Book club for female veterans comes to MCC
Mesa Legend
A book club open for female veterans of all ages recently opened at MCC, due to the efforts of Arizona Humanities, a nonprofit which seeks to serve Arizonans. Hannah Schmidl, programs and marketing assistant for Arizona Humanities, said the idea was brought about by a few things. Recently, opportunities arose for Arizona Humanities to give to veterans, one of which was book clubs, Schmidl said. “The reading lists were provided, you could make suggestions if you wanted, but it was all laid out. And then it was just a matter of finding a location and participants and facilitator,” Schmidl said.
Arizona Humanities has partnered with the ASU Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement, which is operated out of the ASU Pat Tillman Center to broaden their reach with this new program. Though they are strongly linked with ASU, Arizona Humanities wanted to bring their book club to MCC as well. “MCC was generous enough to donate a room for the duration of the workshop so that we don’t have to pay a facility fee or anything like that,” Schmidl said.
The program, according to Schmidl, is designed for a relatively small group of people from a similar background to come together and discuss texts with one another. This club creates a space for female veterans to “talk about their military service, and everything outside of that,” Schmidl said.
Though the club takes place at school and is partnered with multiple colleges, the book club is not exclusive to female veterans who are also students. Any female veteran of any age is free to join, according to Schmidl. “There are maybe some students in there, but other people who just live close enough that Mesa Community College is a good place for them to come,” Schmidl said.
The book club opens the student community up to a non-academic book club, where no grades are given and no exams are taken. “It’s a nice non-academic offering; it’s not graded or anything like that. You are expected to do the readings, of course, and contribute to the discussion but it’s certainly not a classroom style,” Schmidl said. Being able to host a non-academic program, Schmidl said, enables students to get involved outside of their regular, classroom activities.
MCC student Kathleen Nguyen said the community should give more to veterans. “They should receive better benefits from the community,” Nguyen said. One of these benefits, she said, would be lower college tuition if a given veteran decided to enroll in college after coming home. According to Arizona Humanities, more than two million men and women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. In response, Arizona Humanities launched their Veterans Program with the goal of helping them recover from the consequences of war.
The book club meets on Tuesdays from 6:30 – 8 p.m. Its first meeting was on Feb. 24, and it will have meetings on March 3, 17, and 24. Meetings take place in EF1W on the MCC Southern and Dobson campus. Dinner is also provided at the meetings. Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, command chaplain of the 807th medical command (deployment support) and associate rabbi at Temple Chai, and Lillis Lloyd, counselor at MCC’s Red Mountain campus, are the facilitators of the weekly meetings. All required materials are provided at the meetings.
