Network for Global Civic Engagement Reception

Tue, October 23, 2018 3:30 PM - Tue, October 23, 2018 5:30 PM at The Kellog Hotel & Conference Center, Room 93

Location:
The Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center, Room 93
219 S. Harrison Road
East Lansing, Michigan 48824

Thanks to a generous grant to the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities from MSUFCU, the Network will be announcing seed grants to help faculty and students from across the campus with the investments, leverage, assessments or technical support required to build the kinds of sustained and reciprocal university-community partnerships that have global reach and impact.

We are just beginning the second year of this five-year construction project funded by the MSU Federal Credit Union. After a year of careful planning and consultation with many of prospective MSU and community partners in 2017-18, we (a Coordinating Committee of 12 faculty and staff from RCAH, CSLCE, Music, Engineering, James Madison, Law, Arts & Letters, Outreach and Engagement, International Studies and Programs, Honors College, Education, and Social Science) are ready to put the Network into action.

Three interrelated concepts inform the vision for this network. We realize it will take time to realize this vision, and over the next four years we believe we can build a set of exemplary partnerships that embody it.

First, the network will be devoted to sustained community partnerships. That means the partnerships we want to create will be designed to be sustainable even as individual faculty, students, and staff may rotate in and out. They will have a business model that makes sense and a means of assessment and evaluation to facilitate future fundraising.

Second, the civic engagement programs in the network will have a global reach so that space, ways of knowing, and goals are integrated across communities at home and abroad. This means that the activities that define the civic engagement program will connect participants across geographical boundaries depending upon the nature of the program. For example, a literacy or health program with local migrant workers or refugees may be tied to their families and communities in their countries of origin or in other diasporic communities in the US or abroad.

Third, the relationships between academic and community partners will be reciprocal, that is, the partners will share with and learn from each other in ongoing communities of teaching, learning, and co-generation.