How Mercer’s partnership with Macon homeless shelter is making a difference

Ellie Cape, a Mercer University student, didn’t know when she got her cosmetology license in high school that her skills would one day allow her to help women at Daybreak, which provides assistance to homeless people in Macon.

“They’ve been very, very grateful to have something as simple as having their nails painted,” Cape said. “It’s just been so cool to see how simple of an act it is and how you can connect with women over that and get into deeper conversation than that and how it brightens their day in a really small way.”

Charlotte Thomas, who teaches at Mercer, got the idea to create a service-learning ethics class while helping her students learn about utilitarianism. The students who normally showed compassion had no trouble sacrificing the one to save the many, but Thomas worried the students were too far removed from the ethical dilemma to analyze it properly.

In an effort to apply theses ethical models to the real world, Thomas decided to take her students’ ethical teachings outside the classroom. About fifty students and five professor assistants (who are also students) worked on about a dozen projects at Daybreak.

“Ethics is an incredible important thing for students to study, but it’s difficult to teach that class in a way that doesn’t feel abstract and kind of removed from real decisions that people make and that ethical education, ethical judgment, might really be useful for,” Thomas said.

Students created project proposals that incorporated their talents and interests along with the needs of Daybreak. Thomas said that allowing students to create their own projects was essential in evaluating ethics.

“In order for people to, I think, really be able to think about the ethical value of some activity, of something their doing, there has to be an element of choice involved,” Thomas said. “Aristotle is really clear about this, that the things that we do involuntarily, it’s not that they are not relevant, but they don’t go to character in the same way as the things we do deliberately.”

The preceptors for the ethics classes provided assistance to the students and coordinated with Daybreak as well. Preceptor Kayli Martin said that the project had several goals, one of which was helping the greater Macon community.

“While the project is about teaching ethics, it is also about helping those who are vulnerable in the community,” Martin said.

One of the students Martin oversaw was Cape who said that her work at Daybreak and in the classroom has taught her the value of ethics and about some of the challenges in the community.

“I don’t subscribe to any certain ethical theory, but I think the ideal of ethics and the act of questioning, I think it’s worthwhile to think about and to question,” Cape said. “So, Dr. Thomas has really encouraged us to do that in each of our projects. Examine it and why we feel it’s necessary and, in the long run, why does it matter what we’re doing.”

The project also made the students more aware of the issue of housing insecurity and how it impacts Macon.

“Often people are one bad thing happening away from being a partner at Daybreak and I think the students found that moving,” Thomas said.

This story was originally published May 21, 2019 at 2:41 PM.