The popular Service Opportunities in Leadership program, a component of the Hart Leadership Program, is currently on a year-long hiatus in order to retool its course offerings and make them more academically rigorous.
Rest easy, future community leaders. The Service Opportunities in Leadership program, a subset of the Hart Leadership Program, isn’t going anywhere.
The increasingly popular program, which helps students initiate service-oriented projects, is currently on a year-long hiatus in order to revamp its course offerings. Officials said they hope these changes will make SOL more prestigious and academically rigorous.
SOL originated as a summer internship in Croatia and soon developed into a three-part program, in which a house course in the spring prepared participants for summer-long community outreach internships. The third component was a fall follow-up course, in which students reflected on their experiences and linked them to academic pursuits.
The program hit a snag last year when Ellen Wittig, associate dean of Trinity College, announced that house courses could not be reserved for a select group of students such as those in the SOL program—the courses must accommodate any student who wants to participate. In addition, new University policy now requires house courses to be “stand-alone” courses that cannot exist for preparatory purposes. This policy left SOL’s spring course in jeopardy, since the sole purpose of the house course was to train and prepare participants for community service projects in the summer.
After these policy announcements, Alma Blount, director of both the Hart Leadership program and SOL, decided the best thing to do would be to put SOL on hiatus for a year in order to update the program’s academic courses.
“Approval for new courses takes a long time, and the changes we want to make require approval from a lot of people,” said Bridget Booher, assistant director for the Hart Leadership Program. “Even if we dropped everything else to focus on SOL, we still wouldn’t have time to finish revamping before this spring.”
The new, full-credit spring course, which will be introduced in 2006, will no longer be considered preparatory, nor will it continue to be categorized as a “house course.” The course will be open only to SOL participants and will particularly emphasize academic and research aspects of community projects.
“We plan to focus more on topics such as research methodology, as well what it truly means to take part in community-based research,” Booher said. “Community-based research essentially means that students who participate in SOL will be working in conjunction with a community partner organization and a dedicated faculty mentor.”
While SOL changes its curriculum, it is continuing to provide students with summer research grants, although fewer than in years past. SOL plans to offer $2,500 summer grants to 10 students this year, whereas it previously offered at least 16. This will change, however, when the program is back on course. “The plan is to come back in 2006 with the full program,” Booher said.
Booher encourages students to get involved once SOL returns in Spring 2006. “We put these students out there in the community, and sometimes they are in over their heads, but that’s okay,” she said. “SOL is designed to show them the real world.”
Previous summer internships have included opportunities in Croatia, Nicaragua, South Africa, Namibia, Honduras, Malawi and Costa Rica, as well as cities within the United States.
Sophomore Suparna Salil traveled to Chicago to work with inter-faith refugees and immigration ministries last summer and is anxious to get the program started once again. “I am disappointed about the hiatus,” she said. “I miss working with a community at Duke that is politically active and gives me sense of social responsibility.”
Senior Chris Carlberg also interned in Chicago, volunteering at a shelter for homeless youths. “I was attracted to SOL because it allowed a diverse group of people to come together for interesting social work,” he said. “And it also didn’t hurt that funding is provided.”
Blount said the SOL program hopes to continue to provide students with the opportunity to apply their own questions and ideas to community-oriented policy issues.
“An important thing to note,” Blount said, “is that SOL was a student-created initiative. The driving energy of this program has always been Duke students.”
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