Community CONNECTion

Partnerships for Carlisle youth

September 1, 2009

Students from schools in the Carlisle Area School District display African masks they crafted in a CONNECT program at The Trout Gallery.

Caught between childhood and adolescence, middle schoolers are particularly vulnerable to negative outside influences. But when exposed to positive experiences and role models, they can be energized to effect constructive change. This is the premise behind Coalition of Neighborhood Networks for the Enhancement of Carlisle Teens (CONNECT), a four-week summer day camp that builds community vitality by empowering and educating middle-school children.

“This program encourages students to tell their own stories. They also learn about the community so they feel connected to it,” says Joyce Bylander, special assistant to the president for institutional and diversity initiatives, who heads CONNECT. “We want [middle schoolers] to feel a part of something bigger than themselves.”

CALCulated enrichment

Dickinson College partnered with the Carlisle Arts Learning Center (CALC) and other area organizations to present two CONNECT programs this summer. Offering positive role models and tapping students’ creativity and enthusiasm, the programs enriched the lives of area youth—and helped build a stronger community along the way.

Free to Carlisle Area School District students aged 11-15, the program offered a chance to create a video memoir, prepare organic food, learn about sustainability, attend art classes and display their photographs in a formal exhibit.

The 10 students in the program also participated in community-improvement projects. In fine-art workshops, they created artwork to beautify a local community center. They also worked with Project S.H.A.R.E. And, after a week of photography instruction, they took pictures of people and places in their community—pictures that told the community’s story, as well as their own. (An exhibit of these photos, Viewfinder: Experiments in Photography, was shown at The Trout Gallery last month.)

Community leaders from the United Way, YMCA, YWCA, Victory Circle, Hope Station, the Carlisle Area Health and Wellness Foundation and other nonprofits helped develop this unique program. The organizations donated money and in-kind resources; CALC co-presented a week of fine-art workshops with The Trout Gallery.

Bylander hopes to secure funding to continue the program next summer. She says that the future looks bright.

“People have been extremely generous with their time and resources,” says Bylander. “This program is extremely rich because there’s been so much generosity. It’s been a true partnership.”

Trout Gallery exhibits

Approximately 800 elementary-school-aged children took part in the The Trout Gallery’s summer enrichment program, which drew rave reviews.

“This is the first full-scale museum summer program offered in Carlisle—people are excited,” says The Trout Gallery’s curator of education, Wendy Pires. “We want people in the community to know we are here as a resource.”

Throughout the summer, The Trout Gallery offered educational workshops to local children who had enrolled in summer camps through organizations such as the YMCA. Workshop presenters used objects in the gallery’s permanent collection to teach CONNECT kids about Africa, Asia and the history of the American railroad. Area families were encouraged to attend free, related exhibits throughout the summer.

One of the most popular interactive exhibits was Tracks: The Railroad in Photographs. Celebrating both the history of the American railroad and the history of photography, the exhibit included a model of Carlisle’s old Cumberland Valley Railroad station and more than 80 railroad images from the George Eastman House Collection. Attendees not only viewed those images, but also learned about the workings of the great steam engines that once powered iron horses all across the nation.

“They acted out different railroad jobs and learned a little bit about railroad history,” says Pires, adding that the children also created a take-home woodblock print of a railroad image. “We made a piston that they could operate, and they pretended that they were the steam or the coal. It was very cute.”

And also very effective, says student educator Emily Rother ’12.

“The mother of one of the kids in the program told us that her little boy became so excited about trains [after attending the class],” says Rother, who helped run the program with Shippensburg University student Emily Noss, under Pires’ direction. “It’s good to see the kids go home and talk about what they’ve learned.”

Those lessons were echoed in the train-themed film series, held monthly throughout the summer. Community members were invited to bring a picnic to the Weiss Center lawn and enjoy the outdoor screenings.

The event united several generations of folks who shared a love of movies and a renewed sense of community spirit. “People thanked us afterward and we had a lot of repeat customers,” says Pires. “It was very successful.”