting a sign-up sheet on the door of his room as he encouraged his peers to join him on the Quad to learn the game of Ultimate Frisbee.

“That Friday night, I was in bed sleeping because we had a cross country meet in the morning,” Johnson said. “Back then, the drinking age was 18, and all these guys came up, very loud and very raucous. They said, ‘Hey, Frisbee Johnson. We’re going to sign up on your door.’”

That might not sound like a fateful moment, but it gave Johnson a nickname he has kept to this day and it started a chain of events that grew into a Frisbee phenomenon at K. Since then, hundreds of students have played the sport which combines soccer, basketball and football, turning practices and tournaments into athletic passions, along with lifelong friendships. And Johnson is among the pioneers now celebrating the 50th anniversary of bringing Ultimate Frisbee to K.

“I’ve always said K should write a whitepaper about how to keep an Ultimate team going,” Johnson said. “When you have a team like there is at K that’s passionate about a sport, they can have a passing of a torch when senior leaders move on because more people can fall in love with it easily. It’s a sport like running, cycling, golf or tennis that you can play for the rest of your life.”

Ultimate Frisbee demands speed, stamina and agility as it requires players to score points by passing the disc to a teammate in the opposing end zone. Players can’t run with the disc and teams maintain possession until they drop it, which constitutes a turnover to the opposing team. It’s one of the few sports that always requires two players for a team to score points, and it uniquely is played without referees or umpires. Players, through what’s known as the spirit of the game, call their own fouls. 

The sport’s competitors trace its roots to fall 1968 when Joel Silver, a student at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, proposed to the student council that a school Frisbee team be formed. The next summer, he recruited students to play what he called “the ultimate game experience,” which was an adaptation of a Frisbee football game that he had learned at a summer camp in Massachusetts. 

In turn, Johnson learned the sport from a few of the founders at the annual International Frisbee Tournament held in the Keweenaw Peninsula, subsequently bringing it to K. After the initial games on the Quad, K students competed in their first intercollegiate contest in 1974, against Calvin College, in what reportedly had been one of the first match-ups conducted west of Pennsylvania. 

K continued developing its presence in the sport, eventually acquiring the name Kalamazoo College Ultimate Frisbee Society (KCUF). In 1976, KCUF was one of a select few teams to participate in the first College Nationals Tournament in Amherst, Massachusetts. Around the same time, the team played a showcase game against Michigan State University during the halftime of a basketball game between MSU and Indiana. In front of 15,000 fans, KCUF defeated Michigan State, 7-1, with Johnson, who later became an All-American and played in the World Frisbee Championship in the Rose Bowl that August.

After college, Johnson promoted the sport by serving in various leadership positions from being the first Midwest director of the Ultimate Players Association, also known as USA Ultimate, in 1978, to being a leader in the Kalamazoo Ultimate Disc League (KUDL). In 2014, Johnson was honored by the Ultimate Frisbee Hall of Fame as a member of the Johnny Appleseeds, a group of people recognized as having been critical to the germination of the sport.

Now, Kalamazoo College Ultimate Frisbee consists of a men’s team, the Ultimate Buzz, and a women’s team, the Queen Beez. Both teams are open to all, regardless of skill level, and conduct regular practices interspersed with several tournaments during the academic year. The club sport consistently grows through K-Fest, the College’s annual involvement fair each fall, yet Maddy Guimond ’22, a Beez captain last year, first tried the sport after her LandSea orientation counselor recommended it.

“I had heard of Ultimate Frisbee a little when I was in high school, even though I never had a chance to play it,” Guimond said. “But when I did the LandSea backpacking trip, my leader was one of the senior captains. She was really into it and pushed me to join, and I just fell in love with it. It’s intense and fun to play at the same time.”

Regionals for the women’s team in Guimond’s senior season were conducted in April, although community tournaments and scrimmages lasted throughout the spring. Moving forward, the Queen Beez now are looking to recruit new students to the team as COVID-19 caused a decline in participation.

“We’ve been trying to recruit people and get people excited,” Guimond said. “We need people who are committed to the club and will come consistently to practices so we can rebuild and have a strong foundation of people who know the rules and have the fundamentals down so they’re able to teach other people. I think it’s incredible that it has survived for so long. I’m impressed and happy with all the captains have done to keep this club going because it’s a lot of work, but it’s super rewarding to have a wonderful space for people to feel welcome and respected.”

The Ultimate Buzz has experienced similar problems with recruiting because of COVID-19, yet has attracted some accomplished players such as Tommy Saxton ’22, one of the senior captains from the 2021–22 season.

“When I was a senior in high school, I visited Kalamazoo College and stayed with three other seniors at one of the Living Learning Houses,” Saxton said. “It happened to be a house full of Frisbee people. They told us about the team and it seemed to be a fun group. All three of us not only ended up playing on the team, but we ended up living in the same Living Learning House.”

Ultimate Frisbee remains a club sport, which presents funding challenges, yet K fields competitive teams against schools such as Western Michigan University, which the Buzz beat three times this year, and regional squads from institutions such as Butler University. The Buzz lost convincingly to Butler in fall, yet came within two points of beating the school, which ultimately fell one game short of the national championships, during regionals. Grace College, the team that eliminated Butler, beat the Buzz by just one point in the tournament before regionals.

“It’s a large club that feels like a team,” Saxton said. “We compete at as many or more tournaments in the fall and spring as a lot of the other teams on campus, so I definitely would consider anyone who participates in Frisbee to be a college athlete. We hang out regularly outside of practice every week, even when we’re not competing, so it’s a close-knit group of people, and a group of people you can call your friends.”

Guimond and Saxton agree they hope to return to K as alumni someday and see more players drawing the same enjoyment they did.

“I think everyone who plays Frisbee and graduates K recognizes Frisbee as one of the most influential college experiences,” Saxton said. “This is probably true at other schools as well. Alumni feel nostalgic about the team, having friends that they made and still communicate with. I’m sure that I’ll be talking for my whole life with the friends I’ve made. It’s been a significant part of my experience at K.” 

Through CCE, Building Blocks Partnership

By Fran Czuk

Experiential education is one of the hallmarks of the K-Plan, and each year, hundreds of Kalamazoo College students join the life of the city around them through the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) and its long-standing community partnerships.

Building Blocks of Kalamazoo stands out as an exemplar of those partnerships between K and local schools, groups, organizations and the city. Founded by Professor Emeritus Kim Cummings as a student-neighborhood endeavor in 1995, Building Blocks has since developed into an independent organization that empowers residents, one block at a time, to enhance the quality of their neighborhood life.

Resident facilitators guide a block’s residents in choosing, planning and enacting projects with funding from Building Blocks. Working together, groups have created community gardens and home landscaping, built ramps and porch railings, and lobbied for and installed better lighting, among other projects. Through the planning process and shared spring and fall work days, participants create and sustain networks of neighbors to continue to work together on block improvements.

K students have engaged with Building Blocks through community-based courses, through summer Community Building Internships, as Civic Engagement Scholars and through Senior Integrated Projects, advancing the CCE’s mission to prepare students to build a more just, equitable and sustainable world, starting locally. The work is enhanced and continued by many K alumni who now serve as urban project partners and mentors for current students.

“Led by community members and drawing on their strengths, the work doesn’t just make important connections between classroom and community—it builds powerful relationships based on trust and mutuality,” said Alison Geist, founding director of the CCE. 

Community-based courses

During the 1995 pilot program, Cummings learned three lessons that would shape both Building Blocks and the future structure of community-based courses. The sites should be small; more than one or two students were needed at each site; and the students had limited time to give while balancing a full course load.

The first lesson led to what Cummings said is “one hallmark of Building Blocks, which makes it very distinct and unique, that instead of trying to organize people over a large area, we organize and support people at the street level, at the block level, and we count on people caring about the issues and concerns immediate to them.”

The other two lessons led to the establishment of the first service-learning course at K, Cummings said, “the first course that was fully oriented toward the experience and learning from the experience.” That enabled teams of three students per site to devote more time to their sites and receive adequate preparation as part of the course.

“That course was foundational in my development as a leader and in my own life,” said Katie McPherson ’08, who now serves as Building Blocks executive director. “This notion of believing in people, providing the avenues for people to thrive and seeing it happen, seeing neighbors who didn’t know each other, didn’t trust each other, come together through these community Work Days—it’s magical.”

Students have also engaged with Building Blocks through courses in community organizing, gardening and more.

In spring 2022, Marilyn Evans, assistant professor of classics, taught a new community-based seminar with Building Blocks, House in Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity. 

At the start of the term, the students and resident facilitators shared a little about themselves in a speed dating-style virtual meeting before rating their preferences of whom to work with. McPherson then matched students with resident facilitators to assist with spring catalyst planning and projects in Kalamazoo neighborhoods.

A double major in biology and history with a classics minor, Ella Knight ’22 enrolled in House in Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity with an interest in connecting history to the present and gaining a better understanding of how community is shaped. She was matched with the Oakwood neighborhood, her first choice.

“As a history major, I liked that the resident facilitator talked about the history of her neighborhood,” Knight said. “I think that showed how important the work is to her and how invested she is.”

In meeting with community organizers and Oakwood families for discussions about projects, budgeting and materials, Knight saw connections to coursework about how people view homes and neighborhoods and how they interact with their community.

“Thinking about it historically, we’ve been looking at Greek and Roman houses, which are very different,” Knight said. “Greek houses were a large family structure with a central courtyard, and everyone in the house interacted in the courtyard itself. Whereas in Roman housing, the goal was for people to look into your house and see every room in the house, so it was much more transparent. 

“We met in a park, which seemed to be where people gathered. It was interesting to see that these people who were neighbors hadn’t met before and were realizing they lived two houses apart. They were making connections and forming friendships.”

Those different notions of public and private were key in the course, Evans said. “Strangers normally aren’t in the home, but they walk past the outside; it’s a point of interaction between strangers and people who know each other. Students are starting to think about the role of outdoor spaces specifically in facilitating interactions between people, in the same way that a house in Rome could have been used to do just that.”

Walker Chung ’22, a chemistry major and classics minor, saw those connections when he attended a Building Blocks Work Day in April. Along with another student from the class and K student-athletes, Chung helped gravel driveways in the Northside neighborhood.

“In ancient Rome, a lot of their houses were for the public,” Chung said. “People would walk into houses and look around, so a lot of it was façade, and their private space was tiny in comparison. While now that has flipped, because we value our privacy a lot more, there are still aspects of the house that are public, like the outside, the backyard, the front yard, the driveway. Little improvements like putting in gravel can change the entire aspect of the house and how people perceive it.”

Evans said students in the course saw how these seemingly superficial improvements matter to residents and the life of the neighborhood. The course included discussion on how much energy the wealthy and elite put into decorating their homes, particularly in ancient Rome, and how the importance of appearance and status show up in modern life.

“They’re starting to see how these small changes are welcoming to people and can be a focal point for people to talk to each other,” Evans said. “It definitely matters to them, the exterior and the act of making it look nicer, or in a lot of cases, making it safer, since a lot of projects are aimed at rebuilding stairs or railings, things like that.”

Chung also saw how the Work Day was a communal experience, with residents directing and assisting with the work, as well as students, nearby residents and family and friends helping out. Those bigger ideas about the role of community in building and maintaining houses were key to the course for Evans.

“We’re talking about how much collaboration is involved in these projects and how, for something that’s seemingly a private and individual affair, it involves a whole community,” Evans said. “Everybody’s involved in making decisions about what’s going to get done, how much money can be spent on it, who’s going to do it. It emphasizes how the work of improving a house or even building it is a communal enterprise.”

Elle Ragan ’23, a religion and classical civilization double major with an art history minor, observed this process through a strong collaboration with her Vine neighborhood resident facilitators. Ragan attended several meetings with the facilitators as well as neighborhood residents to discuss possible projects, including a walking meeting to observe potential projects.

“It’s been fun building those relationships with the individual community members and meeting them, hearing their stories and about their lives and working through possible roadblocks with them,” Ragan said.

Ragan said as the term progressed, it was illuminating to see students bringing examples from their Building Blocks experience into class discussion. In addition to deepening her understanding of academic and historic concepts, Ragan’s work with Building Blocks helped her develop interpersonal, project management and budgeting skills. 

Vine resident facilitator Erika Brown said her experiences with K students have been “phenomenal. I thoroughly enjoyed working alongside them and appreciate all that they brought to our team….After hearing that Katie was involved with Building Blocks when she was a K student, I knew this project was destined for greatness. Katie set the bar high and our students met that bar with flying colors.”

The Vine spring projects this year involved yard and trash pickup, soil distribution and leveling, installing a saucer swing and beautifying a corner curb garden, Brown said.

“Building Blocks is a gift to the core neighborhoods,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to build community while enhancing the neighborhoods.”

Ragan said the resident facilitators are invested in developing the students, often pointing out how their efforts could translate to a resumé and helping them network.

“They are excited for us to be involved and they want us to succeed in Building Blocks and beyond that,” Ragan said. “That has been really heartwarming and we feel so supported even though we’re technically here to support them. It goes both ways.”

Experiences like this were part of Evans’ hopes for the course.

“Many students are concerned about getting jobs after graduation, and they like knowing, as a lot of us do, that their work matters,” Evans said. “In a community-based course, they can consciously make connections between what they’re learning and what they’re doing, get real-life work experience, network and work with people in the community, and learn more deeply about the subject matter in the course—as well as hopefully foster the sense that they’re part of the community and they’re committed to improving it.”

Community Building Internships

As Building Blocks has evolved, a big change has been the addition of Block Action Groups, which build on the spring catalyst sites to support residents in continuing to work together on improvements for longer periods of time. While community-based courses coincide well with the spring catalyst sites and provide an excellent foundation for learning about social change, Geist said, “The 10-week quarter isn’t at all like ‘real life.’ Short-term involvement isn’t conducive to the kind of sustainable partnerships that we know social change requires.” 

Therefore, the CCE offers other avenues for partnership programming that enable longer commitments.

For example, Building Blocks consistently participates in the CCE’s Community Building Internship (CBI) program over the summer.

“We take on summer interns every year,” McPherson said. “I love coaching college-age students. It was such a great experience for me at that age, and they want to do right; they want to do well; they’re hungry to improve. They’re really wonderful to work with.”

Interns assist with conducting and analyzing pre- and post-program surveys and assist residents in applying for a continuation grant if the residents want to continue the community work from spring sites throughout the summer.

“That’s their core work,” McPherson said. “From there, I try to work with them on their passions and skills and what they want to get out of the internship. A lot of interns have particular neighborhoods or projects they’re interested in so I try to match them with those interests.”

A past intern who was interested in home repair and passionate about the Northside neighborhood assisted with construction projects in that area. Another who loved serving as an event planner helped take Building Blocks celebration dinners to the next level. McPherson worked to connect the most recent intern, an avid gardener who lives in the Vine neighborhood, with local gardeners and garden projects.

“I have some broad goals for all interns,” McPherson said. “Then I set those final goals based on what they want to get out of the summer program.”

A number of student CBIs have completed Senior Integrated Projects based on their Building Blocks experiences.

Lifelong Learning

“For the vast majority of students, experiential learning opens up possibilities for impassioned engagement by students, with lasting consequences to their outlooks and understanding,” Cummings said. “One can read about low-income neighborhoods, and one can read about populations of poverty, but actually to be involved as participants in the dramas whereby residents grapple with the problems on their street enables a much higher proportion of students to become excited by what they’re discovering, to learn with immediacy and to become emotionally tied to what’s going on. They love the people they work with and they find their own abilities growing and their friendships growing….People’s passions are aroused by seeing the hardships people struggle with and the unfairness of the situations people live with.”

McPherson experienced the power of that experiential learning in her own life and values the ongoing relationship between K and Building Blocks.

“My experience as a Building Blocks student organizer at Kalamazoo College set my life on a path of community organizing and civic engagement,” McPherson said. “I’ve seen this same awakening happen to K students who have worked with Building Blocks. I look forward to continuing our partnership with the College to provide even more opportunities for students to experience this level of direct community engagement. It can truly be a life changing experience.” 

For more information or to get involved, visit the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement at cce.kzoo.edu and Building Blocks at bbkazoo.org

To learn see Building Blocks in action, check out their new video below!

https://vimeo.com/741712085