University Of Massachusetts Amherst Members Honored By Provost For Community Engagement
Two UMass faculty members and a librarian have been recognized as the 2023 recipients of the Provost’s Distinguished Community Engagement Awards for teaching, research and service.
Deborah Keisch, senior lecturer and director of the Community Scholars Program (CSP) of Civic Engagement & Service-Learning, received the 2023 Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching. The award recognizes “community-engaged teaching with demonstrated engagement and impact in the community and benefits to learners at UMass Amherst.”
Keisch has worked in the field of education for over two decades as a practitioner, researcher and activist and supports research and teaching practices dedicated to the work of social change.
CSP is a cohort-based program to support students to do the work of social change through two-year placements with community organizations.
“Because students are placed with organizations for two years, they are able to develop deep and meaningful relationships with these community partners,” Keisch says.
Prior to their community placements, “they take four consecutive courses with me – beginning the first year with understanding the root causes of inequity and oppression, identifying spaces and societies that are designed to be more equitable, exploring theories of social change – and culminating the second year with one course on social policy and another on community organizing,” Keisch says.
Receiving the 2023 Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Research is Arín Denise Martínez, assistant professor of health policy and management.
The award honors a record of community-engaged research, scholarship and creative activities which contributes to their community partner organizations, the university and communities at large.
Martínez’s community-based participatory research examines the sociopolitical and institutional arrangements that produce chronic disease disparities among diverse Latinx populations in the United States. She also explores how institutional racism from immigration enforcement policies, housing and food environments create material deprivation, psychosocial stress and biobehavioral effects in Latinx adults and children.
Paulina Borrego, science and engineering librarian for University Libraries, received the 2023 Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Service, a new category for the award which honors the recipient “for a record of community-engaged service that demonstrates engagement and impact in the community and benefit to UMass Amherst.”
Award recipients in each category received $1,000 and a plaque and were recognized at the UMass Amherst Faculty Honors dinner in April 2023. The community partner recipient will also be recognized at the UMass Annual Community Breakfast at the start of the fall 2023 semester.