West, DiSpirito earn Maine Campus Compact awards
Bailey West, the University of Maine’s 2021 valedictorian from Stockton Springs, and Dominique DiSpirito, a junior from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, both earned the Maine Campus Compact’s 2021 Heart and Soul Student award.
The award, one of five administered by the Maine Campus Compact, recognizes six Maine undergraduate students who are actively involved in transforming their campuses and communities into environments of civic engagement. According to the organization, these students have developed positive community and campus change, worked to institutionalize their community projects, demonstrated leadership and implemented innovative approaches to social issues.
West, also an Outstanding Graduating Student in the College of Natural Sciences, Forestry, and Agriculture, and the Honors College, has been involved in research since high school, first with scientists at The Jackson Laboratory, MDI Biological Laboratory and Maine Medical Center, and then at UMaine with professor Julie Gosse. On campus, she has been a peer tutor and teaching assistant, and a student ambassador for the Honors College and the Study Abroad Program.
DiSpirito, a first-generation college student, has supported the university community in a variety of ways, including participating in the Maine Day Meal Packout since fall 2018, serving as a food waste solutions intern with the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, creating and managing the campus Interfaith Group, co-hosting and co-organizing the annual International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day, and more. The political science major and Honors College student was recently named a 2021 Truman Scholar.
Learn more about West and DiSpirito online.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Maine Campus Compact will recognize the 2021 award recipients with a virtual, pre-recorded ceremony video to be released April 28.
Maine Campus Compact is a coalition of 18 campuses whose purpose is to catalyze and lead a movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education, according to the organization’s website.