Overview:

This bench serves as a positive space on campus where students can sit outside on benches placed across from each other, and talk about critical issues such as the intersections between climate change, racism, sexism, and classism.

The bench will be installed between the sculpture, Mobius Solaris, and the large tree in the Student Union quad (see photo for reference). This location was chosen because of the contrast it represents between a man-made sculpture, perceived as masculine, and a natural creation from the earth (the tree), perceived as feminine. One person would be facing East, where the sun rises, symbolizing renewal. While the other person would be facing West, where the sun sets, symbolizing reflection and sacrifice. The bench will also be located in front of the engineering building, where STEM students and faculty will be encouraged to apply intersectionality to their coursework and everyday lives.

Project Goals:

Bringing sensitive topics to a space of open, safe discussion is one of UConn's largest academic goals. This bench speaks to UConn's dedication in bringing light to such topics and incorporating them into both UConn classrooms and campuses. This bench will be engraved with questions addressing issues pertaining to intersectionality and encourage those seated to explore the questions.

The bench serves to further promote an awareness and discussion around the topics those questions address.

Contact

Phoebe Godfrey

Associate Professor in Residence of Sociology

phoebe.godfrey@uconn.edu

Initial proposed project location and designs (see below)

Through collaboration with partners across the university, we shifted the project location and received approval for a more ideal location on campus (see below). 

Using the power of sport, Husky Sport will collaborate with community and campus partners to support youth and college student development through shared teaching, learning, and practice committed to equity. Husky Sport will work to facilitate positive, sustained, and reciprocal relationships, between members of the Hartford’s North End and University of Connecticut communities (Campus-Community Partnership).

Campus

Through collaborations with students, volunteers, alumni, staff, faculty, and campus programs, Husky Sport will work to enhance both systemic and individual development at the University of Connecticut.

Husky Sport will work to develop supportive spaces to facilitate enhancement of knowledge and practice in the fields of sport-based youth development, teaching and learning around diversity, social justice and equity. Participant development will be supported through rigorous experiential learning (Service Learning), on-going professional development (Community of Practice), and additional organizational initiatives aligned with missions of the Sport Management Program, the Department of Educational Leadership, the Neag School of Education, and the University of Connecticut (Scholarship). 

Outcomes

Husky Sport’s campus engagement should reveal progress toward the following objectives, with particular focus on college student development outcomes:

• Value stakeholder voices in co-constructing identified needs/desires within partnerships
• Develop reciprocal relationships, while actively dismantling savior-mentality and approach
• Enhance beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, and social competency among diverse participants
• Increase knowledge and application as teachers, learners, and practitioners of SBYD
• Increase student attitudes, behaviors, and intended behaviors associated with social justice
• Build diverse networks for exchange of social capital

Find at University of Connecticut Academic Vision and Neag School of Education and additional citations: (Bruening, Fuller, & Percy, 2015; Dewey, 1916; Kolb and Fry, 1975; Kolb; 1984; Bringle & Hatcher, 1996; Bringle & Hatcher, 2002; Bruening, et al., 2010; Conway, Amel, & Gerwien, 2009; Peters, 2011; Enfield & Collins, 2008; Bruening, et al., 2014; Fuller, et al., 2015)

CONTACT:

Justin Evanovich, Ph.D. Sport Management

justin.evanovich@uconn.edu

Community

Building upon the power of sport as a common denominator in relationship building and tool for supporting youth development, Husky Sport will engage in shared program planning, delivery, and evaluation that encompasses a larger number of youth participants, along a greater age continuum (K–12), and in more aspects of a child’s growth process within Hartford’s North End communities. As part of school time and out of school time support towards youth development, program pillars will include teaching, learning, and application of physical activity, healthy nutrition, transferable life skills, and academic enrichment (Sport-Based Youth Development). 

Outcomes

Husky Sport’s community engagement should reveal progress toward the following objectives, with particular focus on youth development outcomes:

• Increased self esteem/self worth as participants gain interest, knowledge and improve their physical abilities
• Increased accountability/responsibility for self as part of a small program with considerable individual attention
• Increased connections to community/sense of belonging through working closely with mentors, mentees, and peers
• Increased knowledge/acquisition of nutrition/physical activity/life skills/academic skills from the curriculum
• Application of those skills both within program, school, home, and community activities
• Active participation/recognizing one’s own influence on self/others through power-sharing

Additional citations: Bruening, Dover & Clark, 2009; Perkins & Noam, 2007; Pittman, et al., 2002; National Institute on Out-of-School Time at Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Harvard Family Research Project After School Program Quality Assessment Categories of Standards, DC Standards for Out-of-School Time, The Community Network for Youth Development’s Youth Development Framework for Practice, Team Up For Youth’s Building Blocks for Quality Youth Sports.

Husky Nutrition educates Connecticut residents who are in greatest need about nutrition, physical activities, and lifestyle choices that promote greater health. Working with UConn students, we facilitate Community Engagement Programs (Service Learning) that decrease disparities in food and nutrition-related conditions and diseases, food security, and food access. We do this by:

• Promoting positive behavior change in the food-related and physical activities of adults, families and children; and/or
• Impacting systems-level changes to improve access to healthy food and encourage opportunities to be physically active.

Students from many academic disciplines gain knowledge and experience to improve their skills. Utilizing strong community partnerships, students participate in programs that serve underserved, limited resource children, families and adults throughout Connecticut.

Overview

The Husky Nutrition (NUSC 3171) course emphasizes community service, with learning laboratory and site lesson plan development all focused on enhancing the applied, community experience. UConn students enrolled in this course increase their understanding of nutrition and health in underserved Connecticut communities, gain skills in conveying healthy nutrition messages to families, and solidify their cultural competence. At the community site, students interact with parents or caregivers and their children, engaging them and delivering brief, healthy nutrition messages when the parents and caregivers come to pick up their children.

Course Goals

1. To understand the principles of healthy nutrition messaging and be able to convey these principles in the community;
2. To positively impact community health and well-being by providing nutrition education to parents and caregivers of preschool children that results in reducing children’s consumption of sweetened beverages; and
3. To listen to and learn from parents, caregivers, and children about their communities in order to understand what works to improve good nutrition and what challenges they face.

Contact

Heli Roy, Ph.D., RD
heroy@uchc.edu

Husky Nutrition Summer Scholars

Every summer, Husky Nutrition offers a paid internship for undergraduate and graduate level students studying at UConn. Husky Scholars (interns) act as role models and mentors by developing lessons and sharing healthy eating and physical activity messages to participants in under served areas throughout Connecticut.

Husky Scholars participate in active community engagement by:

• Delivering and creating nutrition education lessons to participants across the lifespan through Husky Reads, the On-the-Go Healthy Beverage Series, and the Husky Smart Shopping programs.
• Assisting with research projects and with media projects associated with the SNAP4CT Online Nutrition Education platform.

Contact

Susan Furbish, RDN
furbish@uchc.edu

Resources

Nondiscrimination Statement

Contact

Susan Coleman
sucoleman@uchc.edu

Overview:

UConn Mechanical Engineering students restore the historic Keney Memorial Clock Tower in Hartford as a senior design project.

The students were able to restore the clock tower over the course of one year. Students were able to do so without a schematic, seeing as there are no designs and many of the clock tower's parts are too old to identify or no longer used in present-day engineering.

Today, the Keney Clock Tower is fully functioning and stands as an example of ingenuity and dedication to the Hartford community.

Project Goals:

Restore the non-functional Keney Clock Tower to its former glory and assist in the preservation of this historic landmark.

“It was difficult because they weren’t there...when we got there, there was just a bunch of missing components that we had to design from scratch.”

-Garrett Murphy

“The whole task was a bit daunting. There were a lot of pieces that were gone completely. A lot of things that were broken. We weren’t entirely sure how everything worked."

-UConn student Henry Courchaine.

In the Fall of 2018 four students were selected to work on the restoration of the Keney Memorial Clock Tower for a full year, engineering senior design project. The City of Hartford, Friends of Keney Park, and Keney Park Sustainability Project all being partners on this project. The project goals were to restore the clock mechanisms to be fully operative and once again align the chimes with the time. The students have been successful at identifying the problems and thus, the solutions. Students presented their findings and solutions to partners and are confident the clock tower will be once again operational in time for the end of the academic year. Plans are in the works for a community celebration with date and more specifics to be announced.

The Keney Memorial Clock Tower is located in the North end of Hartford on the corner of Main and Ely streets. Its base is 30 feet (9.1 m) square, and it rises to a height of 130 feet (40 m). It is built out of ashlar-cut red sandstone quarried in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. The tower is heightened by corner buttresses, and pinnacles that rise above its roof to finial crosses. There are clock faces on all four sides, above which are lancet-arched louvers around the chamber housing chiming bells that sound every quarter hour.^[2]

The tower was built in 1898 on land that belonged at the time to the locally prominent Keney family. Its construction was done by the family under the terms of the will of Henry Keney, who sought to memorialize his wholesale grocery business, H. & W. Keney. The family, however, instead placed a plaque on the tower reading "This tower erected to the memory of my mother is designed to preserve from other occupancy the ground sacred to me as her home and to stand in perpetual honor to the wisdom, goodness and womanly nobility of her to whose guidance I owe my success in life and its chief joy ~ Henry Keney".^[2] The tower was designed by New York City architect Charles C. Haight, whose specialty was Collegiate Gothic architecture. The family trust deeded the tower and park to the city in 1924.^[2]

See also[edit]

National Register of Historic Places listings in Hartford, Connecticut

References[edit]

1. ^ Jump up to:^a b National Park Service (2010-07-09). "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service.
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b c "NRHP nomination for Keney Tower". National Park Service. Retrieved 2017-06-29.