Recent Awards

The Charles R. Wood Foundation has awarded St. Lawrence University a grant to launch, in partnership with SUNY Potsdam, a youth literacy initiative.  Entitled "Branching Out with Books," the project will promote high quality, targeted early literacy education in the North Country. The project will enable faculty, staff, and students at St. Lawrence University and SUNY Potsdam to address a key community need of the North Country - that of increasing literacy.

Literacy of New York, a nonprofit organization that provides adult basic literacy and English language tutoring in St. Lawrence Country, estimates "that nearly one in five adults in St. Lawrence Country has trouble reading the newspaper, cannot fill out a job application, and cannot add up the prices of several purchases."  To combat this hardship, "Branching Out with Books" will build upon small literacy outreach programs already in place at Jefferson Elementary school in Massena and Hermon-DeKalb Central School and establish a new reading program at the Akwesasne Library on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation. Graduate students and undergraduates from both universities will travel to the program sites weekly to serve as after-school reading mentors; engage children in literacy activities using books, art materials, and other resources; and provide the children with books they can take home to read in their families.  The project will directly benefit over 50 children weekly, with the potential to have a positive impact on hundreds more.

"Branching Out with Books" will be directed by Brenda Papineau, Director of Community Based Learning Programs at St. Lawrence, and Tina Wilson Bush, Director of the Rebecca V. Sheard Literacy Center at SUNY Potsdam. 

 

In June 2011, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Department Erik A. Backlund was awarded a new grant for his project entitled "Community Well-Being, Satisfaction, and Attachment in the Adirondacks." The study's main objective is to develop a typology of communities to clarify for the public and policy-makers appropriate community development responses to the changing social landscape of the Adirondacks and New York's Northern forest.

Backlund will investigate questions of population and property value gains, employment opportunities, and economic opportunity to determine if environmental protections afforded by the public ownership of land and the land-use controls are at the root of the region's problems. He will also analyze whether global and national economic changes are impacting Adirondack Park communities and causing the variations in socio-economic well-being and community satisfaction in the region.

Professor Backlund's study is designed to inform policy discussions and to develop a better understanding of the effects of natural amenities and related development on socio-economic well-being at the community level and residents' perceptions of community satisfaction and attachment.

Assistant Professor of Biology Susan Willson was recently awarded a 2011 T. Urling and Mabel Walker Research Fellowship for her research project on "Bird-Friendly Hayfields as Refugia for North Country Grassland Birds." The purpose of the Walker Fellowship program is to encourage faculty from the North Country Region's 11 institutions of higher education to undertake research on critical issues confronting local communities and to make recommendations for possible solutions. Dr. Willson's project examines the impact of modern agricultural practices on the nesting success of native grassland birds, such as bobolinks, eastern meadowlarks, and Savannah sparrows, who depend on natural grasslands in Northern New York for habitat.

Willson and her students propose that nest success may remain above replacement rate (and therefore contribute to a net positive population gain) even if farmers hay earlier, in a mid-season hay, when compared with the later date of after August 15. They also suggest that family farms, which utilize less mechanized forms of haying are inherently different from large-scale modern practitioners that utilize much larger and faster machinery; at high speeds, this machinery creates an upwards vacuum effect on a field that sucks up everything in its path. Smaller-scale machinery allows fledged birds to flee in front of approaching machinery. Professor Willson plans to work on this project several successive summers to gather enough data that will help the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation and other agencies develop and implement policies that will help threatened and endangered grassland birds.