She becomes the first Eastern Mennonite harrier to win an ODAC championship since Hall of Honor member won her second straight title in 2002. The last winner for the men was Lynn Stoltzfus in 1994. Including Chappell-Dick, the women’s team landed three all-conference finishers and took third place.  The men had one all-conference runner and were fifth overall.

Chappell-Dick has also won four of the five official races she has run this season.  After her Oct. 19 performance at the CNU Invitational, topping a field of mostly D-I runners along with the D-III regionally-ranked Christopher Newport squad, she garnered her fourth ODAC Runner of the Week award.

The squad totaled 70 points as a team, finishing just behind second-place Bridgewater at 64. Washington and Lee won the team title with 46 points. Rounding out the scoring were (Dover, Ohio/Dover), (St. Joseph, Ill./St. Joseph-Ogden), (Harrisonburg, Va./Harrisonburg), (Goshen, Ind./Goshen), (Gig Harbor, Wash./Peninsula), and (King George, Va./King George).

Not just running honors

Chappell-Dick is a senior majoring in with minors in , and . She plans on spending a year after graduation working with an intentional community/service program called (through the DOOR program) in Atlanta, Georgia, where she’d also continue training and competing with the Atlanta Track Club.

Her decision after that depends on how her training is going, she says. She may enroll in graduate school for a master’s in public health or an MBA. Chappell-Dick says she’s also interested in coaching.

She talks about her choice to attend and compete at EMU, as well as future plans, in .

Chappell-Dick was a two-time All-American in track and field last year, finishing second in the indoor mile and third in the 1500m at those respective NCAA D.III championships in 2015.

For now, though, there’s the regional and national meets to finish out the cross country season and an indoor and outdoor season of track to look forward to, as well as juggling the demands of the classroom and her extra-curricular activities.

Giving back

A leader in the classroom as well as on the field, Chappell-Dick is serving as a student representative on the  throughout the 2015-16 academic year.

She is also working with the athletic department to rebuild the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee at EMU, in which student-athletes are able to give feedback on proposed NCAA legislation, advocate for student-athletes on campus, and serve the community through various projects.

With teammate , Chappell-Dick started a track club called “FLASH” for 10 to 12-year-olds, which meets twice a week in the spring. She’s also active in Big Brothers Big Sisters and at Shalom Mennonite Church.

Working around her athletic schedule, Chappell-Dick completed her cross-cultural requirement during a summer 2014 trip to Guatemala. “We stayed with host families and attended language and cultural lessons during the day at CASAS, a program through Semilla Seminary in Guatemala City,” she said.

This semester, she is living in an intentional community theme house on campus. The goal of residents of “Bridge House” is to “bridge the gap” between first-year students and seniors with twice-monthly social gatherings.

In 2009, they began work on a straw bale house. The Martins will heat their house with wood in a masonry stove, a large structure that dissipates heat throughout the day after a hot fire in the morning. The house also uses passive solar design, composting toilets, recycled lumber, plumbing to allow gray water recycling, and other features to minimize its environmental impact.

Their house is a duplex of sorts, with adjoining living quarters for Mike’s brother and sister-in-law and a shared mud and laundry room in the middle. The two families lend each other support and encouragement, sharing the work of gardening and feeding the livestock.

“Doing it in community makes it much more joyful,” Mike says.

Lynn Stoltzfus ’95 also returned from a period of service in Mexico, with Christian Peacemaker Teams, with an inspiration to incorporate sustainability into everyday life. For the past four and a half years, Lynn, his wife, Christine Forand, and their two daughters have lived in a straw bale house that is disconnected from the power grid in Durham, Ontario. The family heats and cooks with wood, uses solar panels and a wind turbine to generate electricity, and grows most of its own food in a quarter-acre garden.
The idea behind this arrangement, Lynn says, is to “withdraw support for the status quo economic system that’s built on the oppression of people in other parts of the world.”

Among the challenges of living the way they do is that Lynn and Christine have to devote significant time to tending the garden, and “simple” tasks in a normal home (e.g., adjusting the thermostat) are more time consuming (e.g., going out to the woodshed and rekindling the fire).

For Barry Kreider ’86, one of the most rewarding aspects of living in a straw bale house has been the way it has connected him to new people. People call out of the blue, asking if they can stop by to tour the home in Akron, Pennsylvania.

The Kreiders themselves did a lot of visiting and research before building their own house, which was finished in 2003. They heat with a masonry stove and have solar panels on the roof that produce twice the amount of electricity as they use. “In-law quarters” built into the home, currently home to a family from the Kreiders’ church, represent another aspect of sustainable living in the home: community.

Among the straw bale homes visited by the Kreiders was one in Keezletown, Virginia, where Alta Brubaker ’74 lives with her husband, Wayne S. Teel. Their home was finished in 2000, modeled after a Frank Lloyd Wright design. With passive solar design, solar hot water, a wood stove, and the straw bales’ exceptional insulating qualities, Alta estimates their annual heating bill is equivalent to a monthly bill in a conventional home.

After finishing college, sisters Lara Fisher ’98 and Atieno Bird, MA ’99 (Jennifer Atieno Fisher when at EMU), worked with other family members to construct a straw bale cottage as a retreat in Lewisburg, West Virginia, both for family use and for short-term rental