LEWISTON  — Darby Ray is all about community engagement.

It is practically in her blood, and it is in her job title at Bates College in Lewiston, where she is the director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and a professor of community engagement.

Community has been a big part of her life and career.

Ray grew up in a small town in central Florida, where she was raised to be actively engaged in community.

“My dad was the mayor of the teeny-tiny town I grew up in, and my mom ran the preschool,” Ray said. “And my siblings and I were just really involved in our community, from a young age.”

Ray earned a bachelor’s degree in religion at Sewanee: The University of the South, and a master’s degree and doctorate in religion at Vanderbilt University, all in Tennessee. She then taught for 16 years at Millsaps College in Mississippi, where she was also the leader of community engagement.

“Then I moved up to here up to Maine 13 years ago, got a job at Bates College doing what I most wanted to do, which was think about how colleges and universities can be positively engaged in the communities where they’re located,” Ray said. “My work is to join with others and think about what it means for a college to be involved in the community.”

A simple definition of community engagement: A collaborative process that involves people, organizations and governments working together to address issues that affect their community.

The 4,000 or so colleges and universities in this country have not had a great track record with their communities. Some have preferred and adopted isolationist policies from the local community, erecting a gated wall around campus.

A 2007 report by the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland found that colleges and universities “have a vested interest in building strong relationships with the neighborhoods that surround their campuses.”

Ray said Bates College made that turn a few presidents ago, during Donald W. Harward’s tenure, from 1989 t0 2002.

“One of the things (Harward) really wanted the college to do was kind of break out of the Bates bubble and realize it was part of the larger community,” Ray said, “and that we benefit enormously from the community in which we’re located.”

Many people in Lewiston and Auburn might not know that Bates students volunteer much of their time in the local community. They are in classrooms at public schools, helping teachers and conducting research. They are at Blake Street Towers, helping the elderly and disabled residents.

“Our students are making brunch (at Blake Street Towers) every Sunday,” Ray said, “and sitting down with those folks and having breakfast, so they’re making a contribution of breakfast.”

Bates students are involved at the Good Shepherd Food Bank, the Trinity Jubilee Center, Central Maine Medical Center, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center and with Big Brothers and Big Sisters or other organizations in the Twin Cities.

More than 800 of the college’s students took part in the community vigil Oct. 29, 2023, at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, where members of the Bates College Crosstones, an a cappella group, sang a moving rendition of “Run to You” by Pentatonix.

For some Bates students, the community engagement process takes hold quickly. Part of what a first-year student wrote in an opinion piece published last year in The Bates Student, the campus newspaper, reads: “I’ve learned from walking 20 minutes from my dorm to downtown to get a bagel at Forage Market that Lewiston doesn’t often feel unsafe, and from the students where I volunteer at Tree Street Youth that the people here are full of unique backgrounds and cultures. Unequivocally, I’ve learned to dig deeper into the community that surrounds me — to not take it as it first appears.”

The idea, Ray said, is to have porous boundaries, “so that our students realize that what it means to really be educated is to have enough knowledge and wisdom to know what you don’t know, and how being involved in your community can grow you throughout your life and transform you into a fuller human being.”

As a professor of civic engagement, Ray knows the process must go both ways to be successful.

“I wish more citizens of Lewiston would tap into Bates athletics and the arts and culture events here,” she said. “There’s so much free stuff that happens on the Bates campus that is open and welcoming.”

Bates has been recognized twice by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for its community engagement. Only 157 colleges in the country have received this distinction.

Ray said the best part of her job is being a matchmaker who is “able to match the community desires with the college needs, and bring those two things together, and just see what sparks when the college and the community come together.”

The worst part of her job?

“I can get impatient,” she said. “The worst thing is that it takes time for change to happen, and I’m somebody who wants things to happen now.”

Spare time is rare in Ray’s world, but when she can steal away, she likes to go for a hike.

“I like on a snowy afternoon to be able to sneak away from work at 3:30 p.m. and grab my dog and run to Sherwood Forest in Auburn and hike in the snow,” she said, “just to, you know, just for an hour. Good, hard hike.”

Ray has also written a book, “Working,” which offers insights from Christian scripture and tradition, and considers their implications in the complex, globalized work world.