The participants, ranging in age from 18 to 80, represented multiple tribes including Nez Perce, Yakama, Lakota and Shoshone-Bannock.

The storytelling workshop was funded by a National Native Master Artist Initiative grant from the Longhouse Education and Cultural Center at The Evergreen State College. The Longhouse’s support is made possible by the Ford Foundation’s IllumiNation Program, which was established to strengthen Native arts and cultures throughout the United States.

During the workshop series, workshop participants and Lewis & Clark campus community members journeyed down the Columbia Gorge to the famous Native American rock art known as “She Who Watches.”

The workshop series culminated in a public performance where the storytellers demonstrated at least one traditional legend and explained how it relates to the work they do and how they will incorporate storytelling into their everyday work.

In the following video, IWOK Coordinator Se-ah-dom Edmo explains the purpose of the IWOK program.

Vrindavan lies on the banks of Northern India’s Yamuna River, not far from the site of the Taj Mahal. Believed to be the city where Lord Krishna grew up, Vrindavan is one of the most sacred sites for Hindus, featuring hundreds of temples devoted to Krishna’s worship.

The holy city is also the site of overwhelming poverty and powerlessness for its most vulnerable residents: widows. Known as the City of Widows, Vrindavan has a total population of 57,000, of whom an estimated 15,000 are widows.

“Destitute widows pour into the town, either in observance of centuries-old religious and societal prescriptions or because their families, unwilling or unable to support them, have abandoned them here,” Walter said. “Fewer than one third of the residents have regular work; of those who do, many make less than a dollar a day. The high volume of tourists and pilgrims visiting the town creates a perception of economic opportunity, but a privileged few have already laid claim to the market for visitors’ goods and services, leaving no room for newcomers to secure living incomes.”

Click to view photos Walter took in India

Walter’s project will target Vrindavan’s widows and female immigrants as well as other members of the community who have no viable means of supporting themselves.

“My project is called Vrindaban ka Gaurav, or, Glory of Vrindavan (VKG),” Walter said. “It involves the creation of an artisans’ collective for the production and marketing of poshak, a needlepoint handicraft traditionally made by women in the Vrindavan area. My goals are to help create livelihoods for local people and to create a community surrounding this project in which skills can be developed and ideas can be shared.”

Walter’s work will be supported by a $10,000 grant from philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis’s 100 Projects for Peace initiative, as well as an additional $2,500 from Lewis & Clark. Capitalizing on connections she made with many organizations and nonprofits during previous trips to India, Walter will partner with groups that are already established in the Vrindavan area, such as Friends of Vrindavan and Food for Life Vrindavan. Such collaboration will not only allow her to launch VKG quickly, but will also ensure its continued existence after her visit.

“All of my lodging is being provided for free by people I know in the area, so nearly all grant funding will go toward the project: coordinator and trainers’ wages, training sessions, packaging supplies and initial poshak materials,” Walter said. “It is my hope that this solid foundation for VKG will enable the collective to cover its own operating expenses and employee wages within the first year.”

Walter also recently won a Fulbright Research Grant to study the salience of religious and economic themes in advocating environmental stewardship in Vrindavan.

“It’s clear that Vrindavan has myriad problems, including deforestation, over-development, water security issues, and unemployment,” Walter said. “I know my project won’t be able to help everyone, but I hope VKG can facilitate greater security for those most egregiously affected by these circumstances. Giving widows and poor housewives a source of income will lead to the stability and dignity needed to create an overall environment of peace.”

This slideshow features images Walter took during her travels in India. These photos appear in an exhibition at Pappacino’s coffee shop on Terwilliger through the end of May.  

The Sustainability Education Initiative is a program of professional development coursework and activities for K-12 teachers in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District. During three courses offered in 2009, Smith will prepare 50-60 teachers to incorporate sustainability issues into their classrooms and help them implement school or community projects that will enhance local natural and social environments. Participants will be eligible for small seed grants to fund start-up projects. The grant aims to increase the number of teachers implementing sustainability projects in schools, and increase student and educator awareness of local natural systems, ecologies, and social needs.

In this video, Smith visits Zenger Farm with the first cohort of teachers, and discusses the importance of teaching sustainability using place-based education.

“As you know, the independent colleges and universities in Oregon pay out huge amounts every year in grant and scholarship support to needy students so that they may attend our schools,” Hochstettler said. “In 2006, Oregon Independent Colleges invested more than $173 million in grants and scholarships to students—8 times more than all government grant programs combined. We at Lewis & Clark dedicate approximately 35 cents of every tuition dollar to need-based financial aid. We are very happy to do so, and we embrace our obligation to provide even the poorest groups within our society the kind of education that will transform them into productive and contributing members of the labor force. In the current period of financial uncertainty, we at Lewis & Clark have redoubled our efforts in this regard by committing an additional 10% in financial aid over current levels in an effort to address at least in part the anticipated decline in the ability of some of our students to finance their college education. Even at these levels, though, we cannot begin to meet the full financial needs of all of our students, which is one of the reasons I am here today.”

Click here to read the full text (PDF).

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Proctor launched a multi-institutional, multi-year collaborative research initiative, designed to further scholarly rigor and coherence in the field of environmental studies.

“Environmental studies will advance as an interdisciplinary field to the extent that it provides resources and promotes opportunities for high-quality research and exchange among its undergraduate students, who are the future generation of environmental scholars and leaders,” said Proctor.

Proctor kicked off the interdisciplinary project in spring 2008, by inviting two dozen undergraduate environmental studies majors from across the country to visit Lewis & Clark. The spring workshop provided an opportunity for participants to learn about each other’s research topics and to finalize a common rubric for interdisciplinary, situated research to afford comparison.

“Situated research is a way a student can take a broad and seemingly intractable issue and locate it somewhere—situate it—to give it context and make sense of it in time and space,” said Proctor. “It offers a means to build, store, and share research resources; it offers a connection with real-world, practical problems, providing students the opportunity to contribute to solutions for these problems; and it provides a good basis for students to compare their work between locations, leading to collaborative opportunities, and refinement and generalization of the theories they are building.”

Each student will complete a capstone project to submit to their institution’s environmental program, and present their results at a final conference at Lewis & Clark in 2010.

In this video, Proctor and several student research associates talk about the interdisciplinary approach to their projects.

“The size of these grants speaks volumes about our efforts to help victims of crime,” said Meg Garvin, executive director of NCVLI. “It will allow us to increase the capacity of our national network by 50 percent. It means that every day an additional 200 victims of crime may be able to receive free legal help.”

Four new clinics

The U.S. Department of Justice Office for Victims of Crime has awarded NCVLI $4.2 million to support its network of eight legal clinics and allow them to open new clinics in four more jurisdictions. The clinics provide free legal services to crime victims in state and federal criminal cases.

Each clinic serves approximately 50 victims at any given time, helping them access a judicial system that is not designed to assist crime victims through the process. Since launching in 2004, NCVLI’s network of clinics has represented more than 1,000 crime victims in criminal courts and trained more than 15,000 criminal justice professionals.

The clinic network currently includes clinics in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina and Utah. NCVLI will issue a request for proposals in December to begin the process of identifying the new states in which to launch clinics.

“The Office for Victims of Crime has been critical to our launch and our growth over the last six years,” Garvin said. “There are thousands of crime victims struggling with the judicial process—many of them unable to afford legal assistance and our ongoing relationship is helping hundreds of victims seek justice and become survivors.”

Violence against women

A two-year grant from the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women totaling $150,000 will focus on the rights of victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking and dating violence. NCVLI will provide training and assistance to agencies that help these victims.

“Because the Violence Against Women Act was only recently amended to allow for assistance to these victims in criminal courts—as opposed to civil courts—this is a tremendous opportunity to fill a gap in services for these victims and to advance victims’ rights,” Garvin pointed out.

This summer, Loening published a study with colleagues in the UK, detailing a major discovery the group made: an unusual, knotted protein structure.

“Typically, the 3-D structure of proteins appears like a string folded in on itself,” he explained. “If you pull on both ends of most proteins, the protein strand unties like a shoelace. When you pull at both ends of the protein we discovered, instead of unraveling it tightens and forms a knot.”

As a protein’s structure determines its function, one major area of research over the past 50 years has been directed toward studying and predicting how strands of protein fold into 3-D structures. The discovery of this unique, knotted structure generates new questions about how proteins form.

“The structure that we determined in this project underscores how much we still have to learn about protein folding,” Loening said.

Beginning this fall, Loening will bring his expertise to bear on a different, consequential question, this time regarding proteins from brown recluse spiders. With the support of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Loening will collaborate with Greta Binford, assistant professor of biology, to investigate the structure and function of proteins contained in spider venom toxins.

The $190,000 Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) Program Grant from the NIH will allow the team to engage in a three-year study of the peptides and proteins in brown recluse spider venom, which may have practical applications in the pharmaceutical industry.

“Brown recluse spider venoms contain hundreds of different toxins that target neurons and cause different reactions in victims—from injury to paralysis to death,” Loening said. “We want to study the specific effects of each of these toxins and we hope that, by determining their structures, we can gain some insight into how they operate. Since these toxins interfere with the nervous system, they can potentially be used in a controlled way to produce practical applications in medicine, such as a naturally derived, non-addictive pain reliever.”

“Lewis & Clark Law School’s partnership with the CDLC to create this practicum is unique throughout the nation,” said Lisa LeSage, Associate Dean and Director, Business Law Programs. “No other law school has such a partnership which is mutually beneficial for the community and our students. Community nonprofits benefit from the provision of free, much-needed legal services and law students gain practical, hands-on experience in transactional law that they would not otherwise receive.”

Under the direction of experienced and highly skilled attorneys, students assist clients with a multitude of business transactions, including financing, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, land use, tax, human resources and general corporate legal issues.. Students have the opportunity to participate in client meetings, corporate board meetings, and in drafting business and legal documents.

Since its inception in 2000, the CDLC has assisted in the development of nearly 3,000 units of affordable housing and nine community facilities, and provided training to over 750 board and staff members of community-based organizations. By doubling the number of nonprofits and community development corporations the CDLC can serve, the legal clinic conservatively projects that this grant will benefit 18,000 individuals over the next three years.

About the Collins Foundation
The Collins Foundation, an independent private foundation, was created by Truman W. Collins and other members of the family of E. S. Collins. The foundation exists to give greater expression to humanitarian endeavors in the state of Oregon and to assist in improving the quality of life for Oregonians.

Toward that goal, Beck spent her summer researching legal cases for the Oregon Law Center (OLC), an organization that provides free civil legal services to low-income individuals and families.

Beck’s summer internship with the OLC was made possible by a $4,500 stipend from the law school’s Public Interest Law Project, known as PILP. Through the summer program, students gain valuable experience while providing public interest organizations with much-needed legal assistance. In addition to supporting summer projects, PILP funds are also allocated to the Loan Repayment Assistance Program, which helps public interest lawyers repay law school loans after graduation.

This summer, 18 Lewis & Clark law students were awarded stipends to work with organizations such as Mercy Corps, EarthJustice, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, and Trustees for Alaska.

In this video, Beck talks about her work with OLC, a visit to Dignity Village, and her commitment to public interest work.

Lewis & Clark Law School graduates enter public interest careers at a rate that is more than three times the national average. Combining graduates who enter government work, and public interest graduates, more than one third of Lewis & Clark Law School’s graduates entered public service careers.

The students, Casey Nelson CAS ’08, James Cotton CAS ‘08 and sophomores Betto van Waarden and Claire Battaglia, are hard at work, improving the Criamar facilities and establishing community programs with help from UNICEF. As they help Criamar residents counteract the effects of neglect and abuse and become peaceful contributors to society, they will share stories and photos on their blog Cultivating Peace.

In this most recent dispatch, Cotton describes the arduous process of renovating the Criamar playground. The former site of an open sewer trench, crumbling concrete, and generally unsafe conditions, the playground has undergone substantial changes at the persistent hands of the peace group.

Read about their progress and see pictures on their blog.