The CCCE is conducting a series of interviews to highlight alumni that have gone on to career paths that involve civic and community engagement. In this profile, Teddy Gelderman ’11 discusses his work with Northfield Tackling Obstacles and Raising College Hopes (TORCH). The mission of TORCH is to improve the graduation and post-secondary participation rates of Northfield’s students of color, low-income students, and youth who would be first-generation college attendees.
Could you tell us who you are and what you do in Northfield?
My name is Teddy Gelderman, and I live here in Northfield, Minnesota. I work for the Northfield TORCH program and, for the last five years, I worked as the director of the high school component of the program and, in this last year, I took on a new position working exclusively with alumni. Working with the alumni entails… it depends on the student.
Last June TORCH graduated its 500th student. It’s been around for 13 years, so it’s a lot of students. That’s five hundred students in the world trying to figure out their place. There are students who are pursuing PhD degrees, with more education than me, and there are students who are struggling to find a job or who were kicked out of their house last week and need a place to sleep, and so it’s a wide range of needs. So from social work, connecting former students to resources in the community, to helping students craft their personal statement for higher education Master’s programs or PhD programs — and everything in between.
How did you end up in this role?
I went to Carleton and, in my senior year, I took a class with Adrienne Falcon called the Ethics of Civic Engagement. And, as I was literally leaving the class on the last day, she said, “Hey, you should apply for this position.” It was a position through AmeriCorps in the public schools here in Northfield and in Faribault, split halftime. I applied and I got it and then worked that job for two years. Then, when my time with that job was running out, the director of the TORCH program was retiring. I applied and it worked out — they took a gamble on me, and I’ve been been at the program ever since.
So you initially came to Carleton to study Bio…
Well I wanted to go to med school, and then I ended up studying abroad and it was just kind of hard to reshift all my priorities. And when I came back was when I started looking at how to get involved in my own community. It’s super cliché, but the abroad program I was on was all about community resources and looking not across the world, but in your backyard. I realized that I’d been going to Carleton for two years and had never crossed Second Street, or had never really been into the community. So I got back and just immediately thought, “Okay, what can I do to look at what’s what’s right here?” And that just sort of shifted my career trajectory and what I wanted to do.
How did the Center inform the work you do now?
The CCCE is sort of the perfect complement to what a Carleton education offers. When you’re going through the Carleton academic side, you get the skills that you need to be successful — you learn how to write, how to think, how to communicate. And the Center does a really good job of contextualizing those skills and applying them while you’re a student, and then making it really easy to do that as a student and, for me, afterwards. So it just made it really easy to connect to an off-campus real experience, and I think Carleton does a really good job of setting up the support for a really successful academic time.
What the Center did was make it clear that things like the Carleton schedule, the Carleton sort of dress code, expectations are different than they are off campus. And that was extremely valuable and something that has been paying off ever since. It was because the CCCE provided an additional piece of my education that I graduated with a more complete set of skills. It’s extremely useful in a way that taking classes or being a part of even campus clubs can’t really match. I can’t imagine going to Carleton and not having that piece of my education, especially during four years when you’re supposed to be figuring out things that really matter to you. It would be really, really hard to do that without something like the CCCE. There’s no way to put theory to practice without an opportunity like that.