Civic Engagement: Courtney Muller '10
When she was 16, Courtney Muller left Cincinnati for five weeks in Manhattan. A talented ballet dancer, she was chosen for a summer program at the performing arts school founded by renowned choreographer Alvin Ailey.
"I loved living in New York," she says. The following year, as she looked at colleges, she realized that in addition to its location, Barnard had the small size, superior dance program and rigorous curriculum she was seeking. While she enjoyed studying dance, she didn't plan a career in the field, and wanted a broad education in the liberal arts.
"Barnard was exactly what I wanted," she says. "I applied early decision and never looked back."
In addition to viewing the road ahead with an intelligent assurance, Courtney views the world around her with an intelligent concern, and she's determined to play an active, constructive role. Immediately upon arriving at Barnard for first-year orientation, she set her sights on the gritty, teeming city beyond the lovely, leafy campus.
"The summer before orientation, I got mail about FYRO," Courtney says of her early introduction to First Year Reach-Out, an initiative that involves new students in the College's New York City Civic Engagement Program. "I liked the idea of community service."
Since then, while committing herself to the curricular "Nine Ways of Knowing," to Barnard's full intellectual and social life, and to a personally high level of academic and artistic advancement, she has also committed herself to improving the lives of New York's most impoverished and vulnerable residents.
Through FYRO, Courtney carried out a variety of tasks for New York Cares, an organization that meets community needs by mobilizing tens of thousands of local volunteers. She also went to regular campus meetings with other involved Barnard students, where they discussed the different kinds of work they were doing as volunteers. For Courtney, it didn't take long to discover the issues that interested her most.
She dedicated herself to work with the homeless, and during her first winter break helped conduct a census of people living on New York's sidewalks. As a canvasser for the Street to Home Initiative of the charitable organization Common Ground, she joined social workers and other students in conducting counts and interviews in the late-night and early-morning hours, and she helped individuals get the housing and social services they needed. She also worked for the student organization Project for the Homeless as an overnight staffer at a Manhattan shelter.
"It was so hard emotionally for me to talk to these men and hear their stories," she says. "I wasn't sure I was built for these things."
Courtney soon found a way to overcome the helplessness she was beginning to feel. Directing her civic efforts toward the criminal justice system, she spent the summer of 2007 interning for Cincinnati's county commissioner - an official who was working with the Vera Institute of Justice to analyze and reform the penal system, foster rehabilitation, and reduce recidivism.
"I really do see changes being made," Courtney says. "They took the information collected by Vera, created a panel of judges and ex-prosecutors to evaluate the effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration, and provided funding for new programs."
Back in New York for her sophomore year, Courtney lived with other activist students at the Civic Engagement House suites in the Cathedral Gardens residence hall, and found work with the Brooklyn District Attorney - first as a volunteer and then as a paid intern. At the DA's office, she received new cases faxed from police precincts, ascertained further facts from victims and arresting officers, and wrote up charges for the paperwork used in courtroom arraignments. What struck her most was the confluence of her new judicial work and her earlier work with the dispossessed. Courtney's internship with the DA's office was supported by a grant from The Tow Foundation Public Service Internships Fund at Barnard.
"I saw that a significant number of the people coming before the judge were homeless," she says. "They were charged with building a structure without a permit, or with trespassing. Those cases are such a clog on the system, and people are being punished for trying to survive."
Such revelations were ones she wanted other Barnard students to directly share. So for a required Civil Engagement House project, Courtney organized a student trip to night court in lower Manhattan. To further enlighten the 10-member group, she drafted and distributed a handout explaining the arraignment process, and arranged a question-and-answer session with the presiding judge. Later, in a presentation on campus, she summed up her own experiences and her classmates' excursion. In the spring, she received a Student Leader Award from Barnard's Student Government Association.
"I found I like working in law on a daily basis," she says today. Political science is her major and law school may beckon, but right now she is studying Hindi at St. Stephen's College in Delhi, India. Her semester abroad began especially early, in June, with a month-long intensive language course.
Delhi, she notes, is the capital and political center of India. She adds that while she will take St. Stephen's courses that satisfy Barnard requirements, "I may also do some kind of volunteer work."
For Courtney Muller, civic engagement takes no extended breaks and knows no national boundaries.
—Anne Schutzberger
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