Blog

The Trinity Medical Humanitarian Association (TMHA) is one of the newest student organizations bringing together members of Doctors Without Borders at Trinity and the Trinity Collegiate Health Service Corps. United by a shared commitment to healthcare, public health, and humanitarian work, TMHA connects pre-health students with meaningful service, hands-on learning, and community partnerships across Hartford.

Meet Thaddeus Hempel, a junior in Applied Mathematics and Philosophy whose work with CHER, Action Lab, and HMTCA has connected him to Hartford through tutoring, storytelling, and community partnerships.

In this newsletter, HMTCA Trinity College Partnership Evolution Over Time, Trinity’s Public Humanities Collaborative Project Earns Prestigious Olmsted Network Award, Community Action Gateway Students Present on Hartford Change-Makers, COBA: Where Hartford Trains Its Heart and more!

Charter Oak Boxing Academy (COBA) has served as a long-standing community institution for more than three decades. Founded by Johnny Callas, COBA operates as both a training facility and a youth development hub, where young people, college athletes, and experienced boxers engage in a shared environment focused on discipline, mentorship, and personal growth.

Over the past several years, Trinity College and the Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy (HMTCA) have expanded their partnership in scope and impact that bridges campus and community.

Welcome to the new school year! CHER is excited to continue strengthening mutually beneficial partnerships between Trinity College and Hartford. In the 2024-2025 academic year, 1,214 Trinity students engaged with a CHER program at least once, learning from our Hartford community partners. In this newsletter, you will find the Trinfo reopening celebration, Liberal Arts Action Lab Recognized in National Case Study, Jessica Cruz ’26 Receives Campus Compact’s Newman Civic Fellowship and more!

Each year, Trinity Athletics goes beyond the playing field to foster stronger connections between Trinity College and the community. What begins with “Do It Day” in the fall extends into a year-round commitment to service and sustainability.

Meet Mafer Vacca '27! Mafer is an integral part of the CHER Team! She's involved and supports almost every program here and is one of our current CHER Engagement Fellows. Being from Peru she understand and deeply appreciates creating mutual beneficial partnerships in urban diverse environments and encourages students to explore and make Hartford home.

The semester-long Liberal Arts Action Lab project was particularly exciting because it launched the three-year Urban Environmental Justice in Greater Hartford grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a collaboration between Trinity College's Center for Hartford Engagement & Research, Center for Caribbean Studies, and Center for Urban and Global Studies, with community partners at the Center for Leadership & Justice and the Stowe Center for Literary Activism.  In the Action Lab project, students and faculty from Trinity and CT State Community College partnered with the Center for Leadership and Justice (CLJ) to understand how residents in Hartford’s South End, a predominantly low-income community of color, were impacted by the waste incinerator. In collaboration with CLJ, our research aimed to center Hartford residents’ voices specifically by highlighting their recommendations and calls for change. 

Each year, the Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership will award several mini-grants for curricular development, community co-instruction, and community-engaged research. We are pleased to announce the 2025-26 recipients.