printable versionTwo faculty members named winners of volunteer service prize
Donald Barr
Michael Wald
Donald Barr, an associate teaching professor of sociology and human biology, and Law School Professor Michael Wald will receive the Miriam Aaron Roland Volunteer Service Prize at the third annual Community Partnerships Awards Luncheon on May 19. The prize, announced last week, recognizes Stanford faculty who engage and involve students in integrating academic scholarship with significant and meaningful volunteer service.
The Roland Prize was established in 2004 by alumna Miriam Roland of Montreal, Canada, through an endowment at the Haas Center for Public Service. The prize focuses on the role that public service by faculty can play in higher education. A $5,000 cash reward will be split between Barr and Wald.
Barr (MS '90, PhD '93), also a staff physician at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, founded the health-policy curriculum and service-learning requirement of the Program in Human Biology, which engages students in deep and genuine structured volunteer service in the community. In HUMBIO 160, Healthcare in America: The Organizations and Systems That Shape the Healthcare System, a course introduced last fall, Barr worked with students on research topics directly related to program development at the Opportunity Center of the Midpeninsula.
The center, currently under construction, will provide housing and comprehensive services to the Midpeninsula's homeless. For the past five years, Barr has chaired the board of directors of the Community Working Group, a network of local nonprofit, government and religious organizations that is committed to the creation of the center.
Wald, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law, has spent the past 40 years providing leadership for the integration of a public service curriculum and direct experience into the training of Stanford Law School graduates. Wald established the school's first public interest legal clinic and the first externship program to serve the needs of the poor and most vulnerable in society. In 2003, he helped found the East Palo Alto Community Law Project, which serves needy clients in East Palo Alto and surrounding communities with legal problems related to housing, workers' rights and government benefits.
Wald served as executive director of San Francisco's Department of Health and Human Services from 1996 to 1997. Barr won the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding service to undergraduate education in 2003.
The Community Partnerships Awards Luncheon, an invitation-only event co-hosted by the Haas Center for Public Service and the Office of Public Affairs, will take place at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. May 19. SR