December 2008 Stories

Fellowship Polishes Nonprofit Skills

Most fellowships don’t start with a raft trip down the Colorado River, but Trevor Findley ’06 got lucky.

His El Pomar Fellowship started with a team building exercise that included negotiating 30 sets of rapids —with names like Capsize and Big Drop — through Canyonlands National Park in Utah. The 90-mile stretch is known as one of the swiftest river passages on the continent.

“It was exciting because we were learning rafting skills, but also team building skills that we can apply to our work,” Findley says.

That work revolves around the El Pomar Foundation’s Community Stewardship programs in urban and rural communities in Colorado. The El Pomar Fellowship, a highly competitive, two-year program, nurtures leadership skills as fellows fan out across the state, working on the front lines of philanthropy. Fellows are assigned to different foundation programs; Findley’s program addresses needs specific to each region of the state.

“I’ve been assigned to the High Country, which includes a lot of the resort towns,” says Findley, who works with a regional council to focus on health care. “Service workers in the resort communities often don’t make a living wage and there are a surprising number of uninsured children.”

Findley’s role with the council is to identify organizations that address specific needs — including a lack of providers and the difficulty of enrolling children in the state health care program — from multiple angles. He has researched physician loan repayment programs that may attract providers and collaborated with community organizations to create plans to enroll children.

Findley has also worked with the Empty Stocking Fund, an annual community fundraiser that supports 14 human service agencies in the Pikes Peak Region. Last year’s campaign raised more than a million dollars to help families with housing, emergency food and other needs.

“I enjoy this work,” says Findley, who is completing professional development courses in nonprofit management and grant making as part of his fellowship program. “Wherever I choose to go after this experience, this knowledge will help,” he says.

It’s not his first exposure to nonprofit work. After graduation he taught children in inner city Las Vegas with Teach for America, an organization that places high-achieving college graduates in schools in underserved areas, where they work with the nation’s most needy children.
“I loved my experience at Willamette,” says Findley, who majored in international studies, minored in politics and economics, and served as president of his Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He was also an Associated Students senator and played lacrosse.

He hopes to pursue youth development and advocacy, and will probably head back to school for studies in law or policy — or both — after his fellowship ends.

For information on this scholarship and others, contact Monique Bourque in the Student Academic Grants and Awards office on the third floor of the University Center, or visit www.willamette.edu/dept/saga/.

Canvassing the Cosmos

Physics Professor Rick Watkins is not one to limit the scope of his research. In fact, it’s tough to get much broader than his area of interest: the universe.

“When I told my father that I study the universe, he laughed,” Watkins says. “He thought it was a joke. He said, ‘How can anybody study the universe?’”

The subject may sound all-encompassing, but Watkins’ actual work is narrowly focused. The cosmologist uses scientific observations to study the universe as a whole. Cosmology is based on the idea that the entire history of the universe, starting with the Big Bang, is governed by physical laws.

“As a system, the universe is pretty simple,” Watkins says. “I’m mostly interested in galaxies. The Milky Way is roughly shaped like a Frisbee, and we’re located about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the disc. If you went outside the Milky Way, you’d find there aren’t many stars between the galaxies. So once you’re looking at that large of a scale, you’re basically just watching a bunch of galaxies moving through space.”

Watkins is a theorist who tries to make sense of the data collected about these galaxies’ movements. He examines how the galaxies are distributed throughout space, which way they’re moving and why. As gravity pulls on the galaxies, they flow toward regions of the universe that contain more mass, creating clusters of galaxies and leaving nearly empty space behind.

If you’re concerned about us being on a collision course with another galaxy, you shouldn’t be. At least not now. Our nearest neighbor, Andromeda, is about 2.5 million light-years away. Yes, it and the Milky Way are moving toward each other, but don’t worry, Watkins says. “If they do collide, it won’t be for another 3 billion years or so.”

Galaxies move at hundreds of kilometers per second, but because they’re so far away, we can’t see them flow. Instead, scientists track their motion using the Doppler shift, the same concept that makes a train whistle’s pitch change as it whooshes past. A galaxy’s light shifts toward the red or blue end of the spectrum depending on whether it’s moving closer or farther away.

Cosmology also provides revelations about the early history of the universe. The galaxies scientists observe are millions, sometimes billions of light years away. The most distant galaxies scientists can see appear as they did billions of years ago, when the light started traveling away from them, providing clues to how the universe has changed.

“The general trend is that as you go back in time, the universe becomes smoother instead of having these clumps of galaxies,” Watkins says. “The early universe was filled with a dense, hot, uniform gas. It was very different than the universe we see around us today.”

When he’s not pondering the universe, Watkins can be found playing Ultimate Frisbee with Willamette students. This is his eighth year as the Ultimate Frisbee Club faculty advisor and his 20th playing the sport. He’s also a popular speaker at a local middle school, where he has visited several times to introduce the students to cosmology.

“The nice thing about being a cosmologist is that almost everyone is interested in the universe. The middle-schoolers always have interesting questions. Some of them have done a lot of reading, and I’m always surprised about how much they know.”

The Emancipation of Robin Morris Collin

Law Professor Robin Morris Collin knows a thing or two about social justice. She was raised on it.

Some of her great-grandparents were still slaves when Willamette University was founded in 1842. They were not allowed to marry, “own” their children or choose their profession. Perhaps that’s why their descendents have been righting wrongs ever since.

After Emancipation Collin’s great-grandfather became a university professor at a black college. Her grandfather became a minister and civil rights activist who focused his energy on ending segregation in the Methodist Church. And her father championed social justice as a lawyer, although his introduction to the practice of law didn’t come easy.

After graduating at the top of his class, Collin’s father received only one job offer, as a law firm librarian, with the express understanding that he would not meet with clients. His classmate and best friend, separated in GPA by 1/100th of a point, was inundated with offers. Collin’s father turned down the demeaning offer, established the first integrated law firm in Chicago, and made his name with a landmark case, successfully suing to allow black doctors access to Chicago hospitals. “My father saw that changes could be made using rhetoric and the law,” Collin said.

When Collin’s father was offered a position as a law professor in Arizona, he asked his 12-year-old daughter what she thought of the idea of moving. “Are there any black people out there?” Collin asked. When her father said no, she said, “Well, we’d be kind of like pioneers then, wouldn’t we?”

“African Americans are sometimes pioneers for much the same reason white people were pioneers,” Collin says. “If you feel you have an opportunity to live a more fully engaged life and develop your God-given potential, you’ll change your life radically. You’ll move away from your comfort zone. I followed my father’s path.”

Collin first attended law school at age three, when her father parked her in a basket under the law library desk where he worked. After she earned her own law degree, she threw her energy into civil rights. “My grandfather knocked down structural barriers,” she says. “The struggle now is one that addresses the narratives that go on in people’s minds. We need to dismantle the mental paradigm of racism, and that task is more nuanced and slippery.”

Collin also sees a changed landscape, one where environmental ills, not barred lunch counters, are the primary threat to people of color. “We can’t talk about fixing the problems of poverty and racism without talking about the environment,” says Collin, who is a writer, speaker and advocate for environmental justice.

“The best predictor of toxic waste in a neighborhood isn’t geology, hydrology or property values,” Collin says. “It’s race. The darker the skin or the poorer the people, the more toxic their neighborhood is likely to be. The pattern holds in neighborhoods and between nations.

“But environmental degradation eventually reaches us all,” she says. “The earth’s natural systems are interconnected without regard to national borders, race or wealth, and sacrifice zones are no longer sustainable. Inclusion means a voice for all, not just for the economically and politically powerful.”

Collin’s three-volume encyclopedia of sustainability, with one volume dedicated to equity, will be published in 2009. And she helped envision the College of Law’s Certificate Program in Sustainability, where students combine studies about environmental, energy and natural resource law with environmental justice.

Collin also taught the first American law school course on sustainability, in 1993. The first time she taught it, her students were “profoundly depressed.” She says, “I took that to heart. It’s distressing to hear that everything is going wrong. But for me, sustainability is a way to make sense of the chaos and distress. I want to teach law and say, ‘Here are the tools for changing the story.’”

For the last 13 years, Collin has done just that, giving students, faculty and community members the tools to protect not just the Earth, but also its most vulnerable citizens. Her ancestors taught her well.