Angela Medeiros has been the project coordinator for the Community Partnerships Center at Roger Williams University for the past three years.
Before joining the CPC, Medeiros worked as a student recruiter for the RWU School of Continuing Studies and as a research assistant for Women & Infants Hospital’s Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk.
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Medeiros holds a master’s degree in education with a concentration in higher education administration from Northeastern University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rhode Island College.
PBN: Do the students and faculty that participate in the projects connected to RWU’s Community Partnerships Center all come from the undergraduate programs or are some of them from the graduate school programs, such as the law and business schools?
MEDEIROS: The Community Partnerships Center provides RWU students at the undergraduate and graduate levels with meaningful, project-based educational experiences, which address real community needs through coursework, team projects, graduate assistantships, work-study positions, internships and volunteer experiences. These projects provide real-world experience that is integrated with their growth as scholars and future practitioners.
PBN: What do you find to be the most frequent types of projects that the CPC participates in, and why do you think that is the case?
MEDEIROS: The Community Partnerships Center started in the school of architecture, so by nature we have completed a lot of design-related projects. But to date, we have completed 337 projects within multiple disciplines, including educational-curriculum creation, historical research, graphic design, museum-exhibit research and design, and historic-preservation planning.
Over the last three years, we have seen an increased number of applications for design-related projects, marketing plans and website redesigns. I think it’s because we have experience working on those types of projects, and nonprofit organizations are shocked to learn that those types of projects are an option.
PBN: Which project had the largest number of students and faculty participating and why?
MEDEIROS: Professor Susan Bosco from RWU’s Mario J. Gabelli School of Business and a team of 70 students from her Organizational Behavior course worked with Coggeshall Farm Museum to design and create programs to train management staff members – whether they were permanent, seasonal and/or volunteers – by creating accompanying support manuals and materials for the museum. This project was by far the largest due to the number of students who showed interest in taking a course with a community-engaged project.
PBN: Have students who participated in a CPC project gone on to work in a nonprofit or municipality?
MEDEIROS: Yes, the majority of students who work on CPC projects want to help the community and feel fulfilled when they know the work they created is actually being used. Some of the students love it so much that they go on to work in places that better their communities.
PBN: How do you see the CPC evolving in the next five and 10 years?
MEDEIROS: I would like to see this work continue to grow by strengthening our partnerships with nonprofit organizations so that students can continue to deepen their work in community engagement.
Ideally, it would be great if we could continue to offer fellowships for faculty and students that could possibly turn into an endowment to continue this sort of work for years to come.
Emily Gowdey-Backus is a PBN contributing writer.
