Emily Duseau

CESL Program: Community Scholars Program

Major: Sustainable Community Development

I heard about CESL because one of my friends was already part of the program in a cohort above me, and she always talked about how she loved what she was doing there, and once I read more about the program, I thought that it would really compliment my department because we talk a lot about community engagement, and this was a way for me to not only learn more about what community engagement and service is but also actually do that and be a part of the larger community outside of school.

My time at CSP has been really positive for me, and I’ve met so many great people. At Safe Passage, I’ve been a part of their outreach department, where I’ve been doing social media content and other administrative tasks, and I’ve also been part of their Youth Lab Initiative, where I went to the Bement High School, and we led a workshop for boundary setting, healthy relationships, and just holding space for that kind of material that might not be talked about otherwise, and I learned a lot through that experience about what the community is that I could be serving and also about what it’s like to be engaging with people and holding space for really valuable topics. 

Something with Safe Passage that I really felt was valuable was the hot chocolate run that I went to last year and this year. It’s something that’s really just so inspiring to see such a large group of people gathering to support the cause of intimate partner violence prevention, and then for my experiences in the Community Scholars Program, I just really love how we’re treated as people, and we always check in with each other, and we hold a lot of different roles in our lives outside of being students and other things, but we’re just really treated like real people, and that’s always so important to me.

I think that I’ll always hold CSP in such a positive light in my memory, and I think that is because we focus so much on equity and what it really means to support communities through service and what service is. I’ve also been thinking a lot about visioning and how to imagine the worlds that we want to achieve, and I think that skill is just about letting go of what we think is possible and really just utilizing our passions and our knowledge to kind of think about what we could do in our lives, and so I’ll always be using that as I graduate and think about what I could be doing later.