Community Service Magazine Articles




November 28, 2021

Writer:

DAED staff

The year 2020 changed the world as we know it. These Duke alumni showed us that in the midst of unspeakable difficulty, we can lift up each other, come together, make change that has the power to change us all. The Duke Alumni Changemaker Award is a one-time award honoring individuals across schools who made a difference for their communities and the world in pandemic year 2020. 

November 25, 2021

Manjusha Kulkarni ’91, a Los Angeles community activist and attorney, knew she had to act. She met with the family of the injured student, worked with local school district officials on behalf of the family, and held a press conference to take a stand against violence against Asian Americans—a soaring statistic in 2020’s pandemic year.

November 25, 2021

Writer:

Corbie Hill

When Faulkner Fox planned her inaugural political-theater workshop for fall 2020, she didn’t predict an imminent summer of activism.

Nasher Museum with banner by Carrie Mae Weems

March 19, 2021

Writer:

Scott Huler

The Nasher Museum of Art staff were facing COVID reality last summer. Their Ebony Patterson exhibit, “...while the dew is still on the roses…,” a rich, complex installation with art, video, patterned walls, and more than 12,000 individually placed flowers throughout the gallery, had to come down after having been open only ten days. It was impossible to predict when the doors would reopen. “We were devastated,” says Wendy Hower, director of engagement and marketing.

David Perpich in front of the New York Times headquarters in New York

December 8, 2020

Writer:

Julia M. Klein

In his final year at Duke, David Perpich ’99 wasn’t keen on writing an economics thesis. He told his father that he had a better idea: working as part owner of Devil’s Delivery Service in Durham. “So,” Joseph G. Perpich fired back, “you want to deliver food instead of writing a senior thesis?”

“I said, ‘Don’t think about it that way,’ ” David Perpich recalls. “ ‘Think about the experience of learning about what it is to do something entrepreneurial.’ ”

Tallman Trask sitting in Baldwin Auditorium on Duke's campus

December 8, 2020

When, back in 1995, Tallman Trask III was emerging as the likely choice as Duke’s executive vice president, law professor James Cox was chairing the search committee. He did what search-committee chairs typically do: He called an administrator at the University of Washington, where Trask was then working, to check him out.

September 29, 2020

Writer:

Scott Huler

A few of our stories of realization came to us as spoken words, not as writing or images. We’re sharing them here as part of our podcast "The Devils' Share."

Homework

July 22, 2020

Years before COVID-19 turned the educational world topsy-turvy, Douglas Michelman ’82 was concerned about the “homework gap.” Michelman had joined Sprint as the chief communications officer in 2014, and because his portfolio included corporate responsibility, the CEO asked him to reimagine how Sprint could create social impact in a relevant way.

A damaged and abandoned sailboat near Beaufort

July 22, 2020

Writer:

Corbie Hill

Memorial Day 2020 and Carteret County was as mobbed by tourists as Liz DeMattia has ever seen it.

A headshot of NCMA director and Duke alumnae Valerie Hillings

November 19, 2019

Writer:

Scott Huler

When her phone rang last fall, France Family Professor of art, art history, and visual studies Kristine Stiles recognized the voice on the other end of the line. “Do you know who you’re talking to?” the voice asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Valerie.” Valerie Hillings ’93: student, research assistant, protégé, then friend and ultimately colleague, curator at the Guggenheim. A voice Stiles would never mistake.

An image of Duke alumnus Frank Konhaus and his wife, Ellen Cassilly

November 19, 2019

Writer:

Scott Huler

Early evening. A crowd of fifty or so mills around two levels of galleries and assembly space: a modernist house filled with visitors, the living room lined with folding chairs, the kitchen island covered with wine bottles, pimento cheese dip, ham biscuits, and fruit. Framed photographs cover every wall, and people leaf through books and read gallery guides left in easy reach on shelves and windowsills.

May 17, 2019

Writer:

Lucas Hubbard

Ryan Bergamini discusses “community” to a degree that the combination of his face and the word has become a meme. On East Campus, he’s the senior making signs that encourage the first-years in the dorm where he’s a resident assistant to become TROUTs (Trinity Residents Organizing a Unified Trinity, with the slogan stating that “TROUTs swim together”).

May 17, 2019

When I visited Durham’s Lakewood Elementary last month, the smart students in Ms. Ledwith’s first-grade class were having a spelling contest. Divided into teams of five, they raced each other to spell green, week, feet, and—perhaps for the benefit of their visitor—Duke.

May 16, 2019

Writer:

Anne Saker

Almost every advertisement for razors ever created captures the same moment. Towel around his neck, a man with morning stubble confronts his bathroom mirror. He is about to execute the manly act of shaving. But first, he locks eyes with his image.

May 14, 2019

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“I don’t understand why we don’t understand grief,” says Kimberly Holmes Wiggins ’02.

It’s a frustration both immediate and ongoing for Wiggins. On April 16, 2016, her husband, Rasheed Wiggins ’99, M.B.A. ’10, was killed in a still unsolved hit-and-run crash in Orlando, Florida. That was the beginning of a new title for her—widow. The label, she says, was hard to accept, hard to even verbalize.

July 22, 2014

It’s a mid-April morning in Highland Park, a neighborhood just north of Richmond, Virginia, where historic Queen Anne-style homes the color of popsicles give way to boarded-up buildings along a slight Main Street.

July 18, 2014

In the afternoon, Don visits the third cabin, which he recently made his workshop. He lifts a pine plank and secures it between two bench vices, checking to see that the grain runs in the right direction. Over one edge, he steadily passes an old-fashioned hand plane, forming a groove in the wood. Pine shavings curl at his feet, reminding him of golden angel hair, and he inhales the woodsy, clean scent of pine, tinged with the perfume of wisteria.

July 18, 2014

Eleven years ago, when my wife, Leah, and I were far from home in the Anbar province of Iraq, American friends with whom we were traveling had a car accident. Three of them split their heads open on impact and stumbled out of the car onto a dusty highway strewn with the debris of war. A car of Iraqis stopped, took them into their car, and drove them to a town called Rutba. There a doctor spoke to them in perfect English: “Three days ago, your country bombed our hospital.

July 18, 2014

The willow oak has written in it
an ink of time-underlayment.
I say the word emeritus
and the wind-rubbed coppery surface
touches my eyes like a worn rug.
Corded by limbs to a base in soil
it recovers those years of toil
that layered other leaves in another place.
The library’s vellum and coffee still drug
my memory, like Gothic walls and trees above.
There I and my gnarled masters strove,

April 29, 2014

More than 2,000 students have participated in DukeEngage since it began in 2007. The program, in which students serve a domestic or international community in need, has become a Duke hallmark. So, it might surprise you to know that forty years before DukeEngage launched, Duke had developed an immersive community- service program based in Durham.

April 28, 2014

Writer:

Mousa Jawasreh

Nour has fair skin and gray-blue eyes, accentuated by her ocean-colored hijab and dress. She tells us how in love she is with her husband, how he waited three years until she was old enough to marry him. She speaks of her son as the only bright spot in her life here in Jordan, the only happy moment. She details the horrors of her father-in-law’s public murder in Syria and even shows us pictures of his flowery burial on her cell phone.

Samantha Emmert helps Victoria Thayer examine a deceased dolphin.

April 28, 2014

“The rolling sand dunes and gentle waves of Emerald Isle are so picturesque that I almost forget why I am here: to conduct a necropsy on a stranded bottlenose dolphin,” wrote Samantha Emmert from the Duke Marine Lab in early 2014. Emmert spent her junior year researching an outbreak of morbillivirus epizootic, a measles-like virus that has ravaged dolphin populations along the Atlantic Coast since last summer.

November 12, 2013

Bradley Hintze thrives on the adrenaline of moving with a purpose. In October, he pedaled 75 miles of rural road in coastal North Carolina for Ride Without Limits, an ultimate cycling event that benefits children and adults who struggle with disabilities.

Building futures: Gates and participants at a Sure Start Project initiative to promote maternal and newborn health in India’s Kathghara Village. © Bill & Melinda gates Foundation/Barbara Kinney.

July 24, 2013

Writer:

Melinda Gates

One of the hallmarks of getting old, I'm told, is thinking that everything is getting steadily worse. I must still be young, then, because I am confident that Duke has gotten better since I was a student. I arrived at this conclusion this past May, when I returned to campus to deliver the commencement address.