Bonner Foundation Joins Leading Higher Education Organizations to Engage All College Students in Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE)
September 28, 2021
The Corella & Bertram F. Bonner Foundation today joined forces with dozens of higher education and student success organizations to announce a “Shared Commitment” to make “Democracy Learning a Top Priority for Postsecondary Education.”
Democracy faces monumental challenges in the U.S. and world-wide. And in this pivotal era, “Shared Commitment’ calls on the higher education community to take concerted action to help build Americans’ readiness to tackle urgent public problems, together.
In 2012, A Crucible Moment served as a call to action for higher education institutions to renew their commitment to civic learning and democratic engagement. Many individuals from across the Bonner Network were involved in national roundtables convened by the Association of American Colleges and Universities that shaped this document. The Bonner Program’s developmental model is featured as an example of a robust, scaffolded approach that successfully supports students’ learning, engagement, and post-graduate success. The Foundation has actively sought to apply its lessons and support the expansion of collaborative work across higher education.
Urging “equity-committed civic learning,” the “Shared Commitment” signatories call for civic inquiry, practice in civil discourse, and collaborative work on real-world public problems to be part of each postsecondary student’s educational pathway.
“We are proud to support the Shared Commitment pledge,” announced Robert (Bobby) Hackett, Bonner Foundation President. “The pledge connects with our founding and present aspirations to support fully engaged campuses which engage a majority of students, enact their public purpose, and address pressing community issues.”
Ariane Hoy, Vice President, added, “The work of the CLDE aligns with the Foundation’s mission and goals to support college access, student development, community impact, and a culture of engagement, as well as our current strategic initiatives to build integrative pathways across curriculum and co-curricular life, as well as support racial equity and justice.”
Background
The Shared Commitment pledge was organized by the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE). Founded by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), Complete College America (CCA) and College Promise, CLDE is working in partnership with civic learning organizations and initiatives across the U.S.
CLDE builds from the revival of civic learning already spreading across K-12 and hundreds of postsecondary institutions, spurred by the work of many educational organizations that endorsed the Shared Commitment statement.
“These efforts are a strong beginning, but much more is needed to make democracy learning expected, rather than possible, for postsecondary students,” said leaders of the organizations that joined the “Shared Commitment“ pledge. The problem, say CLDE leaders, is that students from underserved communities are often the least likely to take part in programs and courses that help engage them with urgent public problems.
LINKS WITH THE BONNER MODEL
Since its founding in 1990, the Bonner Program has aimed to build fully engaged campuses. In 2016, the Bonner Foundation partnered with AAC&U to produce this fall volume of Diversity & Democracy. Its articles explore the evidence and models for creating integrative academic and co-curricular pathways that culminate in community engaged capstones. Through these pathways, students acquire civic learning and the skills for being democratically engaged and building the capacity of communities.
The Bonner Program, created in 1990, offers a model for diverse low-income students, often from underserved communities, to attend college and participate in an intense, developmental experience of civic learning and democratic engagement. Now offered at 65 colleges and universities, programs engage 3,000 students a year and boast more than 18,000 alumni. As evident in the Foundation’s student impact studies of current students and alumni, these students are prepared for civically engaged lives. In fact, a 2020 report The Bonner Program: Proven Impacts was shared across AAC&U’s network of 1,300 institutions as an illustration of a campus model. While the Foundation’s network is small, the model of service-based scholarships and linking community engagement with financial aid and Work Study provide a replicable idea for across higher education.
Additionally, the Foundation recognizes how the Shared Commitment links with its current strategic initiatives, including to foster faculty and student involvement in community-engaged learning. The Foundation’s approach for Community-Engaged Signature Work was featured in the AAC&U 2016 publication of Diversity & Democracy. Today, ongoing work to build community-engaged integrative pathways and degrees, supported through the Bonner Community-Engaged Learning Initiative, remains a central focus. “Imagine if a quarter of seniors graduated having completed community-engaged capstones,” Hackett suggested. The Shared Commitment website features the guided pathway model shared in that issue and introduced by Ariane Hoy and Kathy Wolfe in a cover story describing the vision and potential models for linking community engagement with academic curriculum.
Since the publishing of A Crucible Moment in 2012, the Foundation also participated in a related consortia, the CLDE Action Network, led by Caryn McTighe Musil, former Senior Vice President at AAC&U. The CLDE Action Network involved representatives of twelve major national organizations whose work addresses civic and community engagement, voter education, deliberative democracy and dialogue, faith communities, and inclusive excellence. Participating in this national Community of Practice has fueled the Foundation’s strategic initiatives for over a decade.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
CLDE seeks to expand the national debate from its insufficient focus on skills and short- term training to a larger concern with all college students’ civic, historical, global, and intercultural knowledge, and students’ active work on pressing public problems. “Shared Commitment” signatories include the Higher Learning Commission which, in 2020, made civic engagement a criterion for the 967 institutions it accredits.
The CLDE coalition will work on four goals to engage college students with democracy’s future:
Quality and Equity: Build commitment and capacity—across postsecondary education—to make civic learning and democracy engagement an expected part of a quality college education for all college students, with equitable participation by students from underserved communities a top priority.
Democracy Engagement: Engage students with democracy’s history, present and future in a diverse United States, in U.S. communities still struggling to reverse inherited disparities, and in a globally interdependent world where authoritarianism is on the rise.
Collaborative Problem-Solving: Prepare each postsecondary student, through creative combinations of general education, arts and sciences studies, and career-related studies, to work directly on selected public problems that society needs to solve—e.g., problems in racial healing, health, education, housing, climate, digital access, human rights, justice systems, interfaith cooperation, and more.
Policy Commitment: Secure policy support for and robust public investment in the goals listed above.
To learn more about efforts on civic learning and democracy engagement, visit College Civic Learning: A Hub for the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement Movement.
To sign the Shared Commitment statement, join the CLDE movement, and share your own work toward the CLDE goals, visit www.CollegeCivicLearning.org