Civic Leaders

Through William & Mary’s Office of Civic & Community Engagement, students take part in service opportunities in the Williamsburg area and beyond, upholding core values of the university by devoting knowledge, skills and time to serving the greater good.

W&M students and alumni are known for giving back to their communities, earning the university recognition from The Princeton Review as the No. 1 public university in the nation for making an impact. As William & Mary celebrates its Year of Civic Leadership, the Office of Civic & Community Engagement is working to expand participation in service opportunities as students prepare to become engaged citizens and community leaders.

During the 2025–26 academic year, students contributed more than 12,000 hours of service and strengthened partnerships with local schools, nonprofits and government organizations. One new initiative, the Civic Action Scorecard, encourages students by offering incentives to participate in activities on and off campus.

As W&M’s Year of Civic Leadership Committee chair, Roxane Adler Hickey M.Ed. ’02, Ed.D. ’23, has said, “At William & Mary, civic leadership is not something we add on, it is who we are.”

Here, one current student and one alumna share how community engagement helped shape their academic and career paths.

Solving Problems Through Data and Entrepreneurship

When I first came to William & Mary, I knew I was interested in business, entrepreneurship and using technology and data to solve complex problems. What I didn’t know was how much I would become involved in civic leadership and community engagement work across campus. During the second semester of my freshman year, I was welcomed into the Civic Leadership Program, a cohort of first- and second-year students selected by W&M’s Office of Civic & Community Engagement to take two courses focused on community engagement, as well as receive a stipend for a community engagement project of our choosing during the summer.

Through my time in the Civic Leadership Program, I developed a more complete view of community engagement as a way of empowering anyone to take action to create meaningful change in their community. I quickly realized that civic leadership shared the exact foundation of what I wanted to do at William & Mary. As someone interested in solving problems through data and entrepreneurship, I was already regularly supporting my community across campus and beyond. That has included helping students build out startup ideas as a student partner at the W&M Entrepreneurship Hub and supporting members of Circle K International as they work on service projects they care about. I’ve also developed an app to encourage increased member involvement in the Pep Band at W&M Athletics events and helped new students adapt to campus life as an orientation aide. All of these roles support a common goal: empowering the communities I’m involved in to connect, grow and thrive together.

That synthesis of civic leadership has become a foundational framework for my time at William & Mary. In everything I do, I’m always asking myself who the work I’m doing serves and if it is serving those people in the best way possible. It is amazing to look back on the sizable impact of the work I’ve done by viewing it through this lens. As I look toward my future career, I can already see how my community engagement will remain invaluable. Whether supporting a company’s mission to solve any shared problem or launching my own venture around genuine community needs that have not been efficiently met, William & Mary has taught me that I will always be an engaged civic leader committed to supporting the common good.

Bryce McHose ’28 is a business analytics major at W&M, where he is vice president of service for the Circle K International chapter, an orientation aide and a student partner at the Entrepreneurship Hub.

Making a Systems-Level Impact

When I first came to W&M, I had years of active volunteerism under my belt. I’d led bingo at a senior center, built homes with Habitat for Humanity and showed up for neighbors after a flood. Over my four years at the university, the coursework, the community engagement, the friendships and the alternative breaks pushed me again and again to look for how to have an even bigger impact. My time at W&M helped me understand the underlying issues driving the needs I cared about and find the points of highest leverage within our societal systems to effect change. Then, I could influence those points in ways that ripple out to far more people than I could ever reach through a single service project.

My career has followed a similar path. Immediately after W&M, I held roles in philanthropy, AmeriCorps and at a food pantry. I loved the direct, visible impact of that work, but I came to believe more could change if I worked on systems-level challenges. Eventually, I chose to join the specialty commercial insurance industry. Insurance exists to pay claims — to be there on the hardest days and to help people rebuild after the storm. Insurers also aggregate risk and capital at enormous scale, which creates opportunity to influence how we build a more resilient world. I would never have considered the role I have today without my civic engagement experiences at W&M.

Beyond shaping how I think, W&M’s civic and community engagement programs gave me practical tools I use every day. After participating in an alternative break my freshman year, I went on to lead trips and serve as a student director for Branch Out. In those roles, I managed a budget, planned meetings, set agendas, coordinated transportation and meals, and worked directly with our nonprofit partners. Even more valuable was what these programs taught me about people: the emotional regulation a leader needs to stay steady in stressful moments and how to coach and support team members living well outside their comfort zones as they confront hard realities about the world and its complexities. Much of my job now is helping leaders make effective decisions — understanding their perspective, working through difficult interpersonal questions and moving forward with imperfect information. While the setting has changed, the work and purpose remain remarkably similar.

Samanthe Tiver Belanger ’11 majored in economics with a math minor at W&M before earning an MBA from Stanford University. She is now director of strategy and corporate development at Markel.

Enduring Influence

Sonia R. Kinkhabwala ’21 believed deeply in community service, consistently seeking ways to bring people together and create positive change. She left a lasting mark at William & Mary through her involvement with W&M’s office of Civic & Community Engagement. In her memory, her parents have created an endowment to support the office, and the Civic & Community Engagement Suite in the Sadler Center will be named in her honor.