Amherst College
EN-6: Community Partnerships

Center for Community Engagement and Office of Sustainability

The college’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE) oversees, supports, and sustains our long-term community partnerships with local social impact organizations, non-profits, and public schools and institutions. In partnership with the CEE and with the support of a donor, the Office of Sustainability supports a summer student sustainability fellows program that pairs Amherst students with local community partners for eight weeks during the summer to work on a sustainability project/initiative for the organization. A number of these partner organizations have a sustainability focus at their core including:

The Amherst Survival Center

The Amherst Survival Center promotes the health and well-being of residents of Franklin and Hampshire counties. The Center offers a wide variety of free programs and services designed to help people meet their basic needs, including a food pantry, daily community meals, fresh food distribution, services such as showers and lockers for those experiencing homelessness, information and referral, as well as a variety of other support services. The Center serves more than 10,000 people each year.

The Kestrel Land Trust

The Kestrel Land Trust is a local nonprofit land conservation organization that conserves farmland, woodlands, wildlife habitat, water resources, and scenic vistas in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts. The trust has successfully conserved more than 27,000 acres of wildlands, woodlands, farmland, and riverlands in partnership with landowners, governmental agencies, citizen groups, and other nonprofits.

The Hitchcock Center for the Environment

The Hitchcock Center, founded in 1962, connects people with nature and encourages a deeper emotional bond with the natural world that sustains us all. The Center helps develop a community that understands connections among human health, ecosystems and economies through educational programs that offer a particular focus on children, who live in a world of environmental challenges.

The Amherst Mobile Market

The Amherst Mobile Market is a community driven, bilingual mobile farmers market bringing affordable, organic fresh produce to Amherst's food desert neighborhoods. The market not only makes affordable produce available within walking distance of residents who struggle to access healthy food, but also puts decision-making in the hands of low-income, BIPOC community members and builds the capacity of those community members to take on leadership roles.

In addition to the summer fellows programs, faculty, student organizations, and classes work with these and other community organizations throughout the year. Many of these partnerships have been long standing and have a sustainability component to their work and mission. The CCE supports community based learning for classes across the campus. More about that work can be found here on the CCE website.

The college has numerous partnerships and community facing programs with underrepresented and/or vulnerable populations aimed at addressing sustainability challenges around issues like equity, access, wellbeing, and mental health. A few examples of those programs include:

Amherst Prison Education Partnership

The Amherst inside-out prison education program that seeks to facilitate dialogue through partnerships between the college and Hampshire County Jail and House of Corrections. POSC-135 Justice, taught by Prof. Kristin Bumiller, explores the meaning of justice and its realization in everyday life. This course is conducted inside a correctional facility and enrolls an equal number of Amherst students and residents of the facility.

Ancestral Bridges

The college partnered with the Ancestral Bridges Foundation to reveal the rich and complex lives of the Black and Afro-Indigenous community of Amherst. The Ancestral Bridges Exhibit at the college features photographs, objects and rare documents that tells the stories of Black and Afro-Indigenous families who lived and worked in Amherst from the 18th through the early 20th centuries. The Ancestral Bridges exhibit is a first-of-its-kind partnership between Amherst College and the Ancestral Bridges nonprofit organization.

Adult Education

This program is a partnership with Holyoke Community College’s Adult Learning Center. ENGL-120 Reading, Writing, and Teaching, taught by Prof. Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, considers from many perspectives what it means to read and write and learn and teach both for ourselves and for others. As part of the work of this course, students serve as weekly tutors and classroom assistants in adult basic education centers in nearby towns.

We also have strong relationships with the already mentioned Amherst Survival Center and Amherst Mobile Market which focus on the local homeless and food insecure populations.

For those community partners participating in the summer student sustainability fellows program (which is the majority of the sustainability focused partners), the Office of Sustainability maintains regular contact and weekly check-ins on how the program is going from both the college’s perspective and the organization’s perspective. At the end of the summer there is a joint partnership assessment to identify ways to improve the partnership and summer program, opportunities for mutually beneficial follow up work and collaboration, and next steps in continuing the partnership.