Learning Apart, Growing Together: High Road Graduation Showcase

On Friday, July 30, Cornell High Road Fellowships, the ILR School’s premier applied learning initiative in Western New York, will graduate its 13th class of civically engaged students. Beginning at 9:15am ET, twenty-two Cornell undergraduates will celebrate and share about their accomplishments this summer.

This virtual event is free and open to the public. 

High Road Fellows spend two months projects coordinated through the Partnership for the Public Good (PPG), a community-based think tank with over 320 richly networked partners. This year’s placements represented a diverse array of organizations including those focused on civic engagement, social enterprise, poverty alleviation, arts and education, and food justice. Returning fellowship partners included the Western New York Law Center, CWA-District 1, Habitat for Humanity, Arts Services Initiative and more. New placements included Colored Girls Bike Too and Peaceprints of Western New York, among others.

The event will open with Cathy Creighton, Director, ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, ILR School Dean Alex Colvin, Martin F. Scheinman Professor of Conflict Resolution, Ariel Avgar, Cornell ILR School, Associate Dean for Outreach and Associate Professor, and Lou Jean Fleron, Senior Political Economy Consultant and former director of the ILR Buffalo Co-Lab. India Walton will deliver the commencement keynote address. 

Since 2009, over 200 students have been awarded fellowships. The 2021 cohort includes students from the ILR School as well as the schools of Arts & Sciences and Human Ecology. Two fellows are local students from the Buffalo area while the rest are from greater New York, New Jersey, Michigan, California, Georgia, and Vietnam.

This university-community partnership has earned the support of funding from New York State, M & T Bank and Engaged Cornell, making the High Road a true co-laboratory for the ILR School in Western New York to promote and contribute to equitable and inclusive development.

Learn more and register here: https://bit.ly/3hHV2Wt

Agenda

9:15am Welcome and Opening

• Cathy Creighton, Director, ILR Buffalo Co-Lab; Kricky Ksiazek, Collaboration and Research Specialist & High Road Program Co-Coordinator, ILR Buffalo Co-Lab & PPG; Micaela F. Lipman, High Road Program Co-Coordinator.
• Ariel Avgar, Cornell ILR School, Associate Dean for Outreach and Associate Professor
• Alex Colvin, ILR School Dean and Martin F. Scheinman Professor of Conflict Resolution
• Lou Jean Fleron, Senior Political Economy Consultant and former director of the ILR Buffalo Co-Lab

9:40am Student Group One*

• Victor Rosas, Colorado Springs, CO, Partnership for the Public Good. Victor will present on the connection between art and motivation.
• Raquel Zohar, Adventura, FL, Buffalo Jewish Community Relations Council. Raquel will convey hate crime incidence in the Greater Buffalo area, discuss local responses to hate, and provide key takeaways for cross-community collaboration and coalition.
• Sabiha Obaid, Buffalo, NY, Center for Elder Law and Justice and Yasmin Ballew, Manteca, CA, Buffalo Urban League. Yasmin and Sabiha will outline some of the challenges faced by children in foster care and discuss the ways agencies can best empower these youth to achieve their highest potential.
• Paul Havern, Warren, MI, Sophomore, ILR, Center for Employment Opportunities. Paul will present on the challenges of reentry after incarceration in the United States. He will explain some efforts to reform reentry services in the United States and highlight their importance, even to people not directly involved in the incarceration system.
• Lizzie Taber, West Chazy, NY, Citizens for Regional Transit.  Lizzie will share an acrylic painting reflecting on Buffalo’s past and potential for growth moving forward. It is centered around Buffalo’s identity as a rust belt city and how industrialism can give way to a different, more human, future.
• Sam Curtis, Scarborough, ME, Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology. Sam will discuss the importance of art, ranging from its psychological roots to the commonly overlooked role it plays in economic development. He will also discuss the Buffalo public school system and how education facilities are integrating the arts into their programming from both a functional and creative perspective.
• Alora Cisneros, Los Gatos, CA, PUSH Buffalo. Alora will reflect on the general state of climate legislation in New York. She will focus on the ways in which environmental justice has or has not been prioritized in the NY political sphere.

10:25 am Break

10:30 am Paul Russell, Original Music

10:45am Student Group Two*

• Nabiha Qureshi, Melville, NY, Community Action Organization. Nabiha will share a collage about the different aspects of community engagement.
• Kevin Diaz, Ridgefield, NJ, Communications Workers of America-District 1. Kevin will represent the inequalities present in the healthcare system through the eyes of the worker.
• Julia Haberfield, New York, NY, Habitat for Humanity Buffalo. Julia will reflect on her deduction of housing justice being foundational to most other social movements. She will also share the pressing limitations and issues facing renters and homeowners in Buffalo, in addition to explaining the looming fear of eviction and foreclosure moratoria lifting at the end of August.
• Jonathan Zheng, Elmhurst, NY, Buffalo Niagara Community Reinvestment Coalition. Jonathan will provide an overview of the importance of democratizing finance, in order to shift decision-making to localized communities. He will explain the concept of public banking and the potential upsides that public financing can have on communities like Buffalo.
• Uwaila Odiase, The Bronx, NY, Peaceprints of WNY. Uwaila will demonstrate housing issues that formerly incarcerated individuals face and further explain the importance of housing equity.
• Margot Treadwell, Elma, NY, FeedMore WNY &  Wendy Wang, Whitestone, NY, Field and Fork Network. Wendy and Margot will walk through some broad trends in WNY Food Systems, and then highlight some interesting food access points.

11:40am Break

11:50am Student Group Three*

• Callie McQuilkin, Ridgefield, CT, Democracy Summer Fellow. Empowered with $160 million in federal stimulus funds, Erie County’s public servants established dozens of pandemic relief programs that, for some residents, were literal matters of life and death. But county officials didn’t act alone. Backed with the results of 55 self-conducted interviews and data scraped from Twitter, Callie will illustrate the crucial role community organizations played in amplifying the public sector messages that helped Erie survive COVID-19.
• Salima Ali, Ozone Park, NY, The Foundry. Salima will share the importance of workforce development programs that she’s learned from working with The Foundry.
• Harry Ducrepin, Suffern, NY, Cooperation Buffalo. Harry will explain to us what worker cooperatives are and how they are fundamentally different from traditional businesses. He will leave us with a greater understanding of the advantages and benefits of worker co-ops.
• Katherine Esterl, Atlanta, GA, Preservation Buffalo Niagara. Katherine will take us back in time to explain why historic preservation matters and how it can rewrite the narrative in favor of equity.
• Sam Ivey, Mechanicville, NY, Colored Girls Bike Too. Sam Ivey will walk us through the historical and current states of mobility justice in Buffalo. She will then explore the work of Colored Girls Bike Too as an organization fighting for Just Streets as a solution to achieving mobility justice in Buffalo.
• Hannah Drexler, Lewisburg, PA, Western New York Law Center. Hannah will illuminate the consequences for homeowners of harmfully high interest rates on delinquent property taxes. Her presentation will close with recommendations for how we can protect homeownership in our communities.
• Anh Dao Truc Lam, Vietnam, Arts Services Initiative. Anh will share a poem that sums up her experiences and what she has learned throughout the summer. This poem is inspired by our guest speaker Aitina Fareed Cooke.

12:45pm Break

1pm  – The Things They Carried on the High Road, High Road Collaborative Poem

Keynote Speaker: Buffalo mayoral Democratic primary winner, India Walton

2pm Public Adjourn

*Exact student times are subject to change