Chanelle Carver graduated and is out to change the world…!
…starting in Massachusetts! What began as a project for her Human Rights class at Babson taught by A&H professor Elizabeth Goldberg, evolved into an action plan to end poverty and to support adult literacy throughout the Commonwealth. It is now a 10-page guide called Making Massachusetts a Better Place for All.
The Human Rights project she started was collecting books for Rosie's Place, a Boston homeless women's shelter. Thousands of books were collected and distributed. That only fed her drive to do more.
Chanelle's list of achievements while at Babson also includes:
- Chair of campus NAACP
- Black Student Union member
- Volunteers coordinator and pen pals coordinator for Amazing Kids
- Named a “Woman Who Makes a Difference” at Babson, 2007
- Selected to participate in “85 Broads” Broad Advantage leadership program this summer
Amazing Kids is a California-based non-profit organization where no one gets paid. Their mission is to make sure high school students have opportunities to develop leadership skills, internship opportunities, and practical ways to understand the value of volunteering. With the Amazing Kids organization, Chanelle is also the volunteers' coordinator and coordinator for the international pen pals program.
Chanelle credits her interest in developing kids' skills to a leadership course taught by Prof. James Hunt. She says it was instrumental in giving her the tools and the interest to develop a 'virtual' program for Amazing Kids without traveling to their California headquarters.
Chanelle is home now, just outside NYC, where she will be devoting all her time to the myriad projects already started, including 'virtual' consulting with Amazing Kids, and the literacy and poverty projects. She credits her Babson education for helping her to accomplish what she has already done. Her newly honed management skills are essential, since, she says: “Everything is business!”
In June she leaves for a week in NYC with 85 Broads, where she will immerse herself in the professional world along with 5 Babson schoolmates and hundreds of other undergraduate women selected from leading institutions around the world. She expects to return with a new sense of what she can do and how to achieve her goals.
She is also working on a research project with math & e'ship professor Elaine Allen surveying middle-school parents, teachers and students in multiple school districts to identify links between boredom, poor performance, and disciplinary problems.
And, while exploring www.volunteermatch.org, she found “Women's Initiative” and signed on she can get more experience with data analysis and research!
She will soon have to decide how she can continue her volunteer projects and earn a living. She feels her niche is in the Human Resources arena and hopes to consult to non-profit agencies or companies. Her particular interest beyond adult illiteracy and seeing teenagers develop leadership skills is diversity. She wants to be an instrument for change where there is unfair practice or imbalance in race, economic level, and/or gender.
If you're an employer looking for a dean's list Babson grad with boundless energy and a desire to make the world a better place, I recommend you contact Chanelle – quickly!