“How can we meet the needs of human communities while improving the ecological integrity of the surrounding ecosystem?” asks Darron Collins, ethnobotanist, conservationist, and human ecologist, and since 2011, the president of the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Collins will be the commencement speaker at the Conway School’s forty-first graduation, on June 29, 2013.

For ten years Collins worked for the World Wildlife Fund, where he served as the World Wildlife Fund managing director in the Amur River region of northeast Asia and as a senior advisor to the environmental organization’s CEO, and has helped lead the group’s outreach efforts. Before that, he was WWF’s regional forest coordinator for Latin America.

A graduate of Tulane University (PhD, Anthrology; MA, Latin American Studies) and the College of the Atlantic (BA, Human Ecology), for his Ph.D. he studied ethnobotany in Guatemala, and in the process became fluent in Spanish and Q’eqchi’ Maya. He has also researched the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and has worked on leopard conservation on the Russia-North Korean border.

Collins is the first graduate of the College of the Atlantic to serve as the college’s president and its first president born after the school’s founding. COA is an ecology-focused college that admitted its first class in 1972, the same year as did the Conway School. In 2007 COA was the first U.S. college to go carbon neutral.

A skilled communicator, Collins has written and designed TED Talks (see bit.ly/17WlHUH), created the award-winning film “Amur River Basin: Sanctuary for the Mighty Taimen,” (see bit.ly/YPCqbQ) and worked on an IMAX film about Siberia’s Lake Baikal.

Come see Conway in action! RSVP Below

Conway students will present creative solutions to eight very different and very demanding real-world projects, at Conway on Friday, May 31, 2013,  9:00 AM – 4:45 PM. Let us know if you are coming by filling out the RSVP form below.

Each year, students work on three projects — an individual project at a residential scale in the fall, a team project in the winter at a larger land use planning scale, and a more site-specific team project, also at the community scale, in the spring.

Projects this spring include:

• Feasibility study for a farming community at a school in Athol, MA;
• Landscape master plans for senior housing in Chesterfield, MA, a farm in Conway, MA, a Quaker retreat center in Deerfield, MA, a condominium site in Westford, MA, and a bank in Hadley, MA;
• Conceptual design plan for a Nipmuc Nation tribal center in West Brookfield, MA; and
• Village center plan for Wilmington, VT, a community hit particularly hard by Tropical Storm Irene.

Schedule

9:00-9:20  Review of posted material for morning projects
9:20-9:30  Welcome
9:30-12:20  Morning project presentations
12:20-12:55  Lunch
12:55-1:15  Review of posted material for afternoon project
1:15-1:20  Welcome back
1:20-4:10  Afternoon project presentations
4:10-4:40 Final comments and discussion
4:40  Light refreshments

Please come see the school in action. Let us know if you are coming by completing the form below:

Conway’s Sustainable Communities Initiative will focus on Brattleboro, Vermont, and surrounding Windham County for a second year, announced Conway Director Paul Cawood Hellmund. A Windham County resident will be selected as Initiative Fellow for the 2013-14 academic year. Kimberly Smith of Westminister, Vermont, has been the Fellow for the current school year.

A public presentation and discussion will be held in Brattleboro on Monday, April 15 to give an overview of the upcoming year and to review the projects that have been completed this year. Click here to RSVP.

The meeting will take place in the Community Room at the Brattleboro Food Co-op from 6:30-8:00 pm, and is for:

• People who want to learn of the outcomes of the three projects already completed in Windham County and plans for a new project in Wilmington.
• Any Windham County residents who would like to apply for the 2013-14 Sustainable Communities Fellowship which will help support them for a year of study in Conway’s graduate program in sustainable landscape planning and design. (Read about this year’s Fellow.)
• Representatives of organizations or individuals who have projects that Conway students might undertake next year. (See examples here.)
• Anyone interested in seeing real-world, place-based education in action.

There will be brief presentations of this year’s Conway projects:

• Harmony Lot, Brattleboro (See report.)
• Windham Working Woodlands, Windham Region (Read about the project.)
• CoreArts Cultural Assets Mapping, Brattleboro (Read about the project.)
• Village Center Plan, Wilmington (Read about the project.)

 

Brattleboro: An Atlas of Cultural Assets, a recent project of three Conway graduate students will be presented publicly on Wednesday, May 1, at 6:00 pm in the Community Room of the Brattleboro Food Co-op.  The Conway team will describe the techniques and methodologies employed to map cultural assets in Brattleboro.

Brattleboro: An Atlas of Cultural Assets, which was created by Conway’s Willie Gregg, Olivia Loughrey, and Kimberly Smith, explores the life of an arts community by mapping the cultural assets of the town— the people, places, and organizations that support art and creativity.  is journey into cultural cartography employs narratives and colorful imagery to illustrate the richness of a community imbued with creative energy. Moving beyond the two-dimensional geography of a standard atlas, these maps reveal the complexity of an evolving cultural ecology, offering new ways of seeing and understanding the Brattleboro arts scene.

For more information about the Brattleboro CoreArts Project, visit this website.

The Brattleboro CoreArts Project is funded primarily by an Our Town Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, presented to a partnership of the Town of Brattleboro and the Arts Council of Windham County. Other funders and valued partners (to date) include The Town of Brattleboro, Thomas Thompson Trust, Arts Council of Windham County, the Vermont Arts Council, the Windham Foundation, The Town Arts Committee, The Latchis, and the Brattleboro Retreat.

Join us on Saturday, May 4, 2013, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. for a three-hour session that includes lunch. Information sessions are an informative and enjoyable introduction to the philosophy, program, faculty and staff of the Conway School. They are intended for prospective students, potential project clients, and others who want to learn more about Conway.

Register now!

On Tuesday, April 9, 2013, Paul Cawood Hellmund, Director of the Conway School, will be at the College of the Atlantic (COA) in Bar Harbor, Maine, to meet students and faculty and to give a presentation on recent Conway student projects.

• 11:30 – 1:00 pm: College of the Atlantic, Blair Dining Hall (“Take-A-Break”), information table. Drop by any time.
• 4:10-5:30 pm: Human Ecology Forum: “Reinventing the Future: How one tiny Graduate School is preparing landscape planners and designers–including several COA graduates–to deal with climate change and a host of uncertainties.”

COA and Conway have much in common, including a single major, smaller size, about the same founding year, and a strong environmental mission.

For information: babize@csld.edu or hellmund@csld.edu

Conway’s director, Paul Cawood Hellmund, has announced the appointment of Dr. Nina Antonetti as Conway’s Distinguished Visiting Historian of the Landscape. He commented “Nina is one of those rare people who combines vast historical knowledge with a keen interest in contemporary ecological and societal issues related to the broader landscape. She’s an inspiring collaborator.”

Dr. Antonetti, an architectural and landscape historian, is a founding member of landscape studies and food studies at Smith College in Massachusetts. She has previously served as visiting historian at the Conway School, and is a fellow at the Center for Creative Solutions at Marlboro College, Vermont.

She completed a book on Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, a pioneer of sustainable landscape architecture. In another book project, Antonetti promotes Keney Park – one of the largest urban public spaces in New England, but considered one of the most dangerous places in Hartford, Connecticut – as a case study for how urban landscapes can help mitigate climate change and mobilize citizenry.

Kate Cholakis ’11, a graduate of both Smith College and the Conway School, said ”Nina is a pioneer in the fields of design and planning, linking interdisciplinary studies with the built environment in both her university teaching and scholarship. This connection is essential to improving the sustainability of our world, and central to Conway’s mission. She’s an inspiration and an invaluable resource.”

Dr. Antonetti received her doctorate in landscape and architectural history from the Victorian Study Centre, University of London, and has held research positions in the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In 2012, she was invited, along with Jane Goodall and Bill McKibben, by the Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch to be a participant in the Halki Summit on Global Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability,  a gathering of activists, scientists, journalists, business leaders, theologians, and academics working across intellectual boundaries.

There’s an ecology of cultural assets in a community, three Conway students have been discovering in Brattleboro,Vermont, as they map the fabric of situations and relationships of the arts in that Connecticut River town. And that ecology means a great deal to the whole community, not just to a few “creative types.” Those relationships and resources are part of the resilience a community needs when it gets a jolt, such as Brattleboro did in 2011 with tropical storm Irene and earlier that same year with a prominent murder.

Read the full report on Cultural Assets Mapping for Brattleboro, Vermont, here.

Elizabeth Cooper ’10, a Conway graduate from Middletown Springs, Vermont, is working in southeast Asia as the 2012-13 David Bird Fellow. Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, she is designing schoolyards as classrooms for students to learn about nature. You can read her blog here.

For the third year in a row, the Conway School Trustees voted not to raise the cost of tuition and fees for the class of 2014. Ginny Sullivan, Chair of the Board of Trustees and a 1986 graduate of the program, said “Our commitment to keeping costs as affordable as possible has resulted in level tuition for three years. By keeping tuition level and costs low, we  create a larger and more diverse pool of potential applicants.”

In addition, the Trustees have initiated a needs-based student grant fund, to be allocated annually to as many as five incoming students, based on their eligibility as determined by their application for federal student aid (FAFSA). Contact Associate Director Dave Nordstrom (Nordstrom@csld.edu) for additional information.