From the Graduation Files 2020: SALT graduates have already addressed society’s tough issues
SALT Scholars research legal, social and technological solutions to society’s problems, all before graduation
Janel Shoun-Smith | 615.966.7078 |
Two of Lipscomb's 28 SALT Scholars for May 2020, including Seth Mann (second from left) worked on a project to build an exoskeleton. For their SALT capstone project, they researched firefighters' attitudes towards using the technology.
From promoting community courts to applying the latest technology to firefighting, from addressing the needs of deaf child abuse victims to tackling the problem of food insecurity, Lipscomb University’s May 2020 SALT Scholars are already making an impact on some of the toughest issues in society today.
More than a decade ago, Lipscomb made a significant commitment to instilling a service ethic among its students by establishing the Serving and Learning Together, or SALT program.
Through SALT, students take designated service-learning courses, they volunteer for campus-wide service activities and those who strive to become SALT Scholars take on a service-oriented internship and a capstone project in their fields of study. Each year, SALT graduates 20 to 35 SALT Scholars who have met these requirements.
In 2020, one of the largest groups ever, 28 graduates, have achieved SALT Scholar status.
Earning such an honor does not come easy. The capstone projects of this year’s SALT scholars involve serious societal issues ranging from domestic violence to wastewater treatment in underdeveloped nations.
“One of the great benefits our students receive from the SALT program is an immediate awareness of the practicality of their work. To see the benefits of what they are studying in class in the lives of others has had such a huge impact on our students,” said Randy Spivey, director of the Fred D. Gray Institute, which incorporates a SALT capstone project into requirements for its law, justice and society undergraduate major.
“Our students have seen the benefits of the SALT program as they transition into the workforce. Graduate schools and employers love that they have practical real world experience that has meant something to them and to their community,” he said.
Lipscomb’s social work program also requires a SALT senior project of its majors, resulting in 16 SALT Scholars in May 2020, the most of any undergraduate program.
Meredith Crockett (center at left) meets with the Honors College Student Council, one of her many student leadership activities that led to her SALT Scholar status.
Below are the details on the world-changing projects of four of Lipscomb’s May 2020 SALT Scholars and a complete list of all the 2020 SALT Scholars:
Katie Moon
Nashville, Tennessee
Social Work Graduate
Moon will soon begin a social work master’s program at the University of Tennessee-Nashville and one day also hopes to become a certified ASL interpreter for the deaf.
“I want to have the skills and knowledge to fully meet American Sign Language-dependent clients where they are at no matter what aspect of the social work field in which I find myself.”
Moon spent the fall semester interning at Davis House, the Williamson County Child Advocacy Center. The placement entailed working with a team to investigate allegations of child sexual abuse, she said.
“My passion for the deaf community led me to ask the question, ‘How well equipped are professionals in this field to competently and ethically work with the deaf population?’ My question turned into my SALT project,” said Moon.
The result was a proposed training program on how to work with child sex abuse victims who also have a communication barrier related to deafness or intellectual/developmental disabilities.
“The SALT project heightened my awareness of the lack of help and training for professionals to serve the deaf population well,” said Moon. “One of the most eye-opening things I discovered was the lack of research regarding the deaf population. We know that deaf children are far more likely to experience maltreatment, but the research that dives more deeply into the reasoning and implications of this heart-wrenching statistic has yet to be conducted.”
Meredith Crockett
Wilmore, Kentucky
Law, justice and society graduate
Crockett will begin a job at Sanford, Heisler and Sharpe, a Nashville law firm, in May, and hopes to attend law school by the fall. Right now she has her eye on the University of Texas at Austin, which has a strong focus on public service law.
“Part of what I hope to dispel with my project is that these areas are inherently more dangerous. They are not. This is just a really poor area that has been left out of the Nashville picture.”
Having already developed a strong interest and resume in advocacy for equity issues in high school and at Lipscomb, Crockett was selected for an internship at the office of Judge Rachel Bell, in Nashville’s General Sessions Court.
Bell was conducting research on community courts, as she was in the process of setting up Nashville’s Music City Court and CARE Community Court, specifically for those aged 18-26. She reached out to Lipscomb’s Fred D. Gray Institute for research assistants.
Community courts are a subgroup of the court system that provides community resources and services to help people avoid prison time. The model is designed to circumvent the flaws of the court system which often traps the poverty-stricken, homeless and mentally ill in a cycle of being arrested, not being able to pay required fines and thus becoming incarcerated, and then being released into a society with even fewer prospects to improve their situation, said Crockett.
Tennessee already has some community courts operating within its counties. Crockett chose to research best practices within existing community court systems around the world and make a recommendation of what kind of system would work for the entire state of Tennessee.
“I looked at systems around the world and recommended expanding the community court system into all the General Sessions Courts in Tennessee,” said Crockett.
Unlike county courts, the General Sessions Court system is the most flexible, has greater access to state welfare programs and already has experience requiring defendants to use resources like WIC, housing subsidies and social workers, she said.
“If we can start addressing--especially for young people--these crimes that aren’t really a threat to public safety, addressing how do they get to work, how do they keep their job.
When you start addressing the root (of the defendants’ problems), then people stop committing crime,” Crockett said. “When you have people going to school and having access to good jobs, it creates mountains of benefit for the community.”
SALT Scholar Leah Hampton, mechanical engineering major, worked on the engineering colleges senior design project to create an exoskeleton, which could someday be used by firefighters.
Lipscomb SWE Student President Leah Hampton
Leah Hampton
Fayetteville, Tennessee
Mechanical engineering graduate
Hampton will soon begin a job at the U.S. Department of Defense, Missile and Space Intelligence Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Seth Mann
Flintville, TN
Mann will soon begin a job in Tullahoma, Tennessee, at National Aerospace Solutions located on Arnold Air Force Base.
“The whole purpose of the competition is for firefighters to be able to use exoskeletons someday. Creating one prompted us to learn more about how they could be used.”
As part of a first-time project for the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering, Hampton and Mann were two members of a senior design team working to create an exoskeleton, a mechanical suit to augment the wearer’s strength and abilities. Basically, a real-life version of Marvel’s Iron Man.
The exoskeleton was designed for use in the future by firefighters and was intended to compete in the Applied Collegiate Exoskeleton Competition at Michigan State University, which was eventually cancelled due to the pandemic.
The project got Hampton and Mann wondering how much firefighters actually knew about and how they viewed the future use of an exoskeleton in their job, said Hampton. Both graduates have been heavily involved in overseas engineering mission work through Lipscomb, but they saw their SALT project as a way to apply the technology they were working on to enhance their local community, Mann said.
Despite both the tornadoes that hit Nashville in March and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Hampton and Mann were able to conduct surveys among Nashville firefighters to collect their thoughts and supplement those results with online research on exoskeleton use.
“In the responses we have gotten, they are all pretty much in line with a small amount of knowledge of exoskeletons (among fire-fighters), but… no negative responses to their use in the field,” said Mann.
SALT Scholars, Class of 2020
- Sarah Elizabeth Bailes, Social Work major from Knoxville, The Next Door Program Proposal
- Marian Whitten Barber, Social Work major from Fayetteville, GA, Research Proposal for Martha O’Bryan Center: Maplewood Academic Student Union
- Mackenzie Bayes, Social Work major from Merrimack, NH, Raising Awareness: Educating Professionals in LGBTQ+ Competency
- Hewa Bamarny, Law, Justice, and Society major from Nashville, TN, Community Change
- Hope Bundy, Social Work major from Cincinnati, OH, Exploring the Need for Refugee-Focused Childcare
- Trent Cavalier Beacham, Civil Engineering major from Lexington, The Process Behind a Wastewater Treatment System at the Village of Hope in Ghana
- Meredith Crockett, Law, Justice, and Society major from Wilmore, KY, Expanding Statewide Access to Community Courts in Tennessee
- James Chad Curtis, Social Work major from Nashville, Trauma: The Gateway to Addiction
- Frances Claire Fitzgerald, Social Work major from Nashville-- Prepare to Exit: Supporting the Formerly Incarcerated
- Coryn Givens, Social Work major from Nashville, Promoting Education; Assisting Families in Transition
- Calvin Goode, Law, Justice, and Society major from North Chesterfield, VA, Improving Evidence Procedure
- Leah Hampton, Mechanical Engineering major, from Fayetteville, TN, Exoskeletons in Action: Supporting the work of Firefighters
- Anna Grace Hinkle, Social Work major from Memphis, Bridging the Gap within the 37207 Community
- Aubrea Holland, Social Work major from Brevard, NC, Special Needs Education Group for Spanish Speaking Parents
- Hannah Ireland, Social Work major from Colorado Springs, CO, Preparing Individuals to Effectively Serve Children Experiencing Trauma
- Hannah Jones, Family Science major from Spring Hill, Combatting the Effects of Divorce on Children: an Intervention Program
- Dana Lopez, Social Work major from Bloomington, IL, Trauma Informed Human Trafficking Training
- Melanie Macdonald, Social Work major from Newark, OH, Girls Inc. Family Involvement
- Seth Mann, Mechanical Engineering major, Flintville, TN, Exoskeletons in Action: Supporting the work of Firefighters
- Herbert Monroy, Law, Justice, and Society major from Los Angeles, CA, Enhancing Restorative Justice Practices for Public School Youth
- Kathryn Moon, Social Work major from Nashville, Communication Barriers in Child Sexual Assault Victims: A Training for Professionals Investigating Allegations of Child Abuse
- Jacob Neill, Law, Justice, and Society major from Athens, GA, Food Insecurity as Child Adversity: How to Address Longer Term Solutions
- Reagan Hope Nichols, Social Work major from Wayne, NJ, Empowering Through Education: Addressing Older Adult Mental Health with a Team-Based Approach
- Alexis Olsson, Social Work major from Castle Rock, CO, Mental Health and Crisis Assessment Training in Child Advocacy Centers
- Elizabeth Powe, Law, Justice, and Society major from Clarksville, Plea Bargaining Reform
- Kara Thomas, Law, Justice, and Society major from Rochelle, IL, The Necessity of Community Involved Active Shooter Training at Large Arenas and Venues
- Kaitlyn Annmarie Wiley, Biochemistry major from Ridgetop, Improvements to a Student-Run Free Clinic Food Pantry
- Breanna Young, Social Work major from Genoa, IL, Support in Parenting Program for Survivors of Domestic Violence