CAMPUS PROFILE

(Colorado Springs, Colorado) 

The Collaborative for Community Engagement (CCE) at Colorado College (CC) is located in downtown Colorado Springs. With the embeddedness in a growing urban setting, there is no shortage of opportunities to engage in meaningful and impactful community work as a campus! Community-engaged learning at CC is, however, intimately shaped by their unique “block plan,” a curricular schedule in which students take one course at a time for 3.5 weeks (4 sequential courses per semester). To leverage the strengths of this curricular rhythm for community-engaged pedagogy, as well as minimize its drawbacks and limits, the CCE is working to support the transition from traditional service-learning pedagogies to community-driven knowledge- and project-based work. With the support of the Bonner Foundation, they are working to deepen engagement with public problem-solving as a strategy for condensed format community-engaged learning courses. To balance these efforts to support short-term projects, they are also working on initiatives to organize their campus into issue-based coalitions in order to work toward sustained collective impact.

The CCE launched a faculty course development cohort in the 2019-2020 academic year to enhance understanding of community-engaged research methodologies, how to integrate them into the classroom, and practically support the process of identifying community projects that would fit into course learning goals. They met to discuss topics such as Conceptual Foundations, From Theory to Practice, Power and Equity, and Community Impact. Members of this cohort committed not only to participating in a monthly learning community, but also to integrating a community-engaged project into one of their courses. They had 8 faculty apply to this initiative, and while the pandemic has certainly presented barriers to community work in the classroom, the vast majority have been able to integrate community project(s) into their courses. Examples of these courses include: an introductory environmental studies course co-creating a map of food vendors for a local food rescue organization; a Nonprofit Management course organizing their students into teams to conduct secondary research on issues of interest to local nonprofits; and a statistics course analyzing data for the Parks & Rec division of our city to help them understand the diversity of participants in their programs. 

To leverage the block for deep community impact, they need not only to understand how to best deploy the block format, but also how to support those projects that best meet the community needs. The CCE ascribes to the principle that communities are best equipped to identify their own challenges, needs, and outcomes. For community-engaged pedagogical support, this means that they must work to identify and elevate community-driven needs to interested faculty whose expertise can help fill such needs, transitioning away from primarily faculty-initiated project ideas that may not address the most pressing needs of an organization. To support this goal, in the fall of 2019, CCE launched the PEAK Inquiry Project, a platform through which community partners can share problem-solving, creative, and skill-based project ideas, which our office seeks to match to student changemakers (volunteer teams and thesis projects) and faculty for engaged classroom projects. PEAK stands for “Publicly Engaged, Actionable Knowledge,” and is shorthand for the Pikes Peak community; its broad goal is to bring the knowledge of the campus to bear on community-identified, applied questions and challenges.

Piloted in 2019-2020, and developed this academic year (despite the barriers of COVID conditions), they have found this platform to be a great success. They have been able to match community projects with student thesis projects, courses, summer research positions, capstone projects, and student volunteering efforts. This platform was the main avenue through which they identified project ideas for faculty in the course development cohort, but has not been limited to connecting with that particular cohort. Examples of projects submitted and “matched” include everything from a need to update educational materials for a children’s literacy tutoring program, to secondary research into the best terminology to represent all gender and sexual identities for an organization that works with LGBTQIA youth, to a project working to survey youth on their needs for a Teen Court program. To continue to develop this program, they hope to hire a Partner Fellow and Faculty Fellow as strategists this summer.

While they are excited by the potential of project-based work to best leverage a block course for community impact, they also recognize the limits of project-based work in building sustained relationships with community organizations or providing opportunities for sustained collaboration around community work on campus. To balance the short-term nature of project-based work, their second priority as an office is to work more deliberately toward campus-wide collective impact approaches organized around priority issue areas. They are working on two main initiatives to build sustained, collective community work around issue areas that might coordinate and meaningfully sequence project-based work as well as ongoing co-curricular community engagement. First, they are building out a new issue-based coalition structure, which seeks to facilitate collaboration among students (including Bonners), faculty, staff, and partners around priority issue-areas. They have hired 10 student Issue Organizers whose role is to serve as a coalition builder, connector, and “issue buff” on campus. These coalitions are intended to bring together community organizations, student organizations, engaged students, engaged faculty, and interested individuals working in the same issue to: (1) better coordinate and spread awareness of what our campus is already doing, and (2) better connect people with opportunities to get involved (existing and10 new). You can read more about this structure here; issues around which we are organizing include: immigrant and refugee justice, gender and sexuality, K-12 education and youth organizing, political advocacy, poverty and inequity, racial equity, health and accessibility, criminal justice, and next year we will launch arts for social change.

Finally, they recognize the importance of engaging in some cultural change and education on CC’s campus to better support community organizing as a practice. Through a course called Organizing for Social Change, as well as organizing-related co-curricular workshops, the CCE is working to educate students on the skills and theories of community organizing as a way to move the campus beyond individual volunteering toward community engagement as relationship-building, power-building, and collective action toward shared goals. Around 15 students have been taking this year-long course, taught by the CCE Director, in addition to students attending open workshops and the training that our Issue Organizers and students leaders are receiving. To serve as a strategist and thought partner in this work, they are  hoping to hire a Community Organizing Faculty Fellow, as well.