Wheaton Blog

In her sophomore year at Wheaton, Marguerite Dooley, class of 2016, received the Richard and Virginia Thornburgh award for her work as an education intern at the Taunton Housing Authority. “While at this internship, I worked with the Hope VI Case Manager and the Director of Resident Services to teach nutrition and other public health-related courses to site residents who were identified as low-income families.” Dooley said.

For Dooley, a political science major, with minors in psychology and community health, this was but one of many important endeavors in community outreach. She went on to receive a Davis Project for Peace grant in the summer of 2015. Dooley used this $10,000 grant to develop a summer camp program of her own design entitled The Playtime Project, providing important opportunities for homeless and low-income children, ages 6-12, in Brattleboro, VT.

“This camp relied largely on local organizations that I collaborated with to provide these students with access to art programming, swimming, sports days and – most importantly – a safe and chaperoned space to ‘just be kids’ during their summer off from school in a way that their families may typically not have been able to afford,” she said.

In the fall of 2015, Dooley began working with Health Imperatives non-profit at their Healthy Families program in nearby Brockton, MA. A resident-based, site visit program, Healthy Families focuses particularly on first-time teen and young adult mothers who are especially at risk of becoming pregnant again, or are subject to domestic violence, poverty or other social difficulties.

“I served as a program evaluation intern for this program, collecting and analyzing data on client satisfaction, local, state and national birth rates and a variety of other data points to better serve outreach and client retention rates for Healthy Families.” Dooley explained.

Most recently, Dooley has been hired as a youth-vote and student outreach coordinator for the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. Combining her skills and interests in education, advocacy, and political science, Dooley will be reaching out to student leaders on college campuses in both Boston and Providence. Working out of Foxboro and New Bedford, she will provide student leaders with voter registration forms and campaign literature in the hopes of securing the vote for Bernie 2016 in New England.

Categories:
• Political Science