Campus Community Collaborations
Examples & Resources for Community Colleges

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" asked Alice, in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," the Cheshire Cat answered.

AmeriCorps is an attempt for a National Service Network program to get things done, strengthen communities, encourage responsibility, and expand opportunity in four issue areas--education, human needs, public safety, and the environment. AmeriCorps also provides member skill development in leadership, communication, conflict resolution, first aid, critical thinking and problem solving, and civic and community responsibility.

Campus Compact is raising hope for the future in building capacity and community with local K-12 systems, developing and enhancing school-campus partnerships, and engaging college students in meeting needs of the local schools and their students through service-learning. Community colleges invest in the future through educating the local community. They have the potential to expand the dimensions of academic study by bringing the academic vision into the world and the service experience into the classroom.

A window of opportunity has opened for the collaborations of community colleges and National Service Network programs that can be seen in the public's push for educational reform and the reinvention of government. This window opens at a time when community colleges are faced with the challenges of limited resources and at a moment when technology is changing our society to its very essence. Never before have we been in such a place. We must share resources and transform our response by drawing on our talented and diverse community to provide leadership and solve problems together.

Many priorities compete for institutional attention. As our institutions grow (it is their nature), they become too disconnected to be real community members. While the administration and faculty council meetings have reached their limits of problem solving, a few are getting things done in collaboration with AmeriCorps. Community colleges should take the lead and move toward collaboration with local agencies, schools, businesses, and government to maximize the potential of a partnership with AmeriCorps. A community college collaboration with National Service Network programs will usher in a new generation--not of charity workers or service providers and professionals, but of individuals who can interpret the complex intersection of structure and policy--a generation of people who have grappled with root causes and can reflect critically, understand society and embrace it.

In the words of John W. Gardner, chairman of the National Civic League, a partnership between a National Service Network program and community colleges could be a place "in which you're allowed to pursue truth, even if you're going in the wrong direction, allowed to experiment even if you're bound to fail, to map unknown territory, even if you get lost." It's a place, Gardner said,

in which we're committed to alleviate misery and redress grievances, to give rein to the mind's curiosity and the soul's longing, to seek beauty where we can and defend truth where we must, to honor the worthy and smite the rascals, with everyone free to define worth and rascality, to combat the ancient impulse to hate and fear the tribe in the next valley (or gang in the next alley), to find cures and console the incurable, to prepare for tomorrow's crisis and preserve yesterday's wisdom, and to pursue the questions others won't pursue because they're too busy or lazy or fearful or jaded.

As an AmeriCorps member, I didn't know where I wanted to get to. I followed a seemingly unmarked pathway of unfamiliar vocabulary and mazes of paperwork--presenting new ideas, taking risks and saying "I don't know," "I'm sorry," "I need help." For me, AmeriCorps led to proficiency in current technology and irreplaceable work experience. I learned valuable lessons and improved my ability to influence others, follow directions, and work with a team. AmeriCorps also offered the means to settle my student loans.

In the end, like Alice, I came to know what I've always known--that service puts a face on the ideas students encounter in their academic/college education. It's a face that inspires courage and commitment and supports my belief that service and reflection are powerful learning tools. And like Alice, I recalled what I had forgotten. "What is my truth?" and "Who are the rascals?" It was never a place to get to; it was getting to it that was important.

Liz Newport has a history of civic involvement, beginning when she was a sophomore in high school. She started a teen crisis line and drop-in center, and as a senior, she tutored at the Nisqually Tribal Center, taking student grievances to the school board.

With a part-time job and as a single parent raising a son, she continued to be involved in her community. She started an after-school child care program at the school her son was attending. After returning to college later in life, Liz combined her years of community involvement and her newly acquired education to embrace the concepts of service-learning as an AmeriCorps member with the Washington State Campus Compact Team. In 1994 she received the Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian National Award.

Liz is sole proprietor of Primative Perspectives Studio and Gallery and remains committed to art, her first love. She often combines art and learning in community development and youth projects.

Gardner, J. (1995). Remarks to the Independent Sector October 25, 1983. Wingspread Journal, 17( 3), back page.

		References
		Connecting Community Colleges to National Service Programs
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