Two students from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, one faculty member and one organization that made an impact in the local community received 2025 Presidents’ Awards from Seed Coalition, a coalition of colleges and universities committed to civic and community engagement.
CSB senior Macy Ellis from Hutchinson, Minnesota, and SJU senior Canaan Cooper from Nassau, The Bahamas, received Presidents’ Student Leadership Awards.
Ellis, an English major, has worked with the Initiative for Native Nation Relations since she was a first-year student, and has been a critical part of the college’s partnerships with the White Earth Nation. Ellis has been a key part of grants with the Council for Independent Colleges, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities and the Minnesota Humanities Center.
She’s been active doing archival and oral history research for these projects and has presented her findings at the White Earth Tribal Government Center and the Stearns History Museum. Ellis’s dedication to this work has made an invaluable impact as Saint Ben’s and Saint John’s continue to reconcile and foster relations with our native nation neighbors.
Cooper is a bio-chemistry major pursuing a future in medicine. In November 2024, he was selected to serve in the inaugural Bahamas National Youth Assembly for a 2-year term. Cooper is committed to making things better for the youth in his home country, even though he cannot be there physically due to his studies at CSB and SJU.
Among the issues Cooper hopes to champion in his new position are breaking the stigma surrounding mental health issues in The Bahamas and increasing the diversification of his nation’s economy. He is a charismatic and gifted speaker, poet, ambassador and mentor and has left an indelible mark within our community.
The Presidents’ Student Leadership Award recognizes an individual student or a student organization that models a deep commitment to civic responsibility and leadership, evidenced by initiative, innovative and collaborative approaches to addressing public issues, effective community building and integration of civic engagement into the college experience.
Brittany Merritt Nash, assistant professor of history, received the Presidents’ Civic Engagement Leadership Award, which recognizes a member of the faculty, administration or staff, or a group (advisory committee, task force, project team) that has significantly advanced their campus’ distinctive civic mission by forming strong partnerships, supporting others’ civic and community engagement and working to institutionalize a culture and practice of engagement.
Nash serves as faculty fellow for the Bonner Foundation’s community engaged learning initiative grant cohort, as the director of The Bahamas Oral History Project and as the co-director of the Great River Covenants Project, a multi-institution collaboration that documents identified racially restrictive covenants in Central Minnesota. This project, powered by the work of her CSB and SJU Honors students, has studied the covenants lasting impact on segregation and social determinants of health.
Meanwhile, the Stearns History Museum received the Presidents’ Community Partner Award, which recognizes a community-based partner or organization that has enhanced the quality of life in the community in meaningful and measurable ways and has engaged in the development of sustained, reciprocal partnerships with the college or university, thus enriching educational as well as community outcomes.
The museum has been crucial to the ongoing work our institutions are doing to provide high impact practice opportunities for research. Through a mutually beneficial partnership, our students facilitated research on the topic of the history of racial covenants in Central Minnesota.
Student researchers worked with Grant Wilson to locate additional primary sources in the museum archives. The museum is able to use the educational materials created by faculty and students at CSB+SJU for this project for public history education.
These resources are used to create an in depth and more diverse picture of the history of Stearns County, filling gaps that exist in our institutional and communal knowledge.
The awards event was held on April 11 at Hamline University in St. Paul.
Seed Coalition strengthens the capacity of colleges and universities to fulfill the public purposes of higher education through its coalition of diverse college campuses in Iowa, Minnesota and the Midwest. Its network includes rural and urban campuses, public universities and private colleges, community colleges and trade schools.
They connect higher education professionals who work in the spaces of community and civic engagement and educate students through community and civic learning experiences.