Ms. Harmon has worked with the faculty at Shippensburg University over the past year and a half in a variety of academic and service activities. Meg’s level of commitment to societal betterment is top tier. One of our first programs for first-year students is our university’s Day of Service, which Meg enthusiastically embraced. Collaborating with her fellow students, she helped lead a team installing landscaping at a new trail-head along the Cumberland Valley Rail Trail. Over the course of four hours, Ms. Harmon installed landscape timbers, cleared rocks, spread soil, and, completed work on a deck that provides ADA-compliant accessibility to a new museum along the trail. Since 2018, the new trail-head/museum complex has hosted thousands of visitors of all abilities, now serves as a focal point for revitalization for the area. Her efforts have helped lay the foundation for ongoing positive social change.
The university’s Day of Service and First-Year-Experience (FYE) more broadly had a profound effect on Ms. Harmon’s outlook on college and by the end of the fall semester she had made a pact with a group of friends to take action in addressing issues of inequality that they had observed in the local community.