29 minute read
Bates in Brief
BATES IN BRIEF FALL 2021
PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN
4
Fall 2021
Caleb Ireland ’23, an environmental studies major from Amherst, Mass., helps to dry yarrow in the herb building at the nearby Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village. A Purposeful Work intern last summer, Ireland gathered data on various garden herbs, from harvest to processing, to create a mathematical formula for estimating future herb yields.
Out & About
Whether tucked away and studying alone beside the tall columns of a campus building, or walking with a close friend back to the dorm, Bates students head outside to do their thing on a dazzling September afternoon, on a campus with tremendous natural charm, as seen in these photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen.
Jane Austen wrote, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”
Ellory Kearns ’24 of Steamboat Springs, Colo., reads Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility on the porch of Coram Library for the course “Jane Austen: Then and Now,” taught by Professor of English Lillian Nayder. Other course readings include Austen’s Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice.
A Bug’s Life
Passing by Pettengill Hall, Oliver Todreas ’23, a biology major from Auburndale, Mass., photographs an insect perched on the concrete wall. He thinks, but is not certain, that it’s an American grasshopper. “I’m interested in life in general,” he says. “That’s why I’m a biology major.”
At the Den Terrace, Sam Jean-Francois ‘23 of Everett, Mass., attends a class via Zoom.
Taught by Dana Professor of Religious Studies Marcus Bruce ’77, the course introduces students to interdisciplinary methods of analysis in Africana, American studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
Like so many others, Jean-Francois’ laptop is decorated with a selection of witty and pointed images and memes, including: •“Stop Pretending Your
Racism Is Patriotism,” an antiracism slogan that emerged circa 2017 • 9 3/4: Train platform from which students board the
Hogwarts Express in Harry
Potter • “Not today, Satan”: Line from RuPaul’s Drag Race that’s become a meme • The character Appa from
Avatar: The Last Airbender • The character Mamoru
Chiba from Sailor Moon •*sips tea*: a meme implying that you’re chill while there’s drama around you • Steven and Connie, characters from Steven Universe, riding the lion
Walking It Off
This beautiful cross-campus walk will revive them. After a long day of quizzes and classes, sophomores Angelina Moncrieffe (left) of Secaucus, N.J., and Nina Greeley of Scarborough, Maine, head back to Page Hall for a restorative rest before joining a study session at Ladd Library later on.
Three for the Show
A trio of recent facilities projects captures the never- ending cycle of new construction, maintenance, and renovation of campus buildings.
The new construction is the granddaddy of them all: Bonney Science Center, 65,000 gross square feet of teaching, laboratory, and community space officially opened this year.
At the ribbon-cutting event on Aug. 23, Michael Hinchcliffe, lead designer of the project for Payette Construction, said the new building is like having the right tool for the right job.
He recalled how his father, in giving him a set of tools as a housewarming gift, offered advice: “Whenever you try to do something, use the right tool. It will make the work easy and it will allow you to take pride in your work.”
In terms of maintenance and renovation, take a look at Hathorn Hall (1857) and Dana Chemistry Hall (1965).
At Hathorn, workers replaced the century-old slate roof and installed new copper gutters, downspouts, and a rubber-like membrane on the top of the belfry. Facility Services carpenters pitched in by fabricating some massive new moldings for the Hathorn roof.
In keeping with Hathorn’s listing on the National Register of Historic Sites, the new slate matches the original roof and was quarried to order: “North Country Black” at the Glendyne Quarry in Saint-Marc-du-Lac-Long, Québec, and “Vermont Purple” at the John Maslack Slate Quarry in Poultney, Vt.
Elsewhere in Hathorn, old slate chalkboards were replaced with modern units made of porcelain enamel. (You can’t buy slate chalkboards any more.) Removing the old chalkboards revealed...even older slate chalkboards, complete with math problems from a long-ago class session.
Finally, next door to Hathorn, work continues on a reimagining of Dana Chemistry Hall.
Since its 1965 opening, Dana has focused on chemistry research and teaching. When the gut renovation is finished next fall, Dana will have a new focus on science teaching and welcoming new students to STEM fields; it will also feature flexible classrooms for teaching across all disciplines.
Facility Services project manager Chris Streifel was fascinated to witness Dana go from one state — chock full of scientific stuff — to another state, completely empty.
COURTESY OF PRECISION BUILDERS
Removing an old slate chalkboard in Hathorn Room 305 revealed an even older chalkboard, still bearing mathematical notes.
THEOPHIL SYSLO DOUG HUBLEY
Framed by the windows of a south-facing glass curtain wall, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Colleen O’Loughlin takes a look around a classroom in Bonney Science Center.
Krista Aronson, seen with a local elementary student during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day workshop in 2018, is the founder and director of the Diverse BookFinder.
BookFinder at Age 4
In mid-August, the award-winning Diverse BookFinder, a comprehensive educational resource for multicultural children’s picture books, saw an unusual spike in web traffic to its Bates College website, DiverseBookFinder.org.
Coinciding with events overseas, the trending Google search term “children’s books about Afghanistan” was directing web users to a helpful page on the Diverse BookFinder site.
There, the selection of awareness- expanding books included The Library Bus, a story of a young girl, set against the backdrop of war, written by an Afghan author.
For Professor of Psychology Krista Aronson, founder and director of the Diverse BookFinder, the Google-driven traffic was good news on multiple levels.
For one, the traffic indicates that librarians and teachers — the BookFinder’s major users, in addition to parents — are accessing its resources. It’s also “evidence of how these educational leaders are always seeking ways to use multicultural picture books to teach and guide young children,” she says.
Officially launched four years ago this September, the Diverse BookFinder has made big strides in its brief existence. DiverseBookFinder.org averages 46,000 page views per month, and in June the BookFinder was recognized as one of the year’s “Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning” by the American Association of School Librarians, the preeminent professional organization for the school library community.
Meanwhile, Aronson and her BookFinder team offer consulting services to libraries in all 50 states, including hundreds in Maine and Massachusetts. The BookFinder is also a central figure in two significant recent federal grants. The first is a $427,100 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund a partnership between Bates, the University of Florida, and California State University, Fresno, to enhance the discoverability of middle-grade and young-adult novels featuring characters who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
The second is a $175,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund a summer 2022 institute at Bates for elementary school teachers who want to use picture books to develop more equitable teaching strategies.
The institute’s audience, elementary school educators, underscores what experts like Aronson have long known: that lessons about inclusion, race, culture, and identity are more effectively taught to students at a young age — during elementary school — than later on in high school or college.
And a powerful teaching tool to help achieve all that, Aronson says, is the children’s picture book, the “perfect platform for beginning to have essential conversations about race and culture with children.”
Having those conversations is essential, she says. “Fifty years of psychological research has demonstrated that such conversations help children develop positive identities and intercultural competence in support of academic success.”
JAY BURNS The Diverse BookFinder, featuring an online and circulating collection at Bates, includes The Library Bus, a story of a young girl, set against the backdrop of war, written by an Afghan author.
CHARLES “Of course, these films tell a lie.”
Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, explaining the history of interracial buddy films, such as 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, during a Sept. 27 talk celebrating his Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.
The interracial buddy film genre treats racism as something internal, Nero said, implying that “ending racism is as simple as Black and white men becoming friends.” But that’s not true, of course: Racism is structural and systemic.
Behind Nero, whose talk heavily referenced Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, is a projected still from Lee’s School Daze. In the foreground is Nero’s husband, Professor of Hispanic Studies Baltasar Fra-Molinero.
PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN TIM DENNELL
A policeman in Sheffield, England, in April 2021.
THIS JUST IN
A sampling of recent faculty-authored articles.
Cultural and Symbolic Capital in the Market for Security Publication: Policing and Society • Author: Logan Puck (politics) and coauthor • What It Explains: How, in countries where police have public trust, such as the United Kingdom, private security firms actively align with the police and borrow their symbols, whereas in countries where police have a poor reputation, such as Mexico, private firms’ relations with the police are far more ambiguous.
Public Tears: Populism and the Politics of Emotion in AKP’s Turkey Publication: International Journal of Middle East Studies • Author: Senem Aslan (politics) • What It Explains: How an increase in public weeping by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan could be seen as a populist act designed to communicate closeness to the people at a time when his power and wealth is setting him apart from the politically and economically marginalized.
Compact Starburst Galaxies with Fast Outflows Publication: The Astrophysical Journal • Author: Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic and coauthors, including 10 Bates students and young alumni • What It Explains: New insights, using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, about the extreme physical conditions at the center of compact “starburst” galaxies, ones with a high rate of star formation that drive fast galactic winds.
Control of Neuronal Excitability by Cell Surface Receptor Density and Phosphoinositide Metabolism Publication: Frontiers in Pharmacology • Author: Martin Kruse (biology and neuroscience) and coauthor • What It Explains: A new model that can describe, for the first time, how the metabolism of a rare family of lipids called phosphoinositides regulates the activity of nerve cells.
$100 Financial Aid Expansion
A challenge grant of $50 million to Bates College through the Schuler Access Initiative, matched dollar for dollar by Bates donors, will fuel a $100 million expansion of financial aid to enroll talented students from America’s lowest-income families.
Bates is one of four top liberal arts colleges and one university selected by the Schuler Education Foundation to launch the new initiative that supports students who are Pell eligible, low income, or undocumented at highly selective liberal arts colleges.
Joining Bates in the first round of selected institutions are Carleton, Kenyon, and Union colleges and Tufts University.
The $100 million effort is structured as an incentive program. Every dollar that Bates raises toward this initiative over the next five years will be matched by the Schuler Education Foundation, up to $50 million. Funds raised from donors will provide permanent, endowed support for expanded financial aid.
RENE ROY
What’s the Schuler Access Initiative?
What It Is
How the Challenge Works
The $50 million grant will be matched dollar for dollar by Bates donors, creating a $100 million expansion of financial aid.
What the Initiative Supports
The new financial aid funds will enable Bates to increase the number of students who are Pell eligible, undocumented, and low income by 50 percent over the next decade, from approximately 200 students to 300, out of a student body of about 1,800.
What They’re Saying
“I am thrilled that we will be able to make the life-transforming experience of the liberal arts available to even greater numbers of talented students who might otherwise not have this opportunity.” — President Clayton Spencer
“Too often these students are described in terms of cost — the money needed to enroll them, for example — rather than the incredible lived experiences they bring to campus. That’s such a missed opportunity for a campus that wants to serve amazing, smart, hard-working students.” — Jason Patenaude ’91, executive director of the Schuler Education Foundation
As of late September, Bates had raised $30 million in matching gifts and pledges from its donors.
“Bates was founded by people who believed in the power of education to develop the full potential of every human being,” said Bates President Clayton Spencer. “This investment from the Schuler Education Foundation, combined with the generosity of Bates donors, provides us with the means to renew this founding vision in a real and tangible way.”
Each year, Bates provides nearly $39 million in need-based financial aid grants to approximately 45 percent of the student body. The average grant is nearly $49,000 per year.
A national effort with broad reach and impact, the Schuler Access Initiative is poised, over the next 10 years, to award challenge grants of up to $500 million to as many as 20 U.S. colleges and universities, generating up to $1 billion in new financial aid.
In creating the Schuler Access Initiative partnership, the foundation looked “for institutions that we felt were leaders in educating and supporting students who are Pell eligible or undocumented,” said Jason Patenaude ’91, executive director of the Schuler Education Foundation.
Historically, Bates has one of the strongest overall graduation rates in the country. The six-year graduation rate for the cohort of Bates students that entered in 2014 was 98 percent for students who receive Pell grants compared with 92 percent overall.
PRESIDENT CLAYTON SPENCER
RENE ROY
New Bates Trustees
The Bates of Board of Trustees elected four new members in 2020 and 2021:
Lance Matthiesen ’85 of Chevy Chase, Md., is global manager, McKinsey Black Network Programs at McKinsey & Co.
Terrence Murray P’23 of Jamaica Plain, Mass., is founder of Eliot Street Capital, a New England-focused commercial real estate investment company.
Michelle Angelone Rosenberg ’94 of Denver, Colo., is global general counsel and company secretary of Janus Henderson Group.
Stacey Rizza P’20, M.D., of Rochester, Minn., is executive medical director for international practice at the Mayo Clinic.
Lance Matthiesen
’85
Terrence Murray
P’23
Michelle Angelone Rosenberg
’94
Stacey Rizza P’20
Manuel Machorro Gomez Pezuela ’24 of Mexico City holds an embroidered runner that his grandmother bought at a hometown market for him to take to his residence at 280 College Street.
MOVE-IN READY
photography by phyllis graber jensen
Whether a plant to tend, a book to stay organized, or the beginnings of sweet, sweet music, students came back to campus in August with everything they needed to make their dorm rooms home.
Cat Quotes
Quotes from the Bates Bobcast, the weekly podcast on Bates athletics • Bates Bobcast gobatesbobcats.com/podcasts
Raised in England, first-year forward Rex Lane seems right at home at Bates, scoring four goals in his first two collegiate games to earn NESCAC Player of the Week honors in September 1. “In England, everyone’s kind of reserved. Then you come to Bates, and everyone’s so out- going and so friendly. It’s a bit of a shock to the system.” — First-year men’s soccer player Rex Lane, who grew up in England 2. “That last 100 meters is so painful. You're in a tunnel, just focusing on the next stroke. And then you cross that line and it’s, ‘Whoa, what just happened?’” — Women’s rowing captain Saylor Strugar ’21 on realizing Bates had won a fourth straight NCAA championship 3. “I’d pay all the money I have to get back to those days. I’m not talking only about squash: my friends, Commons, classes, professors. But we cannot get time back.” — Two-time men’s squash national champion Ahmed Abdel Khalek ’16 reflecting on Bates life at his 5th Reunion
4. “I’d never seen that many trees in my life. And it’s peaceful. Just you, in nature.” — First-year women’s golfer Maddy Kwei of Pasadena, Calif., comparing Los Angeles courses with Maine courses 5. “It was a very emotional moment because I had just graduated. When a lot of good things just happen on top of one another, it just doesn’t feel quite realistic.” — Men's track and field captain John Rex ’21 on earning All-America honors in the hammer throw two days after Commencement 6. “Pete was always a giver. He always put his team ahead of his own needs, and he’d always be there to motivate people and try to get the best out of them.”
— Matthew Schecter ’89 on his late friend and classmate, Peter Goodrich, who died in the September 11 attacks 20 years ago
The Puns Never Stop
During team photo shoots, every Bobcat poses for a traditional head-and-shoulders portrait, then gets to create a sports portrait, known as “sportrait,” of their choice.
At that point, things can get a little…punchy. Here are a couple of our favorite outtakes from this fall.
On a scale of 1 to 10, we’re 9 3/4 obsessed with this Harry Potter look served up by women’s cross country runner Mary Richardson ’22 of Blue Hill, Maine.
“I grew up reading Harry Potter and felt inspired to pay homage for my senior year sportrait,” she explains.
Richardson says her childhood was “really crafty” (as in creative, not wizardly). “My mom always made Halloween costumes for me and my sister, so we've always had capes and crazy hats laying around.”
Packing for her return to Bates in August, Richardson spied a Gryffindor scarf peeking out from a bin in her closet. Paired with her glasses, the look was complete as she arrived at the photo shoot in August.
BREWSTER BURNS
Coach Fresh Retires
Al Fereshetian, “Coach Fresh” to generations of Bobcats, announced his retirement last summer after 26 years as head coach of men’s cross country and track and field.
Taking over the program is Curtis Johnson, an assistant coach since 2016.
Fereshetian’s 41-year coaching career, including 26 years at Bates, touched the lives of hundreds of student-athletes and achieved consistent regional and national success.
Of more than 500 Bobcat athletes Fereshetian coached at Bates, 48 earned a total of 101 All-America honors, including nine individual NCAA titles.
Fereshetian described his Bates career as a “blessing and an honor, to have the chance to work with so many outstanding young men who were in many cases great athletes, but in every case great people.”
PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN
Coach Fresh is a friend, a dad, a brother, and a mentor. He just does it all.
“Al has given so much to educate, coach, and mentor our students,” said Director of Athletics Jason Fein, noting that Fereshetian has been only the second coach to lead the program in the last seven decades, his predecessor being Walter Slovenski, from 1952 to 1995.
A potent mix of ebullience, intensity, and creativity fueled Fereshetian’s gift for getting the most out of his athletes. A young Bobcat might enter the Bates program as a sprinter or distance runner, but ultimately score state championship points as a thrower or jumper.
BREWSTER BURNS
HOME COOKIN’
Like other Bobcats, senior soccer players Ciaran Bardong of Manhasset, N.Y., Luke Protti of Amherst, Mass., and Charlie Cronin of South Portland, Maine, wanted to cook up something special for their final Bates sportrait.
“One of us suggested fake mustaches, and we instinctively knew that chefs hats and cooking utensils were essential additions,” says Cronin. “One could say we're Michelin starred.”
With the start of the season, the trio put comedy on the back burner, helping the team to a 5-2 record through late September.
Communion, Apart
On late July evening, viewers sat on College Street — helpfully closed for the occasion — to view a film projected on a screen on the porch of Schaeffer Theatre.
Shown as part of the Bates Dance Festival, Communion was created during the height of the pandemic lockdown by Janessa Clark, who asked each of 40 dancers to submit a video of themselves dancing. Each video was then combined with another dancer’s video to create 20 “distanced duets.”
The end result was, as festival director Shoni Currier said, both “a requiem and a celebration.”
Within last summer’s pandemic-modified Bates Dance Festival, artists and dancers “adapted constantly,” said Currier, offering a “testament to what can happen within a creative practice in the most desperate of situations.”
PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN
Gerald Walsh removes dust from Marsden Hartley’s 1942 painting Christ during the installation of the exhibition Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts in September.
Vice Versa
Marsden Hartley, the famed modernist artist who was born in Lewiston in 1877, was a lifelong traveler and wanderer who collected mementos everywhere he went — from seashells to bracelets and rings.
Those souvenirs influenced his art, and vice versa, a dynamic that gave nuanced meaning to Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts, the fall exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art.
For example, a red and black blanket, probably Mexican, that is part of the exhibit seems echoed in the motifs and palettes of paintings like Christ (1942), one of many religious images he finished in his last years.
He collected inexpensive mementos that he treasured, picking up objects and artifacts everywhere he went. He loved seashells (there are paintings of a few in the exhibition) and sought out jewelry, including bracelets with his initials and rings.
HARTLEY CATALOG “We don’t really put our initials on things as much anymore,” said museum
The exhibition registrar Corie Audette, pointing out catalogue for some German cufflinks and a cigarette
Marsden Hartley: case, each emblazoned with “MH.”
Adventurer in the In Hartley’s memoirs he called his
Arts is available collecting an alternative to “concrete through the Bates escapades” — a reference to his life
College Store, as a sexually repressed gay man — store.bates.edu. and his own preference for abstract escapades.
Elena Valle ’25 of Damascus, Md., displays a print with the words“Grow, Evolve, Transform.” The message is “more than just three words,” she says. “It means to accept and embrace the path you were meant to be on in order to grow as an individual and change the world around you.”
Fine Prints
Students milled around the tables, ink-stained hands searching for the perfect print block. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, they took turns using the ink rollers and waited patiently for a space to lay their tote bag, T-shirt, or mask.
The atmosphere outside the Benjamin E. Mays Center was upbeat and friendly, as students traded compliments and encouragement back and forth.
Peppy pop music poured from the speakers, and a strong breeze threatened to blow paper and shirts everywhere. Still, everyone stayed happily on task during this year’s Free Press social justice printmaking event.
The event is run by the “Stringfellows,” students who work with the college’s Multifaith Chaplaincy in the spirit of William Stringfellow ’49, the famed lawyer, theologian, and social critic.
Stringfellows help organize opportunities for campus activists to connect with each other and to reflect on their work. It’s all about “helping to find practices and spaces to root and remind themselves why they do this important work that can transform the world,” says the Rev. Brittney Longsdorf, the college’s multifaith chaplain.
The Sunny Side of Lewiston
The Annual Entering Student Orientation Program has traditionally been a way to introduce first-year students to the great outdoors of Maine. These days, AESOP also includes opportunities to learn about Greater Lewiston.
“Observing and Painting L/A,” an AESOP outing run by Mia Brumsted ’24 of Shelburne, Vt., and Saskia Wong ’22 of Los Angeles, trekked to Lewiston’s Sunnyside Park to find some inspiration for water-colors and catch some rays along the Androscoggin.
From left, first-year students Lukas Jordan of Lewisburg, Pa., Zaya Rothenberg of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Dalila Caceres of Fallbrook, Calif., paint along the Androscoggin during the 2021 AESOP outing “Observing and Painting L/A.”
Pine Performance
Jamari Amrham ’22 of Fontana, Calif., escorts a dancer swathed in quilts through traffic on Pine Street in Lewiston last July.
The scene unfolded during a tech rehearsal for Processions Toward, Being Future Being, a site-specific work in development by choreographer Emily Johnson and her company, Catalyst, performed during the Bates Dance Festival. Amrham worked with the festival as a Purposeful Work intern.
Johnson, an Indigenous artist of Yup’ik ancestry, presented the work, which evokes the visual, aural and ancestral landscape of Indigenous power, in and around downtown Kennedy Park and along the Andoscoggin riverfront, originally home to Wabanaki peoples.
What’s in a Name: Montello
An area just north of campus, Montello is the name of a street, a rise of land (familiar to generations of Bates joggers), an elementary school, a former reservoir, and an assisted living center.
Street Wise
One of Lewiston’s oldest streets, Montello Street connects Main Street on the west side of town with Sabattus Street to the east.
Naming Rights
Other Montello-named places in the U.S. include a neighborhood in Brockton, Mass.; a canyon and creek in Nevada; and a city and town in Wisconsin.
Some sources suggest “Montello” is based on the French, “mont et l’eau,” meaning “hill and water,” which seems fanciful. More likely, the name is borrowed from the hill of the same name in northern Italy.
Spring Has Sprung
As bottled water became popular in the 1800s, commercial bottlers like Poland Spring sprang up throughout Maine, including two in Montello Heights, which were sold nationally: Windsor Spring on the west side and Highland Spring on the east side, on land that became the Thorncrag Nature Sanctuary.
An 1887 ad for Windsor Spring water claimed it was a “medicinal agent for kidney, liver and bladder troubles, dyspepsia, rheumatic affections, chlorosis, malarial poisoning, and general debility.”
New Heights
Since the 1800s, the area around Montello Street has been known as Montello Heights. The street rises and falls about 150 feet. North of the street, the land is still mostly undeveloped woodland, including Thorncrag rising another 150 feet.
Water Works
Built in 1951, Montello Heights Reservoir was closed in the 1980s after the city improved its pumping stations. All public water now comes from Lake Auburn.
Happy Trampers
In the early 1900s, north of campus was mostly farmland. In 1918, The Bates Student reported that seniors in a zoology course trekked to a Montello Heights farmhouse for a snowshoe party. “The trampers enjoyed an oyster stew, apple pie with whipped cream, coffee, apples, and pop-corn.” Montello Street is now part of a traditional three-mile jogging loop: out College Street; right on Montello; right on East Avenue, and back to campus.
Water from the Windsor Spring, located in Montello Heights, was sold during the late 1800s in bottles like this, featuring a stereotypical scene of indigenous peoples drinking from a spring.
Heaven and Earth
Veteran Lewiston Sun Journal photojournalist Russ Dillingham captured this image on July 6, 2021, showing fireworks exploding over the Androscoggin River as the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, illuminated with lights, looms in the foreground.
A Borrower and Lender Be
Biruk Chafamo ’22 of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has created a web application that brings an ancient lending tradition into the 21st century.
In May, Chafamo and his app won the $10,000 top prize in the college’s annual pitch competition sponsored by Bobcat Ventures, a student-run entrepreneur group supported by the Bates Center for Purposeful Work.
The app is called Equb, and it facilitates small loans to people who are not well-served by traditional banks. What’s distinctive about Equb is the source of the loans — from one’s own circle of friends, family, and community — and how Chafamo employs web technology to efficiently gather the funders and their money.
The idea of a friend group making loans to its members is not new. Known as a “rotating savings and credit association,” or RSCA, the concept is found in many countries, including Ethiopia, where it’s known as ekub.
Self-help lending can be financially advantageous, he says. “Imagine you’re trying to borrow money from a bank to buy an oven, but the bank looks at your very poor credit score and they slap you with a 20 percent interest rate. Then you remember that a lot of your friends have money sitting in their savings account, collecting less than 0.5 percent interest.”
Instead of taking the bank’s usurious rate, “why not form a group with your friends and take turns borrowing and lending money to each other?” Besides helping out a friend, the entire group gets way better rates, both loan and investment, than a bank would offer, he said.
Chafamo’s idea sounds something like LendingClub, a U.S. peer-to-peer lending business, “but it’s really not,” he says. LendingClub and others in the space “provide loans to users sourced from individual investors. My approach is to use the social connections that people already have to allow them to form their own lending groups.”
This year’s competition was wordly, with the top prize and two runner-up awards of $2,500 going to international students.
One runner-up prize went to Nicole Kumbula ’21 of Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe, who graduated in May with a chemistry major. Her social-business pitch, Ukama Igasva, focuses on food security and community morale in her grandmother’s home village in Zimbabwe.
Her classmate Armaan Mecca, now a physics graduate from Chennai, India, pitched Passionfruit, an app that addresses the problem facing up-andcoming musicians: how to monetize their music through streaming.
Judging the eight pitches this year were Emma Sprague ’10, co-founder of leadership development group Upswing Strategies; Chris Barbin ’93, founder and CEO of Tercera.io, an investment and advisory firm focused on the third wave of cloud computing; and Ben Schippers ’04, cofounder of the web and mobile app developer HappyFunCorp.
The student entrepreneurs rose to the challenge of developing pitches during a pandemic year and effectively presenting them on Zoom, said Barbin.
Biruk Chafamo ’22 of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, won the $10,000 top prize in Bobcat Ventures’ pitch competition.
COURTESY BIRUK CHAFAMO
Prize winners, alumni judges, Bobcat Ventures student leaders, and Purposeful Work staffers celebrate the successful pitch competition on May 1.
Tour Time
A group of early-arriving international students in the Class of 2025 got an informal tour of campus on Aug. 22, including a visit with President Clayton Spencer in Lane Hall.
They were led by Associate Dean for International Student Programs James Reese. (Fun fact: Spencer and Reese, who is in his fourth decade at Bates, were high school classmates in North Carolina, where Reese’s father, a minister in the Presbyterian Church, was working with the Synod of Catawba in Charlotte, and Spencer’s father was president of Davidson College.)
Eleven percent of the Class of 2025 joined Bates from countries outside the U.S.
PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN
Perfect 10
Marian Chisela Mubamba-Kaluba (right) of Mpika, Zambia, poses with her daughter Mercy Mariana Kaluba ’25 (center) and son Chomba Kaluba ’11 (left) after Convocation on Aug. 31. Mariana is the youngest of Marian’s 10 children. “When my sister got into Bates, my goal was to include Mom on the trip” to Bates to help her move in, said Chomba, who lives in Portland, Ore. “It was an honor for her to be with her last child at such a special occasion.”
