Come to the Community Partner Panels to learn more about the social issues your organization addresses from local experts! There will be two concurrent panels: Engaging with Youth & Mentoring and Accessing Addison County's Resources. You can choose to go to whichever sounds more interesting and/or helpful to you. Read the descriptions and panelist bios below to decide. Then, submit questions you'd like panelists to cover!

When/Where: The panels will take place in Axinn 229 on February 26th from 7:00-8:30 p.m. with a pizza dinner provided.

Engaging with Youth & Mentoring Panel
This panel will seek to cover your most pressing questions in working with youth -- from behavior management, to dealing with hard subjects, to building trust and setting appropriate boundaries and whatever other questions you have.

Panelists:
Laura Basili, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist whose therapeutic work focuses on children and adolescents living with adversity, illness, and loss.  For ten years she worked as a staff psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital & as an instructor at Harvard Medical School. For the past 15 years she has been teaching classes part-time in the psychology department at Middlebury College and working with youth, families, schools, hospitals, and mental health agencies in the community in her therapy and consulting practice.  

Mel Hurlbut  is a Program Director for DREAM, an organization that seeks to close the opportunity gap for youth who live in low-income housing by matching them with college student mentors. Mel supports AmeriCorps members and advises student mentors on multiple college campuses across the state, including Middlebury, with mentoring best practices for working with youth and families. She also coaches youth field hockey!

Elizabeth Burrows is a licensed clinical social worker and has worked as a school counselor for more than 25 years, in both rural and urban settings and at all grade levels. She is active in empowering students, partnering with parents, and collaborating with all members of the school community towards developing every student’s potential. For her, "work is love made visible."


Accessing Addison County's Resources Panel
Many SCB members are involved with one or two organizations, like Charter House Coalition or the John Graham Shelter, but aren't necessarily aware of the wider networks of support available in Addison County. Therefore, this panel will seek to give students a better understanding of those networks, how they work together, and barriers to accessing them.

Panelists:
Luna Shen is a recent Midd grad ‘19.5. She is currently serving as a Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB) AmeriCorps member at John Graham Shelter in Vergennes. As a student, Luna was deeply involved on campus and in the larger Middlebury community. She interned with Charter House Coalition and served on the Charter House Club Board, did a summer internship with HOPE, and completed the Privilege & Poverty Academic Cluster.

Lily Bradburn is the Local Food Access Coordinator for HOPE (Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects), an organization that provides a variety of poverty relief services to individuals in Addison County and the surrounding area. As Local Food Access Coordinator, Lily seeks to increase accessibility to local produce in the Addison County area through regional gleanings, educational processing of said gleaned food, and general educational outreach. She also serves as the Co-Chair of the Addison County Hunger Council.

Christina Grier has been working in the field of ending gender-based violence for more than 23 years. She has been with WomenSafe, a local organization that serves people across the gender spectrum who experience sexual violence, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking, since 2001. At WomenSafe, Christina started out as Supervised Visitation Program Coordinator before moving into her current position as Services Director in 2013. As Services Director, she supervises the advocates and supervised visitation program staff.