Terry: I'd like to ask specific questions about community colleges' role in community building and what assets they have, tapped or untapped. Let's start off with Boston's Dudley Street Project. You said that community colleges provided some technical assistance?

Jody: I know there were students doing internships at Dudley Street, and some of the faculty were involved with the residents of the community. One of the great strengths of a community college often is that there isn't this absolute wall between people who are community people and people who are college people. There's a great overlap. So it's a wonderful place to begin to rethink the relationship between an academic institution and a community.

Every community college in the country ought to start with two sets of individual capacity inventories. First, interview all of their students about what their strengths, skills, resources and capacities are. So many students come into a community college setting not valuing who they are, thinking of themselves in a variety of ways as a failure. They've been battered around often, by the workforce and some of their experiences in the academic world. So one way of instituting a culture in the community college that is asset oriented rather than deficiency oriented is that everybody there does some kind of a capacity inventory focused on the students. Second, every community college might be involved, maybe through their service-learning component, in partnering with local community energies, wherever those might be, in doing a community center capacity inventory process.

I think it's possible to think about the departmental structure of the community college as a set of assets that could be connected with local community-building activities. Anybody in economics or business at any community college ought to be practically engaged in the development of local enterprises, the building of local jobs, and the connection of the local labor force with the local employment base. The service-learning part of that could be very exciting, linking students and faculty with the business community and with the capacities of local residents.

Terry: One of the problems we've had at community colleges is that a lot of the service-learning work is done by individuals taking it on as an additional responsibility. Some cooperative education person enlarges his or her job, or a sensitive faculty member takes on additional responsibilities. And then those people move on. There's no institutionalization. What are your thoughts about moving toward institutionalization, and what role do you think presidential leadership should be taking in that?

Jody: There are two tracks that need to proceed at the same time. If you've got a president who is receptive and ready to move, leap on it. I can imagine that's not the case in 95 percent of these settings. I'm convinced that building something at the edge isn't just about one person doing it. We can pay attention to institutionalization, while working at the edge where there is some ongoing life to it.

I think, for example, of our experience over the last three or four years with the United Way. If somebody had said to me five years ago that there would be 150 local United Ways seriously doing something around a capacity orientation in the community, I would have said they're nuts! It seems to me that United Way is one of the institutions so completely bought into the deficiency idea that it would be impossible to move them. Well, how did that happen? That didn't happen because somebody at the top of United Way of America made a decision that made that happen. It was discussions that were entirely local and then the beginning of the networking among those folks who were trying things. Now the United Way of America is trying to catch up to what their local groups are doing, and they've published a nice little book called United Way Community-Building Stories that focused on 10 of them that were all doing different things. So they're considered a kind of networker and spreader of the practices, but they're not the inventor of them, the shaper of them.

Karen: So you're comparing the administration of the United Way to the community college presidents?

Jody: Yes. It's not an exact analogy. But in my experience at Northwestern, for example, there's no way that our work is going to be the center of that university, ever. We are sometimes on the radar screen for the president, but only because people talk about it. The work we do is not at all at the center of the academic enterprise. It's too practical; it's too policy oriented; it's not researching in the pure way. It doesn't have in it any incentives that produce career successes. So there's no way we could have done this work at the center of Northwestern University.

But the edge of Northwestern is a wonderful place to do this work. I just think we ought to be creatively thinking not just about the president and his agenda, but about how to get some small things going that we could show the president.

Karen: So if the president is a real leader in service-learning, that's OK, but his or her leadership is not what you're relying on to carry service-learning forward. And the community partnerships that you're talking about, are you saying if it happens, great, but it's not critical to making everything else happen?

Jody: It's certainly not critical to making everything else happen. That's right. I don't want to be heard as saying it's unimportant. If service-learning and the notion of understanding communities in the ways we're talking about today gets to be around 20 years from now, evolving in various ways that we don't even know yet, that has to have some kind of a central buy-in from folks who are institutionally powerful. What I react against is thinking that for anything important to happen, it's got to be blessed from on high. I've been at the edges of things myself for so long that I'm perfectly willing to go ahead and do stuff and then apologize later, if I have to. But most of the time I don't have to. Most of the time I can show it off and people understand it. I would be nowhere had I waited for permission to do any of this stuff. It wouldn't happen.

Terry: If you had an audience of community college presidents, how would you motivate and encourage them? If they said, "Jody, what do you think we should do as a group of presidents to assist in service-learning or any other community-building initiative?" What would be your response to that?

Jody: One of the ways to understand the usefulness of major institutions in communities is to say that they are like that unexplored treasure chest, filled with community-building materials that nobody knows about and nobody ever uses. So, the prior question to a group of community college presidents is do you think building healthy communities is important? Do you think it's central to your mission? Do you think it's something a community college ought to be about? If you don't, OK, that's fine; but if you do, what you're sitting on is a huge set of capacities and assets that you don't have a clue about, or that you may have a clue about, but your community doesn't have a clue about.

I've seen this a lot with elementary and secondary schools in Chicago. Professionals put on the top of an institution, the principal of a high school or the president of a college, have a very narrow view of what it is they're sitting on top of. They see just part of what they're sitting on top of. It's an understanding that is professionally defined. A principal thinks she's involved in something that has people called teachers doing things to people called students in places called classrooms around something called the curriculum. Well, that's part of it, but just a small part. She's got buildings, budgets and capacities to start institutions. She's got all of those kids locked up in there. She ought to be thinking about that space and what the local businesses could do and what the local block clubs could do and what's there to be spilled out into the community, including the young people. That's what this is about, spilling out of young people into community.

Young people are clearly our major asset in lots of ways. If we talk to college presidents, we need to ask how they would begin to create or think about spilling out that stuff into community-building.

Karen: Because community members may not even be aware of some of these assets, should it be the community college that takes the initiative to let them know about it?

Jody: A serious community college would start with an asset inventory of itself. What have we got here that's potentially community-building material? Well, we've got space, we've got rooms, we've got computers, we've got equipment, we've got kitchens, we've got all these people who know how to do various things, we've got budgets, we've got just a huge range of stuff. Then let's sit with some community folk and think about this community-building material. That would be very exciting to do, I think.

Terry: So a president or a principal sitting up on the top of Camelback Mountain sees the place he sits and a few feet around him. He doesn't see the entire rest of the mountain as those wonderful resources which are necessary for community building.

Jody: Oh he might have an idea that stuff is there, but it's all funneled into a very narrowly defined set of purposes. A woman in this session, a very bright woman, was asking a series of questions about this way of understanding an institution. That is, how would you construct this within the constraints of current understanding of what a community college is? She asked questions about professional paths and about sequences of student involvement. It was a brilliant set of questions in one way, but it was also incredibly narrow, and it included the whole range of options, from A to B.

Terry: The things you're talking about — what if they work? What's different 10 years from now, in the year 2006?

Jody: One of the interesting exchanges we got into is a threshold question about where we're going as a culture. One simple-minded way of understanding it is through the crossroads we're at. Do we continue to produce people and institutions that support people as individuals who have to continue to define themselves mostly as individual consumers in a marketplace? Do we continue to produce people whose identity comes from an increasingly commodified set of options? Or do we find ways to self-consciously rebuild the possibility of people connecting with each other? We might have a college, but we're not going to have a community college, because we're not going to have a community unless we get much more serious about community and rebuilding. So that's the choice.

How will we know that something interesting is happening? On Dudley Street, people know each other. They know each other on the block level. It means that crime is down. It means that young mothers talk to each other about health and they talk when they're pregnant. It means that older folk in the community aren't frightened of the young people in the community because they actually know them and they've worked with them. All of the indices of a healthy community--whether infant mortality, or teen pregnancy or school dropouts--are affected because people know each other. It sounds so simple. But mostly we're constructing all kinds of ways in which people don't know each other anymore, and don't make the connection.

In a culture and an economy which atomizes, individualizes, commodifies and tries to pull into the cocoon, how do we construct ways for something called community to happen?

Karen: But we're not just talking about the community of people in the neighborhoods, are we? Let's say there's a partnership I want to get going as a community person working with people from my community college. I don't know them. I don't know the people I need to go to in that community college.

Jody: Absolutely.

Karen: I might know my neighbors, but I don't know how to get the community college president interested in what we're doing in our neighborhood or community. That's another whole place where we don't know each other.

Jody: I think that's exactly right. The old community organizing tradition says we need to constantly remember that you never, in fact, need an individual. You are constantly needing people who are dragging with them or being surrounded by a whole networking association of relationships. I don't know you until I understand all of the incredibly complex relationships that you bring. You may not have to get to the president of that community college, but I'll bet that there are people who have sets of relationships that begin to invade that alien reality.

Terry: We understand the potential of service-learning, but I think we're barely scratching the surface. To use my favorite word, I think we're very pedestrian about service-learning.

But service-learning can't be the only thing that would bring these people together. What are some of the other pedagogies or teaching strategies that you think would be effective in community building? For example, one of the things cooperative education has is contracts. They have expectations with United Way. They say we're going to place three students with you, but here are the things we expect of you. We expect to have a supervisor, and we expect mentoring. I think those are wonderful things.

Jody: Yes, a two-way street here.

Terry: In service-learning, I don't think we're that sophisticated yet. Are there some other ideas you have--approaches to learning--that align with what we're doing?

Jody: Well, I'm not sure that I'm as up to date as I should be on what falls technically in the box of service-learning. Almost anything, from my point of view, that knocks down walls between academic institutions and communities can't be bad, and the more thoughtful about it we are, the better. Teachers are being encouraged to bring in four or five folks during the course from the outside world--non-academic practitioners. Teachers in some high schools in Chicago are now getting told that whatever it is they're teaching, they've got to have their kids out in the community doing it one day a month. If they're teaching history, their kids have got to do some kind of oral history project with older folks in the neighborhood, or if they're teaching biology, they have to be involved with the park district in trying to figure out what's polluting the stream. They've got to do something that gets the young people out in the community to contribute. Internship is really important. I like mentorship, apprenticeship and shadowing.

Terry: You're saying it can't just be between student and supervisor; there has to be the other institutional connections as well.

Jody: The student and supervisor ought to be the excuse for a whole lot of other connections to happen that involve faculty and community folk. Absolutely.

Terry: How frustrating to you is it that Northwestern as an institution doesn't model what you vehemently believe?

Jody: I frankly don't expect it to. I never have expected it. I am interested in social invention. I am interested in social entrepreneurship, and I don't think that academic institutions are where that happens. I think academic institutions are useful sometimes as places to think about that, but it's not where I would look for people to help me to invent them. So I have never had the expectation that Northwestern was going to be much more than it is.

I shouldn't be unfair to Northwestern about this, because they've paid a lot of fruitful attention to questions of multicultural reality and diversity. They've paid a lot of very fruitful attention to thinking about 19- and 20-year-old students as whole people, which is helpful. As a research place, it attracts folks who also value teaching, and I like that. It's a little bit less snooty than some places. There are a lot of things I like about it, but it is not where community problem solving gets done. I think community colleges are much closer to the action.

Terry: I think what you're saying is that in most community colleges, the commuter colleges, the people who go there are citizens first and they're students second, as opposed to somebody from Chicago coming to Arizona State University, working in a shelter and saying what does this have to do with Chicago? Somebody who goes to Mesa Community College lives in Mesa, so the service they're doing is to their community.

Jody: Absolutely. And they have then a sense that they're part of something that's bigger than they are, that's got a developmental edge to it. That ought to be right at the center of how you understand what it is that you're doing in service-learning in a larger context. What is this about in terms of moving toward something? Toward a vision of something. It's not just skill-building. It is thinking about the creation of public people, citizens.

Karen: Creating not just leaders, but visionaries.

Jody: Yes, absolutely.

Terry: Have you given thought to the whole K-16 piece, the connection about education as a seamless system as opposed to education with limited entry and limited exit? I'm a proponent of creating opportunities for educators, whether they be K-12 or higher education, to get together and have a dialogue, because what they're doing is educating. Have you ever given any thought to those kinds of systems?

Jody: Very interesting question. There are two angles I would want to think about. First, how do we institutionalize what we've institutionalized? How do we get to a self-understanding that it's all about trapping people in systems and reconnecting with communities? The second thing I would want to grapple with is how do we constantly move young people into an understanding of their ever-growing capacities and obligations to give? And opportunities. It is the citizenship creation process, right? Somehow I think we're not real good at it. School is a sort of alternative to being a citizen.

Terry: How do we give young people an opportunity to engage in civic discussions and civic discourse? What are some general ideas you have about how we can get young people involved, given the systems that exist? What are some of the constructs you see that either exist or that we can deliberately create?

Jody: My simple-minded answer, from the Service Studies Program that I've been involved with for almost 30 years, is that you always start with the specific and the concrete and the encounter stuff. It is the face-to-face encounter with ordinary people doing ordinary things that begins to say what do you see happening there, what was this about? What did you like about it, what didn't you like about it? What could happen better?

If I'm doing Chicago politics or urban politics, I spend a morning with 12 kids down at the city council meeting and we watch whatever battles are going on down there. Then we go back and we talk about reality. What did we see there? What was this battle about? For what kinds of purposes? It's the deepest kind of civic analysis about what's going on. I think it's much richer to go from the specific, the particular and the concrete to the general than the other way around. It's the other way around that colleges normally do, right?

Terry: These are the things that young people need to engage in. They can do it. We just never expect it of them. I've found that kids will meet your expectations every time.

Jody: Absolutely. The Denver United Way has put together a fund for projects in five low-income neighborhoods, and their fund is administered by people from the neighborhoods. A very radical thing for United Way to do! But what they find is that the folks in the neighborhoods have incredibly high standards for each other, much higher than the United Way would ever have for any of their projects. It's sort of similar.

Terry: In some United Way organizations they have a youth board, and a percentage of the funding goes to the youth. The young people determine what gets funded, and it's got to be youth serving through youth organizations.

Jody: That's a great learning situation. You deal with actual money, actual projects.

Karen: That applies to people at any age. Let them do it. The Seattle Matching Funds Program, for example, is run by the neighborhoods. Money comes from the city, which is obtained from tax monies anyway, and the neighborhoods run the whole thing. They select the projects and they determine who gets how much money. At any age, if you let the citizens do it instead of doing it for them, it works. It's part of creating that healthy community we keep striving for.

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Terry Pickeral is the Assistant Director and Coordinator of Academic Programs for the National Center for Community Colleges. He also manages the Corporation for National Service Learn and Serve America Teacher Education Affinity Group. He has developed and implemented many campus-community collaborations.

Karen Peters, writer/editor with the National Center for Community Colleges, is active in community issues in Mesa, Arizona. She is co-chair of the Action Mesa! Transportation Task Force, a citizens action group, and serves on the Mesa Library Advisory Board. Her interests are education, the arts, transportation, community planning, the environment and communications.

The National Center for Community Colleges, established in 1990, has a dual mission. First it serves as a national advocate for community colleges to sustain service-learning as a national movement. Second, it serves member organizations and others in the promotion and implementation of community service as a means of improving teaching and learning to the benefit of students and the communities in which they serve.