Sharing Björklunden Memories

by Debbie Sycamore‘80

During 2025, the 50th anniversary year of Lawrence’s northern campus, we are hoping to tell the stories of meaningful moments that each of us has had at this incredibly special place. Perhaps your moment was an eye-opening seminar or meeting a thought-provoking new friend. Maybe your moment occurred while meditating in the chapel or exploring the many beautiful hiking trails. Just to get you inspired, I’m volunteering to start the sharing process by going back to the spring of 1979. Hope you enjoy reading my story.

It was in the spring of 1979 that I said “yes” to joining the Lawrence summer work crew at Björklunden, acquired by Lawrence four years earlier. The job description failed to mention anything about wielding Stihl 075 chainsaws and spending weekends in a dirndl and clogs giving tours of a stavkirke in the woods. Nor did it mention that we were to march in the Baileys Harbor July 4th parade – in clogs and dirndl no less.�� I hailed from NH/Mass. What the heck was a dirndl or a stavkirke? �� One of the many benefits of a liberal arts education includes taking leaps of faith and trusting you will figure it out. And so we did. Fellow crew members and I mastered pole saws on those infinite driveway cedars. I still know how to wield and sharpen the teeth of said chainsaw. A frosty cold Leinenkugel or Point Beer takes me back to hanging out in Adirondack chairs along the shores of Lake Michigan after a long day of work. The summer was magical and a study in contrasts that make me smile to this day. Grateful for all of it! For those who might wonder, I said yes to Björklunden in the summer of 1980 too!��

����vlog alumni, families, and friends will soon have an opportunity to meet with President Laurie A. Carter in a series of receptions throughout the country. The “Time to Shine!” series will launch Thursday, Dec. 15 in New York, coinciding with a performance of The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera featuring Lawrence voice professor John Holiday.

The series marks the first time in three years that Lawrence has been able to host regional alumni events, and there is much to celebrate, according to Matt Baumler, associate vice president of Alumni and Constituency Engagement.

“W�� welcomed a new president,” he said.��“W�� .��We resumed in-person classes.��We graduated the Classes of 2020, , and 2022 and welcomed more than 1,100 new Lawrentians into the community.��We unveiled a welcoming arch, announced the Lawrence Advantage, expanded our music degree options, launched new majors in business and entrepreneurship, , international relations, and , brought back a homecoming tradition, and celebrated numerous records and awards on the field, on the stage, and in the classroom.”

Carter, who began her tenure at Lawrence in July 2021, is looking forward to sharing university updates and vision with members of the Lawrence community during stops in New York, San Francisco, the Twin Cities, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee.

“I am very much looking forward to visiting with members of our Lawrence community across the nation,” Carter said. “This series of receptions is an opportunity to highlight both Lawrence’s progress as well as the integral role alumni, parents, and friends play in the incredibly bright future of the university.”

Invitations to the Time to Shine! events will go out soon to alumni, parents, and friends in those locations. Anyone is invited to attend any of the events.

The stops include:

Time to Shine: New York

Thursday, Dec. 15, 5-6:45 p.m. EST: Lincoln Center, Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, 165 West 65th St., New York. Includes John Holiday in��The Hours��at the��. ()

Time to Shine: San Francisco

Saturday, Jan. 7, 1-3:30 p.m. PST: Fort Mason Center for the Arts & Culture, Firehouse, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco. ()

Time to Shine: Twin Cities

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 6-8:30 p.m. CST: Minneapolis Institute of Art, MacMillan Atrium & Reception Hall, 2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis. )

Time to Shine: Chicago

Saturday, April 8, 5-7 p.m. CST: Cafe by the River (by Jose Andres) 120 Upper Wacker Drive, Chicago. Includes John Holiday in��Proximity��at the��. ()

Time to Shine: Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, April 12, 6-8:30 p.m. EST: Planet Word/Museum of Language Arts, 925 13th St. NW, Washington, D.C. ()

Time to Shine: Milwaukee

Thursday, May 4, 6-8:30 p.m. CST: Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, McIntosh/Goodrich Mansion, 1584 North Prospect Ave., Milwaukee. ()

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Getting around the Fox Cities just got easier for Lawrence students.

Beginning immediately, Lawrence students can ride Valley Transit buses for free with their student ID. The pilot program is a partnership between ����vlog and the public transportation service that provides access to Appleton and surrounding communities.

“Lawrentians come to Appleton from all over the world, not only to further their education but to forge meaningful relationships in a new geography,” said Garrett Singer, director of Lawrence’s Center for Community Engagement and Social Change. “This partnership will contribute to that experience by allowing students to explore the Fox Valley without limitation.”

For students who may be new to riding public transit, Valley Transit offers a free travel training program where students are partnered with a travel trainer who takes them through the process of riding the bus and navigating routes to where they want to go within the Fox Cities. To sign up for travel training, visit . Lawrence President Laurie Carter called the partnership with Valley Transit an important connection for students who want to more fully engage with the community that Lawrence calls home. The school has long provided shuttle services and other connectors, but this new option gives students much greater flexibility, and at no additional cost to the student.

“I am grateful to Valley Transit for their partnership, which will make a meaningful difference in the lives of our students and their engagement with our surrounding community,” Carter said.

Valley Transit General Manager Ron McDonald hailed the new arrangement as a more accessible bridge to the community. The bus service has similar partnerships with a number of other schools.

“Our team works hard each day to help people find their place in the community by eliminating transportation barriers,” McDonald said. “This new partnership is truly a community-driven effort to expand access.”

The service gives Lawrence students new opportunities regarding off-campus employment, makes it easier to volunteer with local nonprofits, and improves access to retail and entertainment outlets across the Fox Cities. While students have always had easy access to downtown Appleton, it was more difficult to access other parts of Appleton or the downtown districts in other communities in the greater Fox Cities.

“Having access to safe and reliable transportation through Valley Transit will support off-campus employment and volunteer engagements, link our students with local businesses for shopping and entertainment, and—perhaps most importantly—deepen our students’ sense of belonging and connectedness to the Fox Cities,” Singer said.

Valley Transit has rules in place to help keep riders and drivers safe. Per a federal mask mandate, masks are required to be worn at all times while using Valley Transit services. In addition, there are air purification systems and driver barriers installed on the buses, and hand sanitizer is readily available on all buses and in the transit center.

With 18 bus routes spanning 117 square miles, Valley Transit provides transportation to the many communities that make up the Fox Cities including Appleton, Buchanan, Fox Crossing, Grand Chute, Kaukauna, Kimberly, Little Chute, Menasha, and Neenah. Valley Transit also offers options for paratransit and demand response services. To learn more, visit��.

When it was time for her first-grade class to form a line, LaDora Thomas always volunteered to be the caboose. From her perch in the back, she could see everything: every side conversation, every step out of line, everything that could potentially disrupt their perfect order. Then, she could move swiftly and correct it—before the line leader even knew what had happened.

“No one understood what a caboose was, no one understood why I needed to lead from the background or why we needed a leader at the end of the line,” Thomas said. “But that was so the person at the front can lead without worry.”

Now a junior at ����vlog, Thomas is staying true to her first-grade roots. Although you might not��see��Thomas in her leadership roles on campus, she’s everywhere. From ����vlog Community Council (LUCC) to Residential Life to All is One—to name only a few of the positions decorating her long resume—Thomas is all about leading from the background.

So… what exactly is she doing?

Now in her third year as an LUCC member, Thomas has seen Lawrence student governance from all sides. Starting as a first-year class representative, Thomas quickly moved to take on the Cabinet-level role of public relations secretary. Now, following a special election at the beginning of November, Thomas will take over as LUCC vice president starting Winter Term.

In all these roles, Thomas has never necessarily been the face of LUCC. Still, she’s participating in key conversations, having her opinion heard in Cabinet, and promoting communication with the student body, largely through email and social media.

As soon as she started as public relations secretary, she had one key goal in mind: to make LUCC more accessible to the student body, breaking down barriers and making sure students are informed about the decisions that impact them. Since she took over running LUCC social media during her freshman year, it has more than doubled, growing from 180 followers to more than 400.

“I get to communicate with the student body in a simpler way, in a different way,” Thomas said. “My leadership there is more of a backseat position, and I really enjoy that—leading from behind. I don’t necessarily always have to be the leading person in a conversation, but I can provide my opinion, and it’s heard in those situations.”

This connection to the student body is fundamental to Thomas’s leadership style, and it carries over to her work as a community advisor (CA) in Residential Life. Especially with first-year students, Thomas is always ready to spark a conversation with one of her residents, doing what she can to help people navigate their first year of college and pass on the wisdom she’s learned through experience.

And now that she’s in the second year of the job, she’s really starting to see the rewards: she loves to watch her residents—some of whom have grown from shy first-years to outgoing CAs themselves—develop as they find their niche on campus.

Of course, her passion for helping others navigate their college experience doesn’t stop with her residents. As the president (or as she calls it, the “CEO”) of “All is One! Empowering Young Women of Color” (AIO), she strives to create a safe space for WOC to fully be themselves while also enabling others to find their path.

Rather than hosting a formal meeting every week, Thomas is taking AIO in a different direction, focusing on “decompression” events to promote community and healing. From “bestie chats” to cookies and coloring, she wants to create time for WOC to unwind without having to put on any performance.

“I think it’s just so important to have time to relax and really just be,” Thomas said. “W�� have to sometimes conform to the spaces around us to feel accepted and welcomed, and I want a space here where women of color can just come in and be themselves and fully be accepted regardless of all flaws.”

In addition to all that, Thomas has also taken on work with the Philanthropy and Engagement Center, the Communications office, and community service events.

What leadership can look like

The bottom line is simple: Thomas is a leader on campus, and she encourages everyone to find their opportunity to lead.

For Thomas, it’s all about leading from the background and providing whatever support is needed. She analyzes every situation in its entirety and thinks everything through before she acts. That way, she hopes her words and actions can be more impactful.

“Before I step into anything, I definitely analyze what I’m stepping into,” Thomas said. “Just as with this [LUCC] election, I knew exactly what I was signing up for when I applied. Had I not known what I was signing up for, if I were elected, would I be completely equipped? As a student leader, I never want to be inadequate when saying I’m going to help someone in a situation.”

But you don’t need to be LUCC vice president to be a leader, Thomas said. Everyone has their own level of comfort with leadership and their own style, and college is the time to explore that. As we make our way through life, Thomas said, everyone is responsible for being their own leader—designing their life, making their own plans, and influencing the people around them. As far as Thomas is concerned, the conflict resolution and problem-solving skills one develops in a leadership role on campus is critical to life after Lawrence.

“You definitely have to find that happy space where you can challenge yourself to take on a little bit more leadership, because it’s so needed,” Thomas said. “Even if it’s just one person walking down College Avenue and you know they’re a first year, and then you give them some advice. That’s a leadership position right there. Even if you don’t have a title, you’re being a leader.”

It’s easy to recognize the power of music while in concert halls and music classrooms, but Betsy Kowal Jett and four Lawrence Conservatory of Music students looked to take it a step further this summer, tapping into music’s healing powers to help people on their mental health recovery journeys.

Kowal Jett, the Lawrence Conservatory’s community programs manager, recruited four music students to launch the outreach support group Creative Recovery: Music in Motion in partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Fox Valley.

The four Conservatory students—seniors Jacob Dikelsky, Mindara Krueger-Olson, Lucian Baxter, and Holly Beemer—set out to use music to strengthen the community participants’ well-being. They partnered with Paula Verrett, the Iris Place program director for NAMI, to organize the sessions.

“NAMI, for a really long time, has been wanting to create music-based programming for their clients,” Kowal Jett said. “So, I saw that there was this need and desire for music in NAMI, and they recognized the power that music could have for their community.”

The goal was to explore various kinds of research on the healing impact that music can have, and then use appropriate methods and techniques to help participants bring out their own creative voices.

“Everyone who we’ve worked with in this creative recovery support group is in their mental illness recovery journey every single day,” Kowal Jett said. “I wanted to explore how music could become a part of their tool kit to help maximize their well-being.”

See more on the Lawrence Conservatory of Music here

The group met for one-hour Saturday sessions during three consecutive weeks in July. All of the participants were provided with a music-making kit and connected on Zoom, where the number of NAMI Fox Valley participants fluctuated between four and seven people.

Kowal Jett and her team would meet the Wednesday prior to go over what they had planned for Saturday, but Kowal Jett noted that she had already been training with her students for several weeks. They would plan and co-create the best way to introduce each week’s curriculum.

Each Saturday they shared different musical practices with the NAMI participants. The first Saturday they focused on body percussion, where they explored body movements through a call-and-response technique. The teaching artists and participants would create a rhythm and then the ensemble would echo that rhythm back. Then they explored the sounds that their bodies can make, and then finished their first session by co-creating a body percussion dance together.

The second Saturday focused on creating visual art in response to music. Each participant created graphic scores in response to music selections provided by the students. Baxter played an improvised piano piece; Beemer sang a Shakey Graves song accompanied with guitar; Krueger-Olson shared��Through the Fence, a piece she co-created with her jazz combo.

On the final Saturday, the group created musical affirmations to embody the wisdom that guides each participant through their life challenges. The participants worked one-on-one with a teaching artist to transform their words into a song, and each songwriting pair shared their song for the group at the end of the session.��

“The third session was so powerful because at the end of the session almost every person said that what they experienced filled them with hope,” Kowal Jett said.

The debut of the Creative Recovery program could not have gone smoother, Kowal Jett said. She attributes that to the hard work and dedication of the students and emphasizes that she could not have done this without support from her colleagues in the Conservatory, especially Brian Pertl, dean of the Conservatory, and Leila Ramagopal Pertl, professor of music education and the harp.

Verrett worked closely with Kowal Jett every step of the way. She said she was thrilled at how the program was delivered and received.

“This program made such a difference for me and the other participants,” Verrett said. “It was an opportunity to use music in a new way that supported the recovery of everyone in the group. It was an opportunity to be creative in ways that did not require formal music training. The group provided an opportunity to share with each other without fear of judgment and connect in a unique and different way.”

Not only did the Creative Recovery program leave a positive and hopefully lasting impression on the NAMI participants, but the four students who worked as teaching artists say they also benefited from the learning experience.

“These experiences have repeatedly shown me that we can—and should—broaden our musical focus to include many more styles of music to bring people from all walks of life together,” Dikelsky said.

Kowal Jett wants Creative Recovery: Music in Motion to become an annual summer program, where she can continue to help connect students with the community and provide safe and creative healing environments.

“Every single person is musical, every single person is creative, and to design a program where each person’s intrinsic, musical voice can flourish is so incredibly powerful to me,” Kowal Jett said. “It’s what I absolutely love about my job.”

“Getting involved is the best thing you can do in college!”��

Whether it’s coming from parents, teachers, or alumni, we’ve all heard that advice dozens of times. And yeah, it’s good advice—but honestly, when I was an incoming first-year, I didn’t have a clear idea of what it meant or how to do it. Get involved with what? With whom? To what end?����

I mean, seriously, can you get any more vague?��

But with a couple years of schooling under my belt, I’m finally getting the hang of this whole “get involved” thing. And if you’re looking to join the club—literally—here’s where you should start your search:��

1. Your residence hall is the first stop��

Going to residence hall activities is how I met 75% of my friends during my first year, so it kind of had to top this list. Community Advisors (CAs) put in so much effort to create opportunities for you to bond with your neighbors, and a lot of the time, it works. Game nights, trips to the Appleton Farmers Market, tote bag decorating sessions—I did it all, and it’s one of the best decisions I made, so be on the lookout from invites from your CA throughout the year.��

2. Fun student orgs��are everywhere

An important part of the Lawrence experience is the opportunity to volunteer and make connections within the surrounding community. As students return to campus for the start of Fall Term, Garrett Singer is excited to welcome them as the new director of the Center for Community Engagement and Social Change (CCE).

To hit the ground running, the CCE is holding an outdoor engagement fair on the quad at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 17, where incoming and returning students can meet with about two dozen community partners to learn about their missions and be introduced to the work that happens in the Fox Valley. There will be food trucks, carnival games, and live music leading into the fair.

“W��’re really hoping to make a splash as students return to campus, and to grow awareness of our work, our mission, and our physical space,” Singer said.

He said he looks forward to engaging with Lawrence students to help them discover opportunities to serve in the community and build lasting relationships with area nonprofits. He wants to raise the profile of the CCE on campus while emphasizing the importance of building community engagement skills.

“What it’ll develop, hopefully, is this cycle of engagement, dialogue, and action where our own ability to serve is informed by our previous service experiences and those interactions with communities and individuals whom we might not have crossed paths with in our pre-Lawrentian lives,” Singer said.

From an early age, Singer was exposed to the impacts and benefits that come from a working relationship between higher education and the surrounding community. Both of his parents were involved in education commissions with local community colleges that aimed to increase educational attainment. Their work sparked his desire to enter the nonprofit field, and after earning his bachelor’s degree at Washington and Lee University, Singer went to work as district executive for Boy Scouts of America in North Carolina.

“I was exposed to the incredible work that young people are capable of and I think is often overlooked,” Singer said.

He eventually enrolled in a master’s program of higher education and administration at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. There he worked with nonprofits and designed programs to develop service-learning opportunities for undergraduates to form partnerships with those local organizations.

After earning his masters, Singer set his sights on Lawrence. He knew he wanted to sit at the juncture between higher education and civic work. He also knew that he wanted to re-enter the private liberal arts setting that he enjoyed during his undergrad years. A main draw for Singer, though, was Lawrence’s ongoing commitment to social change despite all the uncertainty during the pandemic.

“A lot of colleges and universities were not making a demonstrated commitment to the type of work that I was interested in,” Singer said. “Lawrence was the exception to that rule.”

Singer said he feels honored to join Lawrence as its new CCE director and is ready to dig in to the work ahead. The first objective, he said, is simply to grow awareness of the CCE on campus and let students know of the varied volunteer opportunities that exist.

The second objective is to make sure the partnerships that are developed with community agencies reflect and represent student interests and identity, Singer said.

A third objective focuses on improved academic integration with civic work. The CCE has service-learning programs—Viking Ambassadors in Service and Engagement (VASE)—that help students make connections through volunteering while also learning about issues within the community. Singer wants to expand those programs and explore ways to better integrate them in the curriculum.

“Those are the things that we want to think about, not only defining those learning outcomes, but also assessing them on the tail end and figuring out how we are really impacting student development,” Singer said.

An important aspect in reaching these goals is to have a good working relationship with Lawrence faculty, he said. Many faculty members have already been supplementing students’ academic experiences through their own community connections. The next step, said Singer, is to encourage those faculty members to be ambassadors for community-based learning, showing other faculty how they’ve built these service-learning experiences into their classrooms.

“The CCE comes into play by facilitating those conversations and those relationships, as well as building out a library of resources that faculty can leverage to support that development,” Singer said.

Volunteering, he said, will help students build lives of meaning and purpose. That happens not only by sending students into the community, but also by creating innovative ways to bring the community to campus.

“So, as the CCE moves forward,” Singer said, “we’ll build relationships that will allow for richer, more robust, and more colorful experiences, and I think that’s really what we’re striving for—to get us on the same page so that we can move forward together.”