St. Mary's College of Maryland partners with alumna-led program to bring local teens into community-building work
Eight youth from Southern Maryland spent the weekend of July 24-26 immersed in workshops on place and belonging, wellbeing, and disaster preparedness at the Center for Resilient Communities' (CRC) Vibrant Transformations youth summit at WVU in Morgantown, West Virginia. The trip was organized by St. Mary's College of Maryland faculty, while the summit itself was organized by SMCM alumna Chrysanthe Kallimanis '25, who is currently a graduate student at WVU.
The group was accompanied by St. Mary's College Assistant Professors of Environmental Studies Parisa Rinaldi and Matthew Wilfong, Great Mills High School teacher Raquel Grassinger, and three SMCM student interns: Jesse Slingluff, Finch Porter and Armirah Gonzales. The schedule ran from icebreakers and community-mapping exercises to an evening arts workshop and live concert.
The Southern Maryland teens joined a much larger cohort of youth from across West Virginia, including participants from Huntington and Charleston, for three days of shared programming. The mix gave the Maryland group a chance to compare notes on their home communities with peers from other regions, building the kind of cross-community relationships the summit was designed to spark. Kallimanis, who now works at the CRC, served as one of the summit's lead coordinators. She said the curriculum was designed to help teens see themselves as capable of starting their own projects rather than waiting for something to exist for them. She traced her own path into that work back to her junior year at St. Mary's College, where she said mentorship helped her understand what community-engaged research looks like in practice and that she could step outside the classroom and build projects directly from conversations with people. That experience, she said, is part of what led her to graduate work centered on youth leadership at the CRC.
Bradley Wilson, Professor of Geography and Director of the CRC at WVU, described the summit as one expression of a broader model the center has spent nearly a decade developing: pairing structured study with hands-on community work, then giving participants room to reflect, adjust, and take on more responsibility over time. For St. Mary's College, the trip builds on the College's Youth Resilience Leaders program. Faculty leading the trip see the CRC partnership as a chance for local teens to connect with a broader network of young people doing similar work, and for SMCM's approach to community-engaged learning to keep drawing on models like the CRC's. Since returning from the summit, the high school and college interns have launched a "listening project" to learn what matters most to their friends, family members, and neighbors. The results will shape future community-engaged projects and a local version of the youth summit in summer 2027. For more information, contact pnrinaldi@smcm.edu.
