Founded in 2000, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service has had a short but vibrant history of providing students with opportunities to become engaged in their communities.
The Tisch Civic Engagement Fund (CEF) is one program in particular within the college that helps students implement their own ideas of what it means to be an active citizen.
The CEF provides funding and advising sessions to student−run active citizenship initiatives on campus, both locally and internationally. Students undertake these projects and complete them during the academic year, and priority is given to projects that help communities near the Tufts campuses.
"The program has two purposes. One is to address community identified needs — no group or individual is accepted without a community partner. The second part is that it is all about student learning, student development and student engagement," Program Coordinator Rachel Syzman said.
Each year, the program receives more than a dozen applications for consideration.
"The application process draws about 20 or so proposals, and we can fund up to $15,000, and that depends on the quality of the project, on how much the money is divided and how much money is requested," Student Programs Associate Kristen Feierabend said.
Syzman pointed out that the applications allow the CEF staff to get a sense of what the group and project dynamic will be before the initiative gets underway.
"The application process is unique," she said. "It forces you to delegate responsibility in that it has a reflection that each team member has to write in order to be accepted, which is great because then you get a real perspective of what the group is like and whether our goals line up."
Although students are often drawn to apply to the CEF by the promise of financial support, it is the personal advising sessions that each group or individual participates in three times a year that students most appreciate. These sessions provide students with an objective view of their projects, by identifying which aspects of the initiative can be implemented more effectively, according to senior Erik Antokal.
"I think [the CEF advisors] do a really good job in being constructively critical," Antokal said. "They have a unique way of telling you what the issues in your project are and what you can improve on in a way that's not condescending."
Antokal is the team coordinator for one of the CEF's 2012 projects, Health Horizons International.
This project — which was founded by two Tufts graduates in 2009 — works on public health projects in the Dominican Republic. Last year, they became a student group on campus.
The group took a trip to the Dominican Republic over winter break, where they used the PhotoVoice method — encouraging locals to take photos of relevant public health issues in the community — in order to bring to the forefront issues that might not otherwise come up in community conversations.
Along with the advising sessions and the convenience of funding, many of the students involved in CEF initiatives also said that the networking opportunities the CEF provides are great aspects of the program, according to Antokal.
"We realized they had great resources to connect us with, even beyond their own advising abilities," he said. "CIRCLE [Tufts' Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning] is another part of Tisch College that was super helpful."
Health Horizons International is not the only student project that has benefitted from the CEF's networking opportunities.
"One of the really valuable things that Tisch has offered us is people who are connected with the community," junior Alec Howard said.
"They really have an understanding of the organizations that are around and they saved us a lot of time in terms of having to work this out independently," he added.
Howard, along with junior Gustav Vik, headed the Community Outreach through Microfinance (COM) initiative, another one of the projects taken on by the CEF this year. This project helps immigrants in the local community attain American citizenship. To do so, they work to provide microloans in order to help them with the application fees and hold comprehensive citizenship classes.
"That cause really hit home for me because I come from an immigrant family," Vik said.
CEF also funds projects that help bring various initiatives together on campus, such as the Undergraduate Global Health Network (GHN), founded by seniors Mary Bruynell and Dahlia Norry.
"In my experience, in being interested in global health at Tufts, I found there wasn't a specific path that you could take in this field," Bruynell said. "There are a lot of opportunities but no one ever really explains what all those opportunities are."
This desire to make global health opportunities on campus known to students resulted in the GHN, a lecture series that brings together the various global health initiatives on campus in order to create a sense of unity.
The GHN is also developing a website that will soon showcase all the global health opportunities Tufts has to offer.
Bruynell said that the CEF's unique advising sessions have been vital in establishing the GHN.
"Because [Norry] and I are starting the club from scratch, it's really great for us to have mentors and advisors," she said. "They definitely ask you to plan out more, and that's helpful."
Regardless of the initiative, students agree that CEF provides an excellent array of resources to help get their projects off the ground and running successfully.
"Overall, I think it's really great that there's access to funding like this, where students can go and, if they have an idea, they can pursue it with the guidance of seasoned professionals at Tufts," Howard said.
