When Jay Peledge ’00 arrived at Bentley University in the fall of his freshmen year, he had every intention of majoring in business. But as he settled into his coursework— completing all of Bentley’s core curriculum requirements such as accounting, finance and marketing— he started to have second thoughts. It wasn’t until he became involved with Bentley’s Service Learning and Civic Engagement Center (BSLCE) that he realized his career path would take him from a corporate track to the classroom.

Today, Peledge’s relationship with the BSLCE remains strong. Working as a social studies teacher at Hanscom Middle School, which serves students grades four through eight who are dependents of military personnel residing on Hanscom Air Force Base, he noticed a need amongst students for stability and positive relationships.

“The transient lifestyle that our students live makes it very difficult for them to call any place home,” explains Peledge. “We found that there was a need for them to get grounded during their time at Hanscom and felt that Bentley’s service learning program could help.”  

Peledge reached out to the BSLCE to launch a formal partnership complete with custom programming to meet the unique needs of Hanscom’s students.

Serving a new demographic

While the BSLCE has connected Bentley students with nonprofit organizations, government offices, and schools in the Greater Waltham area to facilitate projects for 25 years, the Hanscom Airforce Base partnership is the first time Bentley students are working with families in the armed forces

“We provide numerous mentoring and tutoring programs in low income housing communities and elementary schools, but the children living on a military base have a totally different set of needs than children we have worked with in the past,” shares Eliza Brooks ’17. “Their parents give a lot to our country and this has been a tremendous opportunity for Bentley students to learn about what their families go through.”

Brooks serves as one of two lead project managers on the project and worked to build the Hanscom partnership from the ground up with other students on the strategic consulting committee for the BSLCE. The group utilized peer mentoring programs that had been implemented at other service learning sites to form programming for the elementary and middle school students at Hanscom.

Creating lasting bonds

For the 2016-2017 academic year, Bentley offers three different programs for the Hanscom students to take part in depending on their grade level:

• Mentoring: Offered to Hanscom Middle School’s sixth, seventh and eighth graders, the peer-mentoring program creates an opportunity for students to have a consistent role model other than their teachers and parents. Students are broken out into small groups and paired with a Bentley student to act as their mentor for ten week sessions. “Since the students stay in their group for an entire semester, it allows the Bentley mentors to help facilitate relationships between students in their group,” explains Brooks, who in addition to overseeing the entire Hanscom partnership, also serves as a peer mentor. “It can be challenging for these kids to feel comfortable meeting their peers when they first arrive on base.”
   
• Team building: Newly launched in the fall of 2016, Bentley students customized the popular 2+2=5: The Power of Teamwork program from Waltham Elementary Schools for Hanscom’s third, fourth and fifth graders. This afterschool program uses team-building activities to work on students’ interpersonal skills such as leadership, communication, diversity and trust.
   
• Financial literacy: In addition to creating the afterschool programing, two BSLCE students on the Hanscom team started a financial literacy workshop where they teach personal finance to students in classrooms at the middle school. This program introduces basic personal finance concepts such as how to properly use a credit card and how loans work using interactive games.

Within all of the BSLCE programming offered to students, the Hanscom teachers hope that their students can gain insight into what going to college might mean in their future from the BSLCE mentors.

Last year, Brooks and the other program managers organized a bus of over 40 Hanscom students to visit the Bentley campus at the end of their spring programming. 

Student driven mission

Bentley’s service learning model engages over 1,000 students each academic year at more than 60 community partner sites around the globe. All of the partnerships, including Hanscom, are 100% guided through the BSLCE student leadership model, where students organize and lead programs, projects and training sessions.

Celebrating the center’s 25^th anniversary this past fall, Peledge returned to the Bentley campus to join students, faculty, staff and alumni in highlighting the great work produced over the past two decades.

“In President Gloria Larson’s address at the anniversary dinner she discussed the importance of being focused on the well-being of people just as much as profit,” shared Peledge. “I think that’s a great collective message for the campus to have; that students can be actively involved in the business world and want to make money, but at the same time, still doing what’s right for people. I think a lot of the service learning programs at Bentley teach just that.”