A Lawrence-based community service program, a local adaptation of the Niswarth program in India, is the latest victim of the economic crisis. Peter Merrill, Head of World Languages and Chair of the Global Perspectives Group, and Temba Maqubela, Dean of Faculty, recently rejected a proposal for a service-learning project in Lawrence, Massachusetts due to financial constraints. The Niswarth service-learning trip to Mumbai, India was canceled this year due to security issues after the November terrorist attacks in Mumbai. In response, Rajesh Mundra, Assistant Dean of CAMD, Chad Green, Director of Community Service, and Alana Rush, Assistant Director of Community Service, collaborated to create a local version of the program that could operate in nearby Lawrence. Maqubela and Merrill decided to defer the Lawrence program this summer, but not necessarily for future years. “It’s a program that we liked a lot,” said Merrill. “But the problem this year is that…off-campus programs are having funding cut or eliminated.” Merrill said, “[The economic situation] has frozen new programs, keeping them from taking place. This program, coming across as new programming, given the difficulty of telling old programs that funding was cut, would cause legitimate confusion and lead to misunderstandings.” Many co-curricular programs have lost funding, including sports trips and the summer trip to Dijon, France. “It would be awkward to cut in one place and add someplace else,” said Merrill. Merrill also said that the 40 to 50 percent reduction of financial aid for summer language programs would make it difficult to justify adding a seemingly new program. “It’s unfortunate that the current economic situation has to play a role in [the program]’s ability to expand, but it’s simply a reality,” said Merrill. “Ideally we would love to fund both [the India and Lawrence Niswarth programs]. The Niswarth model is very powerful, and the Lawrence program shows you don’t have to go 8,000 miles to get [the experience],” said Merrill. “We just didn’t want to have to go the ‘spin’ route, which would require long conversations on what would count as new.” Some programs abroad, including Pecos Pathways and B.A.L.A.M., have retained their funding from the Peabody Museum endowment. The Niswarth program, on the other hand, is funded by Andover’s endowment, a separate entity. “The cuts have been painful,” said Merrill. “The administration continues to want to minimize them and cut as little as possible. But the suddenness of the problem didn’t leave many options on how to cope.” Merrill said that the school’s budget for need-blind admissions also placed limitations on the financial aid budget for the Niswarth program. The Lawrence program was designed to incorporate three weeks of service learning with local non-profit organizations and partnerships with students in Lawrence, like the Mumbai program. According to Rush, the Mumbai and Lawrence programs were based on the same foundations: community service learning, social entrepreneurship and the challenge to create relevant solutions to social issues. “I was really pleased with the excitement felt about the idea,” said Rush. “There was a lot of support for this kind of work.” Rush said that this model based on the original Mumbai program would translate well into a program in Lawrence. “Because of the global nature of our program in India and the global citizenship skills that we teach, it was easy to think about applying those same concepts to a program in my own community, especially in Lawrence, where we already have connections,” said Rush. “Global programming at a local level [in Lawrence] is an obvious next step,” she continued. The Niswarth program in India was designed “to expose students to social problems in Mumbai,” said Rush, as well as to give students a skill set that can be put to use globally. Mundra founded the Niswarth program in 2007. Since then, there have been two summer programs and two winter programs. For three weeks last summer, six Phillips Academy students volunteered for a children’s rights program in Mumbai, India. The Andover participants worked with their Indian counterparts from the Udayachal School in Mumbai, where they studied child labor injustices through two educational non-governmental organizations. Mundra and Maqubela declined to comment about the decision regarding the Niswarth programs.
