Student Teams Receive Community Engagement Group Awards
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A pair of teams featuring SPHHS students recently won Outstanding Undergraduate Community Engagement Group Awards from the Office of Civic Engagement & Service-Learning (CESL). The awards recognize sustained community engagement on the part of undergraduate students who value community knowledge creation and center collaborative partnerships. Nominees may be involved in service-learning classes, research projects for non-profits, internships, public policy work, local community service, and other community partnerships.
The awards are given annually to undergraduate students that have shown deep commitment to community engagement. The group community engagement award recognizes a team-based project that engages a specific civic issue/community need for the mutual benefit of learners and a community partner.
This year’s winners were honored at Civic Engagement & Service-Learning’s annual CESLebration held on May 7, 2025, where they were presented with certificates of recognition. This year’s winning groups included:
Experiential Learning Project: The Experiential Learning project, led by Lorraine Cordeiro, Professor of Nutrition and Director of the Center for Research on Families and supervised by Nutrition doctoral student Maria Wigati, includes 8 undergraduate student team members: Shaheed Abraham (Psychology); Amara Cheng (Political Science); William I (Biology); Yardana Katz (Public Health Sciences, Nutrition); Aarushi Madappa (Nutrition); Ella McTasney (Nutrition, Kinesiology); Yejun Na (Nutrition); and Unmesh Reza (Computer Science). The Experiential Learning Project bridges the gap between undergraduate students and the workforce by providing undergraduate students at UMass Amherst with opportunities to participate in paid work, engaging with a variety of local institutions and programs, as well as the chance to present their work at conferences. The project also aims to provide a support system that works in the students’ best interests, helping manage academic life, develop professional skills, and connecting them with internships and job opportunities outside the core program.
Going forward, the Experiential Learning Project hopes to expand its program to more students, allowing more undergraduates to have the opportunity to better prepare themselves for the workplace while learning the skills necessary in an environment that encourages self-advocacy and has the best interests of their students as the top priority. In addition, the program aims to connect students with local organizations and foster the idea of responsible community work being a core part of anyone's professional development. They hope this will result in a future workforce that is not only more socially conscious, but also has the ability to bring a wide variety of preexisting skills into the workplace.
UMass Abortion Doula Project: Charlotte Gilson (Sociology), Tasha Simmons (Nutrition), and Mitsou Vincent (Economics), all in their second year of the Community Scholars Program, co-founded the UMass Abortion Doula Project, a program offered through University Health Services (UHS) to provide patients with emotional, physical, and informational support as they undergo medication abortion on campus. In a political climate where access to reproductive health services becomes increasingly precarious, these students understand the importance of education and support for those seeking reproductive care in their communities. As such, they partnered with both UHS and the Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts to spread awareness of reproductive justice initiatives on campus, including an abortion doula training which they hosted in February. In addition to the Abortion Doula Project, they reinstated and ran the UMass Students for Reproductive Justice club, through which they hosted biweekly events to bring awareness to reproductive justice on both local and national scales.
For more on the Outstanding Undergraduate Community Engagement Awards, visit the CESL website.
