On a beach in Gandoca, Duke rower Mikaela Voinov waits patiently for the day’s main attraction. She’s been in Costa Rica for several days now, learning about environmental conservation efforts in the small tribal town. Most of the time, she hears about pollution’s devastating impact or the dangers posed to Gandoca’s sea turtle population.
This day, though, is different. This day is a celebration.
Voinov follows the team of marine conservationists commandeering a wheelbarrow to the water’s edge, right where the foamy surf laps up on the sand. She watches as tiny creatures, no more than two-and-a-half inches long, are released into the water. Voinov carefully follows each sea turtle hatchling — with tiny flippers working furiously to swim for the first time — as they drift out to sea. Each tiny hatchling is on the way to their new beginnings, just as Voinov’s time in Central America is coming to a close.
“No one got stuck in the sand. It was really, really amazing,” Voinov told The Chronicle. “We got to … watch them go into the water, so it was a really cool day.”
In El Valley, Panama, 325 miles away from Gandoca, another Blue Devil is having a formative experience of his own. Wrestler Connor Barket holds up volleyball nets at a local school. Nets might be a generous word — they’re really deconstructed soccer goals with webbing strung between them. After spending days teaching the kids how to play the sport — in between games of Pato, Pato, Gonzo (Duck, Duck, Goose in Spanish) — it all comes down to this: a big volleyball game against a different school that several other Duke athletes have been working at all week. When he’s not busy holding up the net, Barket coaches his star player, Pedro, who eventually leads Barket's team to victory. As the teams play “mano a mano,” the wrestler finds that the language barrier is completely gone, with the joy of sport as the only language they need.
Across the Atlantic, fencer Monica Balakrishnan is making the most of her trip to South Africa alongside 11 other student-athletes. Talking to the grocery store managers and the hotel workers she comes across every day proves to be good practice for her future career as a doctor. She’s learning to build relationships with people and create trust among strangers, a skill that will serve her well when she has to take care of patients. Still, Balakrishnan is attempting to be present, humbled by the people she meets with a life vastly different from hers.
In three different countries with three vastly different experiences, what unites Voinov, Barket and Balakrishnan?
They all have a desire to do good in the world, and they found that opportunity for impact through the ACE Program.
What is ACE?
ACE, formally known as the Rubenstein-Bing Student-Athlete Civic Engagement Program, started as a collaborative project between Duke and Stanford.
In February 2014, both schools’ Boards of Trustees met in Palo Alto, Calif., to find avenues of collaboration. The two athletic departments realized they had a common issue: Because of athletes’ demanding schedules, they often can’t participate in study abroad programs or highly-demanding civic engagement opportunities.
From this mutual challenge, ACE was born as a way to give athletes a summer international experience centered on civic engagement. David Rubenstein, Trinity '70, former chair of Duke’s Board of Trustees and a famous civic leader in his own right, stepped in with generous financial support. The Blue Devil athletic department also started putting a dollar from every regular-season home sporting event ticket toward the initiative. These efforts paid off when the program was officially announced in 2015, with the first batch of athletes going abroad in summer 2016. While Stanford paused its involvement in 2023, Duke’s portion of ACE is still very much thriving.
Emily Durham turned a bold initiative and financial support into a program. The ACE founding director oversees both its administrative and programmatic components. Sean Tate came on as a program coordinator in 2020 after graduating from Duke as a swim and dive athlete and ACE alum.
Durham helps send dozens of athletes overseas each summer, totaling almost 300 over her eight-year career. She and Tate curate each of ACE’s three current programs — in Costa Rica, Panama and South Africa — to focus on projects revolving around youth outreach, coaching, environmental conservation, sustainability, food insecurity and so much more.
“We collaborate closely with our community partners to identify projects that meet their needs and allow us to contribute in ways that add capacity to the work they’re already doing,” Durham wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Student-athletes also have opportunities to engage in cultural immersion activities to learn more about the history and culture of the area.”
An athlete-centered program is not, however, without its challenges. Durham and Tate have to ensure that participants have training opportunities abroad. At the end of the day, these students are still all Division I athletes who need to keep up with their workout routines.
“Training looks different program-to-program depending on the available facilities, but it challenges our student-athletes to adapt to new environments while maintaining their routines,” Durham wrote. “It’s also an opportunity to cross-train with student-athletes from different athletic teams.”
While all these programs have different focuses, different projects and different training locations, one thing remains true: Sports are at the heart of everything.
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“No matter the location, there’s always an element of sport involved — even if it’s just community pick-up soccer games,” Durham said. “This is a powerful reminder to me of the global connectivity of sports.”
The day-to-day of ACE
To be considered for a spot on an ACE program, each athlete has to fill out an application outlining their interests and location preferences along with a series of questions surrounding civic engagement. From there, a select group of athletes interview with Durham and Tate before the final participants are chosen.
However, that’s where the similarities end. The day-to-day opportunities and challenges the athletes face can look very different in each program.
Voinov’s projects centered around environmental issues over the course of her 14 days in Costa Rica. During the day, she’d walk the beaches with her fellow athletes, picking up trash while observing pollution’s devastating effects on marine environments. At nights, she’d don an all-black outfit, following one person with a flashlight along the sand as they hunted for sea turtle nests. They all had to walk in a straight line during these night patrol sessions to avoid disturbing the nests.
Like Barket, she also had to navigate a language barrier. In the beginning, she and many of the other athletes found it difficult to communicate when they got assigned their teams. Lucky for her, soccer is a second language in Gandoca, so Voinov was welcomed into the community as one of its own, regardless of the language difference.
“They had this really, really big annual [soccer] tournament where everyone in Gandoca plays,” Voinov said. “They have a men’s game and a women’s game, and they have people come over from different towns, and it’s amazing.”
Barket came face-to-face with the rainy season during his week in Panama.
“It would be sunny, and then 10 minutes of just the worst downpour you’ve ever seen,” said Barket.
Covered in mud and fighting extreme humidity every day, Barket realized that this was the reality for so many kids in Panama. The place Duke’s athletes stayed at had no washer or dryer.
“We went to the local grocery store one afternoon. We just bought three buckets, a thing of detergent, and then luckily, [the hostel] had a hose,” Barket said. “We all just took turns … old-school washing each other’s clothes.”
The school he worked at was made up of simple cinder blocks, no air conditioning to combat the oppressive heat or reprieve from the mosquitos. The kitchens didn’t have stoves to cook lunches, just a cinder block oven out back. Still, he swears meals at the school were among the best he’s ever had.
Balakrishnan worked at a nonprofit for food insecurity in South Africa, where she witnessed the difficulties families have putting food on the table.
“You realize that people’s priorities are … so different,” Balakrishnan said. “[It’s] humbling … brings you back down to Earth every time.”
While all the athletes in each of the programs had unique experiences or challenges, they each walked away with a renewed gratitude for their lives at Duke.
“We’re completely privileged here,” Barket said. “I don’t have to worry about my next meal. I don’t have to worry about my safety. I often reflect back on my time in Panama to be like, ‘Hey, I need to bring gratitude to life.’”
Looking ahead
Barket, Voinov and Balakrishnan are all now ACE ambassadors, a job that requires them to bring back to Duke the lessons learned from their time abroad and to inspire the next batch of ACE athletes.
Over the past few months, Voinov has attended various informational sessions and social events to get to know athletes and encourage them to apply for a spot. Once the final participant list is decided, she will be paired with a few of the new ACE athletes, acting as a kind of mentor before they go abroad themselves.
The work of an ambassador, however, isn’t limited to helping the next “generation.” When athletes return to campus in the fall, they create “Action Plans” to build on their experiences while at Duke.
“Through their Action Plans, student-athletes have created service opportunities for their teams, taken language classes, pursued other related academic coursework and applied for service post-graduate fellowships,” Durham wrote.
Barket, though, took it one step further. After coaching kids like Pedro, he realized that they would not have the same opportunities to compete at a high level as an athlete in the United States. With five other ACE athletes, he founded the Rising Athletes Foundation, which is aimed at giving Durham high school students the opportunities to access athletics through higher education.
“We provide mentoring, guidance and financial aid to help these kids who might not have every resource or have the right support system, but they have a passion,” Barket said. “They work hard, and they want to take sports seriously so they can affect their life through sport, either [through] higher education [or] opportunities, just like every athlete at Duke ever has been afforded.”
The Rising Athletes Foundation already has several kids enrolled and is looking to expand its numbers through other ACE athletes. Other initiatives, like the Duke Sustainable Athletics Group, have also come out of ACE.
Programs like Barket’s get at the heart of what ACE is about. It’s not just an opportunity for athletes to spend some time abroad in the summer or participate in short-term civic engagement projects. It’s about the desire to do good in the community, both local and global, and to have a lasting effect on other people’s lives.
That’s the power of ACE.
Mackenzie Sheehy is a Trinity junior and associate editor for The Chronicle's 120th volume.