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Blog showcases community-engaged learning and social change
June 7, 2021 — All across Cornell, students, faculty and staff are collaborating with community partners on issues that matter to them. This semester, they’ve shared these impactful community-engaged learning experiences and meaningful relationships via The Ripple Effect blog.
Managed by the Office of Engagement Initiatives, The Ripple Effect gives readers an opportunity to go behind the scenes of community-engaged learning to understand not just the programs and projects, but also the motivations, inspirations, challenges and triumphs that accompany the work.
New center expands community engagement opportunities
Basil Safi, right, executive director of the Office of Engagement Initiatives, will be executive director of the new public engagement center. Krista Saleet, left, director of Public Service Center, will be deputy executive director.
June 3, 2021 — Cornell is launching a new center this summer dedicated to advancing community-engaged learning and public service across the university. Combining the Public Service Center (PSC) and the Office of Engagement Initiatives (OEI), the center will open new pathways for Cornellians to embrace the university’s land-grant mission to improve lives in New York state, across the nation and around the world.
The center will be endowed in part through a gift from Einhorn Collaborative, the foundation led by David M. Einhorn ’91, a member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees. The foundation aims to help people build stronger relationships, embrace differences and rediscover their shared humanity, toward a goal of developing solutions to complex and urgent challenges.
There’s No Syllabus for This
Amber Haywood ’21
May 21, 2021 — Amber Haywood ’21 hadn’t finished settling into her freshman dorm room when an assault in Collegetown, a neighborhood where many Cornell students rent houses and apartments, brought nationwide attention to racism on college campuses. A Black Cornellian, right outside the house where he lived, was called the n-word and sustained physical injuries that sent him to the hospital. The person who was charged with assaulting him was a 19-year-old white man and a fellow Cornell student.
The assault shook the entire community, and news of it set Haywood on a course of action. She refused to live her next four years in fear. Change was needed, and Haywood wanted to help lead that change. She sought community in clubs such as #DoBetterCornell, Black Students United, and Building Ourselves through Sisterhood and Service. “Social justice orientation was very formative to my Cornell experience,” she says.
Break it down: CR0WD task force forges zero waste goals
May 21, 2021 — Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD) is a newly formed collaboration that brings projects and research from Cornell faculty-led labs together with experts across both the campus and the City of Ithaca to address sustainable development practices.
A cross-disciplinary, community-led initiative, CR0WD’s primary goal is to shift current practices in the demolition of buildings that have reached the end of their lifespan. Instead, those involved propose deconstruction — a process that extends the lifespan of building materials — as common practice. The more building waste recovered, they say, the greater the economic, environmental, and social value. Community-engaged learning is central to the project.
Read the full article on the College of Architecture, Art and Planning website.
Engaged Faculty Fellowship application closes June 1
May 19, 2021 — The Office of Engagement Initiatives (OEI) is accepting applications through June 1 for the 2021-22 Engaged Faculty Fellowship Program. This yearlong program has two cohorts:
- Faculty Fellows in Engaged Learning work on developing a syllabus for a community-engaged learning course;
- Faculty Fellows in Engaged Scholarship focus on publishing their community-engaged work.
In both cohorts, which are open to full-time faculty and academic staff, fellows join a small, dynamic group of academics committed to working in, with and for community. They meet monthly to share projects and troubleshoot challenges, and they contribute to a vibrant network of publicly engaged academics.