Marisa Charley and the W&L Bonner Program Featured in Article Posted on Higher Ed Jobs The story focuses on the Bonner Program’s collaborative work with the Street Medicine Institute.
Charley and her students pose with Dr. Withers at Blue Sky Bakery in Lexington.The website Higher Ed Jobs recently profiled Washington and Lee University’s Bonner Program’s collaborative work with the Street Medicine Institute (SMI) as part of its series “Campus to Community: Stories of Impact in Higher Education.”
The article describes the connection between SMI creator Dr. Jim Withers and Bonner Program Director Marisa Charley, and how it came to be that W&L Bonner students began identifying, vetting and documenting street medicine providers worldwide to produce the first international database of street medicine facilities and practitioners. This eventually led to a GIS-mapped resource on the SMI website. The map enables members and other nonprofits to better coordinate their care, identify service gaps and expand their outreach efforts.
The ongoing work spearheaded by Charley and Kristina Ayers ’25 was also recently outlined in the Columns article, “Connecting a Global Movement.”
Charley, who is also associate director of the Shepherd Program and an instructor of poverty studies at W&L, has been with the university since 2012. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in communication arts from Allegheny College and a Master of Arts in critical and creative thinking from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
The Bonner Program was created in 1990 by the Corella & Bertram F. Bonner Foundation to transform students, communities and campuses through service. The program has grown to become the largest privately funded, service-based college scholarship program in the country. Each year, campuses in the Bonner network recruit up to 40 new students with high financial need and an ethic for service. In turn, these students receive four years of financial aid support and an opportunity to participate in an intensive, developmental community engagement experience. Collectively, Bonner Programs engage more than 3,000 students annually at over 65 college campuses nationwide.
Considered a leading resource for jobs and career information within academia, HigherEdJobs is a job board focused specifically on higher education, serving as a platform for connecting job seekers with collegiate and university employers.
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