On September 2, UWC-USA’s Community Partner Fair brought first-year students, second-year student leaders, faculty sponsors, and community partners together to begin a new year of engagement and community service.
The fair introduced students to the Wednesday Community Engagement program, where every first-year student takes part in a weekly activity each trimester. After learning about the available opportunities and speaking directly with program leaders and visiting partners, students ranked the programs hoped to participate in during the first trimester.
The breadth of the fair reflected the many ways students can connect their learning to the people and places of Northern New Mexico. Some opportunities focus on relationships across generations, including games, art, and conversation with residents at Meadows Nursing Home. Others support younger learners through reading groups at Carnegie Library, classroom activities at Luna Preschool, chess at Sierra Vista Elementary, and reading support at Mike Mateo Elementary.
Students can also contribute to community well-being in practical ways: serving food and engaging with clients at Samaritan House (a local shelter), organizing donations at its thrift store, or walking dogs, creating adoption profiles, and supporting communications at the City Animal Shelter. At Trout Springs Ranch and through Farm Ambassadors, students can participate in farm work while learning about Indigenous farming methods and helping bring community members into shared work on the UWC-USA farm.
Community engagement is not simply volunteer service or an extracurricular requirement. It is structured, reciprocal learning: students listen to local partners, show up consistently, develop practical skills, and begin to understand their responsibilities within a community that extends well beyond the campus.
As President Andrew Mahlstedt explained, “If UWC-USA aspires to cultivate global citizens ready to catalyze positive change in whatever worlds they inhabit in the future, then that has to start in their UWC-USA education. Our communities in Northern New Mexico are rich with people and organizations doing this good work here and now, so our students can learn from them, and hopefully contribute in some small, age-appropriate way. In learning from others and starting the work of their lives now, they build the muscle memory they’ll carry into their adult lives, and be the UWC alumni we hope to nurture.”
Through these partnerships, students build relationships with local neighbors while practicing empathy, reliability, communication, and initiative—habits that will serve them at UWC-USA and long after graduation.