Sheyla Carew (BHA), Board Member, Barbara Canyes, Executive Director of                                       Group photos from the 2015 Massachusetts Conference on Service and Volunteerism
        Massachusetts Campus Compact and board on the MSA, and   Meghan Callaghan (BHCC).

Boston, Monday June 1st 2015 – BHA Volunteer Interpreters Program (VIP) and Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) have been awarded the Higher Education Community Partnership Innovator Award by the Massachusetts Service Alliance (MSA), a non-profit organization that serves as the state commission on community service and volunteerism.

Massachusetts Service Alliance recognizes the two organizations for “demonstrating an outstanding higher education community partnership resulting in a long-term reciprocal relationship that reflects mutual investment and benefits for both service recipients and college student volunteers.”

"Our Award Committee selected your partnership out of a pool of 84 very strong nominations of committed service and volunteer leaders and programs making a difference every day in Massachusetts.” – Lindsay Rooney, MSA’s Director of External Relations & Development.

BHCC welcomes students of all cultural backgrounds and from all over the world. Since 2012, BHA-VIP and BHCC have formed a partnership through which BHCC students who are bilingual or multilingual would provide language assistance to immigrant families seeking or residing in BHA housing. BHCC’s Community Engagement and Student Volunteerism Department has worked closely with VIP, enabling many of its students to build upon their language fluency and to reconnect to their native cultures while they learn first-hand about public and subsidized housing in the U.S. Through the BHCC students, BHA has in turn been able to broaden its language access to better serve the increasingly diverse families in Boston. To date, 105 BHCC students have volunteered at BHA and contributed over 500 hours of interpretation and written translation in Spanish, Chinese-Mandarin, Chinese-Cantonese, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Arabic, French, and Italian.