Social distancing.

“You’re muted.” 

Protests. Unrest.��

We asked some UofL students, faculty and staff take an honest look back on the past year, the changes and struggles they endured, and the resilience they uncovered in the face of adversity. Here’s what they had to say: 

Unable to reach anyone in time, that project was put on hold. But the fire had been ignited in Fuchs, who was determined to find something that mixed a comprehensive interior design project with benevolence.�� 

Around that same time, she read an article about Camp Restoration, a planned community of homes made of shipping containers for homeless veterans in southwest Louisville. The objective of Camp Restoration is simple: to help those veterans get back on their feet.

As the idea for the community came from Jeremy Harrell, founder and CEO of the Veteran’s Club, who recruited Paul Sirek, an architect at Luckett & Farley, to conceptualize what those homes would look like.

Coincidentally, Sirek works with Fuchs’ husband. So, she asked if her critique class could participate in the project. Initially, the class was approved to design two of the planned 25 container homes.   

“After we had a critique with Jeremy Harrell, he was so happy about how different each design was, that he said we could do more,” Fuchs said. “He wanted the veterans to be proud of their homes and show them off to encourage socialization.”

The 20 students went through the entire design process, coming up with three different schemes each and choosing one to pursue. At one point, there were 36 different single-family home designs and 24 different family home designs.

The junior class (eight students) had the family home, which consisted of four containers, while the sophomore students (12) had the single container home to design. However, the project entailed much more than just interior design. Each home has to be tailored for challenges like PTSD, for example.

With adaptive reuse of a shipping container, the students were initially required to design homes within the containers, similar to  interior design programming in most projects, Fuchs said. But the project grew as the students began their work.

“After working with the students, I thought they needed to learn how to work on the process of how to create great design as they all were so talented.��So I adapted that style of studio, similar to how an architecture traditional studio is run,” she said. “Design is design and it needs rigor to accomplish anything worthwhile.”

The students’ process for the “adaptive reuse project for homeless veterans” included:

• A summation of nine readings covering design theory, PTSD, homelessness and sustainability.
• The creation of three collages and models.
• Site visits of other container-built structures (the Russell Neighborhood Community Center, Copper & Kings and Jeremy Semones Core Containers).
• A lecture and critiques by Jeremy Harrell of the Veteran’s Club and architect Paul Sirek.

All of that was even before the design development for a 9-foot-by-40-foot shipping container. The students created a thesis, designed at least four schemes and generated four plans, four elevations, one section and renderings in perspective/axonometric. They also created color and furniture finishes for the project and endured several in-class critiques before creating the construction documents. The documents included dimensions, plans, elevations, sections, schedules and cut sheets/specs.

Additionally, two students, Kayleigh Garner and Micheal Blanton, taught themselves how to use AutoCad drafting software during the project and then taught other students how to use the programming as well.

According to Fuchs, working on this “real” project allowed the students to gain the experience of solving problems within conditional parameters.��

“They learned the structural limits, had to learn codes for egress, fair housing requirements of room sizes, natural light, zoning and where to put the electrical box.��These are real problems interior designers face every day and the sooner you know what your parameters will be, the better designer you will become,” she said.

Despite the abrupt shift to remote operations in March due to COVID-19, the project, and the students’ enthusiasm for the project, continued.

“Even during quarantine, the students were able to create construction documents,” Fuchs said. “The students really rose to the challenge and went way beyond my expectations. Their enthusiasm for a real project that will help so many veterans was amazing. I loved their designs and how deeply they thought this through. They worked so hard and I am so proud of them and their efforts.”

Although COVID-19 has put most things on hold, the groundbreaking for Camp Restoration was still held over spring break and the community is expected to be completed in 2021.

Meanwhile, fundraising continues for the community, and Fuchs plans to do what she can for that effort through a new, online free design service called Design for Everyone. The idea is that anyone can submit their home design problems and Fuchs and a few UofL students, acting as interns, will come up with a solution.

“In exchange we are going to ask for donations to be sent to Camp Restoration,” Fuchs said. “It is going to be fun. I had been wanting to have a real project that could give back to the community for my two interior design classes, as I believe good design is for everyone.”   

“Where there is nothing growing, we can turn this soil that’s not useful into something that we can use for crops,” Himes said.

Himes’ students, who are undergraduates, have dug up soil samples from a plot on university property where hemp and kenaf plants are growing. The samples are then taken to a lab to see if they can determine which helpful bacteria might grow under certain conditions. The research could prove to be an economic boon.

“We can make use of land that is right now not useable and hopefully that can be an economic boost for the state” Himes said.

Check out the full story below.��

There members of raiseRED’s executive board — Morgan Tallio, AJ Walters and Dulci Gurley — took the time to talk to UofL News about why they dance.��

Morgan Tallio

Tallio has been in the raiseRED community for the past three years, and has served as a dancer, team leader and programming director.

“To me, raiseRED is a community of college students that care more than anybody that I have met in my life and it’s really crazy because a lot of people see college students as really selfish. But seeing people come together for such an amazing cause, like pediatric cancer, means more to me that I could ever explain,” she said. “Dancing for 18 hours of my life can can help save a child’s life and cure pediatric cancer … it is the least I can do.” 

AJ Walters 

Walters, this year’s Public Outreach Coordinator, has been with the raiseRED team for the past three years, serving as a dancer for the past two years. For Walters, the event is way to support the local and national community through raising awareness and funds for research.

“I wanted to find a philanthropy that I could really support and get behind at UofL. I’ve tried multiple avenues, and I really found my home at raiseRED,” he said.��

Dulci Gurley

Gurley has worked with raiseRED for the past four yeasr, as a dance, morale captain and morale coordinator (this year). She said she is emotionally invested in the cause.

“When the numbers go up (at the end of the marathon) your breath catches in your throat and you see you hit your goal and all the hard work you put in all year pays off. It’s the most intense feeling of pride and excitement that you could ever experience and then you immediately start sobbing,” she said. “It’s more that this 18-hour event that happens once a year. It’s really this cool opportunity to see all these UofL students caring a whole lot make the biggest difference.”

Did you know that alcohol misuse is the fifth leading risk factor for premature death and disability globally and among people between the ages of 15 and 49, it is the first? For those 20 to 39 years old, approximately 25 percent of the total deaths are alcohol attributable.

A group at UofL is working to ensure our students don’t fall victim to these statistics. The Building Resiliency in Campus Community (BRICC) Coalition, a Campus Health Services partnership, was created in 2007 in an effort to advance policies, programs and resources that increase resiliency and reduce high risk drinking on campus and in the community.

In 2010, Heather Parrino came on board as program manager. BRICC has since secured major gifts from Beam Suntory and Brown-Forman to support staff, programming, and infrastructure. They have developed additional resources, including the Voice of Reason manual and other initiatives that Parrino says have yielded tremendous success.

“We’ve been very successful because we have so many committed volunteers (about 200), we work with community and campus partners and we have external funding. I think we’re also serving as leaders in this area because we meet students where they are,” Parrino said.

That means, for example, hosting meetings in the basement of a fraternity house or sharing relevant information on residence hall bulletin boards.

Parrino specifically measures success through three metrics:

1. UofL’s AlcoholEdu (alcohol prevention) and Haven (sexual violence prevention) programs, funded by the president, provost, and Campus Health Services. (AlcoholEdu is mandated for every first time freshmen and transfer student under 21 and Haven is required for every student. AlcoholEdu educates students about the impact of alcohol and how to prevent high-risk situations where alcohol is present. Haven addresses critical issues of sexual assault, relationship violence, stalking, and sexual harassment.

2. A state law () passed in 2013 to provide immunity from prosecution for students who choose to call for help in an emergency.

“We support students that choose to drink and students that choose not to drink. We want to make sure all of our students stay safe,” she said.

3. UofL developed the Voice of Reason manual about three years ago so that students could have tangible takeaways from their prevention training programs. The manual was created after an in-depth needs assessment, in partnership with Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, was completed in 2010, which included a focus groups of students and staff throughout campus.

“We rode in police cars, we came to campus at night, we went into apartment complexes. We would talk to anyone who would talk to us. In our needs assessment, we realized there is a lot of misinformation out there about alcohol use and that much of the communication is ineffective and disingenuous,” Parrino said. “This was our base for the Voice of Reason manual.”

Much of BRICC’s current strategic plan also came out of the needs assessment. The main objective is to “build resilience.”

“Alcohol isn’t the number one issue, resilience is,” Parrino said. “There are two main reasons people drink – to celebrate and to deal with stress. If we can teach students how to celebrate differently – going to dinner with their friends, going on a hike, etc. – then we can teach them life skills development to avoid major issues. We can teach them resilience. At the end of the day, the stress and the reason for celebrating are still there.”

BRICC has been using the Voice of Reason manual for three years. It has been so effective, Parrino said, the University of Kentucky is piloting it this year.

BRICC also features a number of other programs, including:

• TIPs Training. TIPs stands for Training for Intervention Procedures. TIPs University certification is beneficial for students who are in charge of planning events, serving as RAs, risk management chairs and in other leadership positions. TIPs University “recognizes that students are in the best position to address drinking behaviors among their peers,” or, as Parrino explains, “meeting students where they are.”

BRICC offers monthly TIPs University certifications to students and campus/community partners that serve students. The classes last four hours. In BRICC’s fall semester training, 68 RAs were certified prior to campus move-in day.

“My favorite part as a TIPs trainer is watching people arrive thinking they are going to listen to a boring lecture about alcohol information. Our participants become very engaged as they realize they are the experts and we are going to work together to facilitate conversations to address issues that are specific to them and their friends,” Parrino said.

• BRICC Wall. The engages students with community members, businesses and city officials to “make changes in their communities and remove roadblocks to their academic success.” The exhibit challenges assumptions and encourages healthy decisions. It is made up of messages from students sharing their own stories about alcohol and substance abuse. The messages are written on “bricks” displayed as part of the exhibit.��

• Greeks Advocating Matuer Management of Alcohol (GAMMA). BRICC provides funding, resources, and a staff advisor for Greeks Advocating Mature Management of Alcohol, a UofL RSO. In the fall, GAMMA members lead the Voice of Reason initiative, a strategy to help both drinkers and nondrinkers make safer decisions in social settings. VOR includes five one-hour sessions that cover basic alcohol knowledge, awareness of risks, effective messaging and implementing strategies.

• This semester, BRICC will also launch a new RSO called “Advocates for Recovery.” The first meeting is March 9. The organization will offer broad-based support to students in recovery, and will also include friends and allies of students in recovery. Programming will focus on increasing resilience, academic achievement, health and overall wellbeing.

Though the organization is still in the planning phase, Parrino said more than 150 students have expressed interest.

“As with everything we’ve done, we need to start from the ground and we need to find allies,” Parrino said. “I look at what we’re doing as more macro than programming. Our students need more than programming. We are constantly looking at how we can take care of them.”

More information about the BRICC Coalition is .��

Brothers Eric and Christian Bush joined Evan Wright for the 608-mile trek to the nation’s capital Jan. 20 to witness the peaceful transition of power first hand, while fellow McConnell Scholar Celia Cusick was one of the millions of women to protest at the Women’s March the next day. Despite their opposing political views, all agreed that witnessing – and taking part in such a historical event – was an experience they’ll never forget.

“It was a pretty surreal moment, seeing so many important political leaders – past presidents and congressional leaders – coming onto that stage,” Eric Bush said. “Watching these people, who have said some pretty nasty things about each other during the campaign, come together to watch the peaceful transition of power – which is a uniquely American experience – was very impactful.”

For Cusick, taking part in the Women’s March was an equally-powerful experience.

“It was empowering for me to be there because, it was about standing up for not only who I am as a person but for those who can’t stand up for themselves,” Cusick said. “This was me putting my words into action and telling the public and the president that his words and actions reflect all of us and they’re not OK.”

For Wright, the inauguration was a family affair, attending both the inauguration and the Freedom Ball later that night with his father.

“We decided we wanted to go because we wanted to be a part of this historic moment,” Wright said. “You see it on TV, but it’s not really real until you see it in person. It really was one of the best days of my life.”

The McConnell Scholars were interviewed last week on UofL Today with Mark Hebert about their experiences in Washington, DC. .��

Callen isn’t sure what the future holds beyond his impending spring graduation, but he knows that he wants Mullikin to be part of it. Since his high school graduation, Callen has been a student in one way or another, first in the officer candidate school for the Marine Corps and later at the University of Louisville. He came to UofL in 2007, first as a student in the Speed School, before transitioned to marketing, and then returning in 2012 to the Speed School. The call for engineering was too strong.

Callen has long studied the science of their relationship. Although he knew that they had good chemistry, Callen had planned for months for the best moment to propose.

“She told me last May that she thought she’d be married by now. When I knew, it was shortly after that. You know what, I’ll never find anyone else in the world that’s going to tell me… I don’t even know how to word that,” Callen said.��“The mental aspect of it is a complex thing that most engineers don’t get, because it’s not based on logic. Basically everything we do has to be logical, because that’s how the world works.”

Part of his struggle was in finding the right way to express his love, while staying true to his engineering roots.

“I’m not in touch with my emotional side, I figured that spending the amount of time that it took to make this ring and design it would show here that I care. A lot,” he said.

Callen cared enough to spend 5½ months working on the ring.

“I figured that’d be a way I could show my feelings,” he said.��

As for the process, Callen first had to determine what kind of ring to create, but needed more data from Mullikin. The two looked at a few rings and after identifying a few qualities that she admired, he went cautiously forward. Out of all the options available, he narroed it down to the emerald cut, modified hexagonal and marquee cut.��

“So I did my own research. Which ones did I think were the coolest? Obviously I’m into geometric shapes. There are circle cuts, round cuts… all these weird things. I picked the thing that would be most geometric, which would be emerald,” Callen said.

Once that decision was final, he “extruded a basic shape” on Solid Works, took measurements from a ring Mullikin regularly wears and “went from there.” With help from Joe Vicars in the Rapid Prototyping Center, he designed a mold for the ring, which was then set in gold.

“The mold is not like a mold out of play dough. The mold is a design. To straight up 3-D print in gold would be an astronomical amount of money. People do it, but I can’t do that. I created the plastic version of the ring, so that I had an object to hold, and I sent off all my materials to a place called Shape Ways, a 3-D printing website,” Callen said.��

When it came time, Callen proposed to Mullikin on campus on the first floor of the Rapid Prototyping Center. Mullikin said yes.

After accepting his proposal, Callen took Mullikin on a tour of the facility, leaving campus to meet up with family and friends to celebrate. Now the wedding planning has begun, and true to his nature, Callen has offered to work with Mullikin to create her own wedding band, an act of collaboration symbolic of their love.��

For more on this story, check out the video below: 

Photo courtesy of Kari Donahue.��