The article in UConn Today called "Campus Welcomes a New Garden to Foster Connection in Memory of the Late ‘Swing Tree" discusses a new garden overlooking Swan Lake serves both to memorialize the beloved "swing tree" and to foster conversations among the UConn community.

Phoebe Godfrey, Associate Professor in Residence of Sociology, says her fall 2019 Society and Climate Change course decided to build some benches as part of the service learning component of the class. She says, " In the past, I have had the students pick small projects and a lot of the projects have focused on the UConn community,” says Godfrey. “The way I teach is to build community, because I do not think it is very effective to teach about climate change or structural racism or patriarchy in a hierarchical way. In class, it came up that there weren’t enough dialogues about climate change and there weren’t enough spaces to talk about it in intelligent and thoughtful ways.”

These benches face each other in order to create conversation about any topic people want to discuss there. This place is Phoebe's idea of her foundation on the topic of social construction among people.