Language tables offer students a fun and relaxing environment to practice conversation with their peers outside of the classroom.

The Spring 2011 William R. and Linda K. Cotter Debate will address
Social Security Financing for the Future featuring

Henry Aaron
Senior Fellow and Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Chair in Economic Studies
The Brookings Institution

vs.

Stuart Butler
Distinguished Fellow and Director, Center for Policy Innovation
The Heritage Foundation

The
Goldfarb Center organizes the William R.
and Linda K. Cotter Debate Series, bringing to campus experts who
debate pressing contemporary issues ranging from anti-terrorism tactics
to immigration policy, protection of academic freedom to the legal
drinking age. If you have an idea for a future debate, please contact
Prof. John Turner, associate director of the Goldfarb Center.

The debate took place at 7 PM on Sunday, April 3 in Ostrove Auditorium.

Each year the Thomas J. Watson Foundation awards $25,000 fellowships to graduating seniors from 40 select colleges and universities for a year of exploration outside of the United States. In 2011 four of the Watson finalists were Colby seniors: Nicholas Tucker, Nick Cunkelman, Toni Tsvetanova, and Michelle Russell. InsideColby videographer Madeline Gordon ’11 looked at the nominees and their project proposals and interviewed Associate Professor Ben Fallaw, and Peter Schmidt-Felner ’78, who was a Watson Fellow.

Adam Werbach, environmentalist and author of Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto, will
share insights into how companies can lead the way in efforts toward
sustainability.  Werbach was the youngest ever national president of
the Sierra Club at the age of 23, then went on to found a company
called Act Now Productions, consulting to nonprofits and working with
corporations that wished to green their enterprise.  In 2008, Act Now
joined the global advertizing firm Saatchi & Saatchi, where Werbach
is now the Chief Sustainability Officer consulting with large
corporations and directing sustainability efforts worldwide in 80
countries.

Safe Passage is a nonprofit organization founded in 1999 by Hanley
Denning, a 1992 graduate of Bowdoin College, providing educational
programs for the children of families living in the municipal garbage
dump in Guatemala City. In 2007 Denning, 36, died in Guatemala when a
bus traveling in the wrong direction struck her car. But Safe Passage
continued her mission. It now offers Guatemalan
children and their families educational support, food, medical
assistance, and a chance to socialize, gain confidence, and teach
others.

Richard
Schmaltz was recently named as the new executive director for Safe
Passage and has been involved in the organization since the beginning,
when he served as an advisor to Denning in the establishment of the
early childhood program, from curriculum development to teacher
training to fundraising. Schmaltz will offer insights into the process
of establishing and building a sustainable nonprofit service program,
share experiences working with Guatemala City municipal dump community,
and describe ways for individuals or groups to get involved (featuring
current Colby students who have participated in a Safe Passage service
trip).

The lecture took place on April 13, 2011 at 7 PM in Diamond 122.

In the immediate years following the end of World War II, American
Jews, through their communal institutions, went about the process of
creating  a memorial culture which hallowed the memory of the six
million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Text by text, artifact by
artifact, and act by act, they experimented with words and deeds to
both remember those who had been so ruthlessly killed and to affect
changes in the Jewish world and in America. Rather than avoiding the
catastrophe, as so many historians have asserted, American Jews
considered themselves obliged to remember and to tell themselves, their
children and the larger American world about what had happened.

Hasia Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of
American Jewish History at New York University, where she directs the
Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History.  She is the
recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2010-11.  Her recent book, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962, won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for American Jewish Studies.

Professor Diner spoke during the annual Berger Family Holocaust Lecture, on Tuesday, April 5, at 7:00PM in the Pugh Center.

Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times and was one of the leading writers covering the WikiLeaks story that broke last fall.

The Lovejoy Journalist In Residence Program is made possible by a grant
from the Knight Foundation, and brings journalists to campus to give
public lectures and speak in classes. Visiting journalists will meet
with students and aspiring journalists to explore and develop the
themes raised by the year’s winner of Colby’s Lovejoy Award for
courageous journalism.

Shane’s lecture took place at 7 PM on April 12 in Diamond 122.

The Maine Association of Nonprofits (MANP) and Colby College hosted the third annual leadership institute, “Building Movements:
Food as a Metaphor for Systems Change.”  Ben Hewitt, the author of The Town That Food Saved, gave one of the two keynote addresses. The Town that Food Saved is
an examination of one rural Vermont town’s efforts to implement a
localized food system.

David Kato was a Ugandan teacher and LGBT activist, considered a
father of Uganda’s gay rights movement. Kato was beaten to death Jan.
26, 2011, shortly after winning a lawsuit against a
magazine which had published his name and photograph identifying him as
gay and calling for him to be executed. The news of his murder quickly
made international headlines and subsequently hit particularly close to
home at Colby, as he was an applicant for the 2011 Oak Fellowship for
International Human Rights. The Oak Institute and the Bridge hosted a week of events in Kato’s honor, including a culminating keynote
address by David Kato’s close friend and fellow LGBT activist Val
Kalende.

Val
Kalende is pursuing a master’s degree in theological studies with a
focus on leadership at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kalende is one of the founding members of the
LGBT movement in Uganda. She is also a founding member of Freedom and
Roam Uganda, the first organization in the LGBT movement of Uganda.
Kalende has been at the frontline of the campaign against the
anti-homosexuality bill, a legislation that is proposing the death
penalty for LGBT people in Uganda. She also worked as a journalist at a
leading media company in Uganda. She is an outspoken activist against
U.S. evangelicals exporting homophobia to Uganda. Prior to joining EDS,
Kalende travelled to the United States to attend the International
Visitor Leadership Program sponsored by the U.S Department of State.
While in the U.S, Kalende has addressed members of congress, House of
Representatives members, the National Security Council, and several
LGBT organizations with the objective of raising awareness on why the
oppression of LGBT Ugandans should matter to Americans. Once jailed for
campaigning for the recognition of sexual minorities in her country’s
national HIV/AIDS policy, Kalende says her vision is to see a world
where LGBT people will not be judged by their sexual orientation or
gender identity but by “the content of their character.”

Cosponsored by the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights, the Office of the President, and The Bridge.