For her reflective essay after participating in DukeEngage DC – Science and Tech Policy, Maddie Morrison T’26 won the Gratitude category in the 2025 DukeEngage Reflection Challenge.
Judges were moved by how, after experiencing a personal crisis upon returning home, Maddie’s questions about her DukeEngage experience led to new realizations about the basic nature and vital power of community engagement.
Community engagement saved my father’s life this summer.
It was July 28th. Two days before, I had landed back in my hometown of Portland, Maine after spending the summer in Washington, DC as part of the Duke Engage Science Policy program. I had been interning at a healthcare consulting firm, quite the opposite of what I had originally imagined when committing to a summer of service through Duke Engage. My plan was to use the last bits of summer to soak up time with family, reflect on my experiences, and prepare for an early return to campus for RA and OL training.
My plans were turned on their head when a group of bikers showed up at my front door that evening, stumbling over their words in shock, and piercing my heart with the news that my dad was likely being rushed to the hospital. The rest of that night is a painful blur, but I soon learned that my dad had suffered a major heart attack while on a bike ride. More precisely a 100% LAD artery blockage, the type of heart attack commonly referred to as a “widowmaker” due to their extremely high mortality rate.
Two days later, I sat in my father’s hospital room as we held a conversation, almost as if the nights before had all been a terrible nightmare. Somehow, miraculously, and despite every statistic out there, my father was alive. Even the medical team seemed to be glazed by an unbelievable shock. Somehow the news of my father’s event had spread like wildfire, with even the local paper asking to do a story on the miracle. My surrounding family had dropped everything to drive to Maine to support us, and my phone was flooded with texts from my support system throughout the country. I had woken up at home to bags of bagels, cookies, stuffed animals, and never-ending plates of food from seemingly every corner of the Portland community.
While public policy had inherently been implicated in the response time of the ambulance, the equipment available to the healthcare providers on site, and the training of the doctors who saved his life, high quality CPR on the scene had made the biggest difference in my father’s outcome. Instantly when my dad went down, bystanders, strangers, jumped in and began CPR. They didn’t waste a minute jumping to action, something I’ll be forever indebted to them for. They saw someone in need and responded, and are the reason I still have my dad today.
“Community engagement has the power to save lives — systemically through life long commitment to public service and community improvement, but also in critical moments, best demonstrated by the heroes who saved my father.”
Community engagement has the power to save lives — systemically through life long commitment to public service and community improvement, but also in critical moments, best demonstrated by the heroes who saved my father. Thinking back to the first part of my summer, I had struggled to see where the community engagement lied in my work as a part of DukeEngage. Caught up in the bureaucratic realms of health policy and slow congressional processes, my previous definitions of community engagement often fell flat. I felt unmotivated, and frankly out of place, wondering how I was engaging with the community from my office space and Canva log-in.
Yet while sitting in the hospital room in Maine, I realized that despite the business of fast-paced Washington DC, my daily priorities and routines had become embedded in the rhythms of the city for those two months, whether in Trader Joes runs or far too frequent uses of free ice cream coupons. That process of seeing myself, even as a short term visitor, as a member of the space and therefore responsible for the flourishing and safety of those around me, is what authentic community engagement can look like. By being present, I was actively shaping the space around me, regardless of my intentions to do so. That same attitude of collective responsibility is what motivated the heroes of my hometown to step in to help my dad when it mattered most, and what had inspired the outpouring of gifts, food, and love from people throughout the city in the wake of the event.
While the heroism of bystanders is the most extreme example of the life-or-death power of community engagement, oddly enough, it helped me understand that community engagement isn’t always about grand gestures or formal volunteer hours. It’s rather about recognizing yourself as part of a collective responsibility, wherever you are. Saturday mornings at the Dupont Circle farmers market, spending an extra moment discussing the latest metro holdup with my coworkers, and even buying leftover pastries with the latest food waste app I had discovered, were all small but mighty moments of community engagement. By participating in the life of DC, I was temporarily, yet still genuinely, part of the community fabric.
The bystanders who saved my father weren’t trained professionals, they were community members with the courage to step in. I have come to the conclusion that at the end of the day, a single deliverable or a summer spent working in policy pales in comparison to the power of showing up. My close encounter with almost losing my father has given me newfound hope that the willingness to show up, participate, and simply be present within any community is what matters most. Choosing to frame myself as both connected to and accountable for the collective functioning of the world, through big and small moments, is a mindset of community engagement that I now see as foundational for a meaningful life.