Courtesy of Jayvion Anderson
On a bright and unseasonably warm Friday, April 17, Connecticut College’s Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy filled Crozier-Williams College Center with the energy of over 170 students, faculty, staff, and community members for its annual Holleran Center Showcase, a full day of panels, presentations, live performances, and community-building that stretched from 8:30 in the morning to 5:30 in the evening.
The event, one of the most anticipated on the Holleran Center’s calendar, served as both a celebration and a reckoning, a chance to look back on a year’s worth of engaged scholarship, civic leadership, and community partnership work, and to share that work with the wider Connecticut College community. For many attendees, it was also simply a good time: there was free food from the Munchies Food Truck parked outside, a photo booth, live music from Brisa Azul, raffle prizes, and a spin-the-wheel game that drew a near-constant crowd throughout the day.
Behind the seamless flow of the day was a team that had been working toward this moment for months. Holleran Center staff members Rebecca McCue, Patrick Lynch, Claire Benedict, Luis Rodriguez, and Xia Wu coordinated logistics, outreach, and programming across the event’s many moving parts. Megan Griffin, PICA Assistant Director, and Interim Faculty Director Daniel Moak helped scholars of the center throughout the preparation for their presentations and in the panel sessions themselves. The result was a program that balanced intellectual rigor with genuine accessibility.
The academic heart of the Showcase was its four PICA Senior Panel Sessions, held throughout the day in the Cro 1941 Room. PICA, the Certificate Program in Community Action and Public Policy, requires seniors to complete a capstone project rooted in community-engaged scholarship, and the panels gave those students a public forum to present the fruits of that work. The morning opened with Session 1, where Hannah Merritt ‘26, an Economics major with minors in Computer Science and Finance, presented Colonialism and Divergent Paths: A Comparative Study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, tracing how colonial legacies have shaped the vastly different economic and political trajectories of the two nations. Emma Puntin ‘26, a Psychology and Sociology double major, followed with The Use of AI in Expert Testimony: Understanding the Attorney Perspective, a timely examination of how artificial intelligence is reshaping legal proceedings and the ways attorneys are being asked to understand and respond to it.
Session 2 brought three more seniors to the podium. Sarah Goodman Duffy ‘26, an Art and Educational Studies double major, presented New London: It’s Happening! Mapping Community Cultural Connection, a project exploring the cultural fabric of the city Conn students call home. Sophia Williams ‘26, a Dance and Government double major, offered a policy analysis of community-based care and its implications for prenatal and perinatal health, and Abbie Giles ‘26, a Psychology and Sociology double major with a Government minor, presented a comparative study of children’s hospitals examining the gap between public image and actual patient experience.
After the morning panels, the event opened into its most visibly festive stretch. From 11:00 in the morning to 1:00 in the afternoon, the Cro Susan E. Lynch 1962 Room hosted the Community Engagement Showcase, a sprawling gathering of tables representing the full breadth of the Holleran Center’s partnerships and programs. Attendees could learn about Holleran Center programs including Enrich, Horizons Beyond High School, Summer Civic Leaders, and Camels Vote, as well as student-led initiatives like ACCESSTEM, the MOCA Mentor Program, and Givora. Community partners were well represented, too, with tables covering L&M Hospital collaborations, housing justice initiatives, transportation resources, and community work-study opportunities. Local New London organizations including SPARK Makerspace, The Annex, The Telegraph, Flavours of Life, The Golden Owl, the New London Community Recreation Center, the New London Public Library, and Fiddleheads each brought their own presence to the room, making the showcase feel less like a college event and more like a genuine gathering of a city and its institutions.
Goodman Duffy, who had presented her PICA capstone on New London’s community cultural connections earlier that morning, spent much of the Community Engagement Showcase doing something that illustrated that work firsthand, drawing live portraits of attendees who stopped by her station. Nearby, the photo booth generated its own quiet buzz, and the Munchies Food Truck outside kept a steady stream of community members fed and lingering on the sunny walkway rather than rushing off after their sessions.
At 12:45, the Cro 1941 Room reconvened for the PICA Sophomore Presentations, where students presented work done in partnership with community organizations including the Center for Housing Opportunity in Eastern Connecticut, the New London Homeless Hospitality Center, the New London Recreation Department, Safe Futures, and Horizons Beyond High School. The presentations reflected the kind of sustained, reciprocal community relationships the Holleran Center has built over years of work in New London and the surrounding region.
The afternoon panels continued with Session 3, which featured Mikayla Aquino’s ‘26 autoethnographic project on inclusive engagement for BIPOC, multilingual, and special education students, Dina Isakov’s ‘26 work building ACCESStem to expand STEM pathways to higher education, and Florianny Norman Reyes’ ‘26 research on Spanish-language interventions and academic self-concept in multilingual learners. Session 4 closed the formal academic program with Rita D’Agostino ‘26 examining power and inequality through the lens of family court, Lucy Koester ‘26 interrogating the ethics of institutional community partnership through her work with the New London Homeless Hospitality Center, and Olivia McDonald ‘26 presenting on housing insecurity in America.
The day closed with the Keynote Address and Reception at the Lynch 1962 Room, where guests gathered for refreshments and remarks from keynote speaker Chris Soto, an educational consultant and former Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. Soto, who also served as a State Representative for New London in the Connecticut General Assembly and founded Higher Edge, a college-access organization for first-generation students in eastern Connecticut, brought a perspective rooted in both policy experience and deep local ties. His speech message was ‘Do what you say you’re going to do and do it well. ‘ The reception also honored PICA scholars and Holleran Center leaders for their contributions over the course of the year.
For the Holleran Center, the Showcase is not just a culminating event, it is an argument, made visible, for what civic education at a liberal arts college can look like when it takes community partnership seriously. With over 170 people in attendance on a sunny April afternoon, it is an argument that appears to be landing.
