Center for Outreach, Volunteerism and Education

The COVE is a center of citizenship and community building. We are focused on challenging our students to become engaged citizens of the world.

We refer to our activity as public work, which we define as work by ordinary citizens to create and recreate the places that anchor our lives.

Most of all we embrace democracy. We help students develop the skills of citizenship, while giving them opportunities to use these skills to enhance the upstate region.

To do this, we provide multiple ways for students and faculty to do community work through volunteer organizations, service learning classes, summer internships, career counseling, and residential life programs.

Below we have an explanation of our philosophy. For a longer, more thorough description please click here.

Team-Based Community Work:
Democracy, Citizenship, and Community Service

America’s challenges at the beginning of a new century are two-fold: to create healthy communities that can meet the multiple needs of people within a rapidly changing and globalizing world; and the widespread re-engagement of a citizenry as the driving force in public life that can provide the wise and ethical leadership needed to produce and sustain these communities.

Educational institutions should be central to this quest. From Thomas Jefferson’s founding of the university of Virginia to Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Academy to the writings of John Dewey, the great contribution of American educational institutions has been their commitment to the democratic spirit and broad public purpose.

Over the last century, we have gotten away from this notion. We have replaced education for democracy with technical education. Our country has suffered. We now have a populace that is largely disengaged from community and politics, and generally lacking in basic civic capacity for community self-action.

Community service can be at the core of a movement to revitalize American communities. We now have a generation of college students who are interested in community service, and who define their commitment to society through that involvement.

However, community service can also be a mechanism of retreat. At its worst, community service can be driven by cynicism over formal politics and can result (too often) into individualized, compartmentalized acts of service that shields people from the realities of community and robs communities of the well versed and multitalented citizens it needs.

How do we create forms of community service that engages, rather than disengages, students from democratic life?

We must get beyond the philanthropic model of community service. Philanthropic models give students opportunities to volunteer in service to their communities. The main emphasis is on individual voluntary efforts to “do something good in the community.” Little is asked of students. There is little training, reflection, or emphasis on the long term. The action is directed at providing service or money to somebody in need today.

This model is commendable for its ability to engage students in values of responsibility and commitment to the common good. However, the model falls terribly short by modeling a form of thin volunteerism. In these activities, students are not presented with opportunities to acquire the information or frameworks to understand the messy, complex realities of communities. Students also do not develop the skills to become community builders or organizers. Finally, many students become cynical about service because it seems divorced from social change. In short, students learn to go someplace and volunteer, but they do not learn the skills of community organizing, the arts of public dialogue, and the process of critically thinking that allows them to become a productive citizenry.

How do we get community service right? How do we develop community service as a process of developing citizens and healthy communities?

We believe the key concept is public work, which we define as work by ordinary citizens to create and recreate the places that anchor our lives. Here the emphasis is on ordinary citizens coming together to produce things or create processes with lasting civic value.[i]

Public work is a conception of service as engagement in the messy, complex, ugly reality of communities with an eye towards working with others to identify, specify, and solve problems. Thus, the emphasis shifts towards:

- complex and long term projects of changing social structures and institutions, and not simple tasks of doing good;

- students as producers of public works, and not consumers of volunteering activities;

- developing the skills of citizenship, not the development of virtues and values.

To meet this challenge, the Cove is developing and launching a new model of community service. We refer to our model as Team-Based Community Work. Like many universities, we have a long tradition of helping our students volunteer in the community. Like many places, we are changing how we think about, organize around, and engage in service. Our new model is built around processes that encourages our students to come together and work in teams around community based projects whereby four outcomes are achieved:

Thus, we are engaging our students in ways that produces the frameworks of understanding and skills needed to understand communities in their complexity, while also working across social, political, and economic venues to produce public goods and solve social problems.

Question #1: How do I organize a core group of peers? Students start by acquiring the skills to organize and educate a core group of peers who come together to form a project team. Most often, this happens when a group of students have an idea for a project (often carried over from a pervious semester). They recruit team members through student activities night and by word of mouth. However, there are other paths to team formation. Sometimes, students form a team as part of a class project. Increasingly, students (or a group of friends) come to the Cove looking for projects, and we train them to identify peers with particular skills or resources and recruit them into projects.

The size of a project team can vary, but typically a team consists of 4-25 members with 1-2 project team leaders.

Question #2: What are the needs and opportunities in our community? What are the needs in our community? Where are there opportunities to do better? Addressing these questions requires having a good understanding our community as it is shaped by social, economic, and political forces both internally and externally.

Working through the Cove’s Directors of Community Outreach and Service Learning, project teams partner with a community entity. This is often a traditional non-profit organization, but it may also be an informal association of neighbors, a government entity, a merchants associate, or any other sort of formal or informal community group. Trained with the basic skills of coalition partnering and needs assessment, the project team and community partner map needs and opportunities.

Question #3: What do we have to offer our community? The project team then returns to campus to locate under-utilized assets that can be used to meet the identified needs and opportunities. They do this in consultation with the Cove’s Directors of Community Outreach and the Director of Service Learning. We provide basic training needed to map and assess assets. Often, the under-utilized asset may be unused student time which we turn into volunteering hours. However, the asset mapping may unearth a range of assets. For example: students may locate valuable items in the waste stream (computers, books), opportunities to divert university funds, faculty research expertise, student skills (e.g. website design), and other intellectually based resources.

Question #4: How do the pieces fit together? Next, the project team works with their community partner to develop a specified project plan. Students start undergo training to acquire the basic skills of community building. In the process, they learn to address basic questions: How can we use these assets to solve public problems and create public goods? How do our assets fit with the assets of our community partners? Where is their synergy? How do these synergies get maximized? What are the potential threats? How do we avoid the threats, while using our assets in unison with others to meet the vision a community has for itself? Students then work in with their community partner to turn their ideas into a specified action plan.

Community Work: Students are now ready to act. Using the action plan, the team works to implement their project. The duration of a project can vary tremendously. Most projects take place over an entire semester, but some last only a day or weekend. Many projects take place across an entire academic year or longer. At regular intervals the team will meet with the Cove Intern, the Director of Service Learning, and the Director of Community Outreach to assess the project’s progress. We use a model of action à reflection à reassessment à action. Throughout the process, there is a tremendous emphasis on the acquisition of skills needed to produce public work that solves public problems.

Question #5: How well it did work? What did we learn? What advice would we give to others who set out to do similar projects? At the end of the project, or for long range projects at the end of the academic year, the team comes together with Cove staff and community partners to assess outcomes. We hold forums to assess and reassess. Team leaders prepare a report for future teams about lessons learned and suggestions for future actions.

Obviously, there are many variations within the model. Students work across the five stages differently depending on a range of circumstances. The model is premised on the importance of five components of community-based work:

Sustained Reflective Dialogue: The process allows team members and Cove staff to enter into a sustained reflective conversation. We want students to engage each other in dialogue about themselves, community, community service, and social change. This type of reflective, intellectually charged dialogue helps students develop their own values and moral voice. It also sharpens their intellectual skills as they pull from their course work to participate in challenging conversations. Finally, it helps students develop a crucial skill of citizenship, the ability to engage others in conversation that deepens the commitment to and the quality of community work. To quote Guarschi and Cornwell:

“To become active participants in public life and democratic decision making, students must develop the arts of democracy. These include an appreciate for open inquiry and the development of communication skills. Students must learn how to find their own voices and how to construct arguments. They need to distinguish arguments from opinions by relying on evidence. Ultimately, students need to make judgments based on wisdom and knowledge rather than on prejudice and parochialism [ii].”

Problem Solving: A focus on problem solving problems allows us to move beyond “good work” as a goal. Rather, we are trying to solve problems in our communities. There are two target communities:

The Colgate Community: more than a decade ago, Earnest Boyer defined the challenge for higher education in a rapidly changing world as the need to create campuses committed to the six principles of learning [iv]:

· Educationally Purposeful- a place where faculty and students share academic goals and work together to strengthen teaching and learning on campus;

· Open Community- a place where freedom of expression is uncompromisingly protected and where civitiy to powerfully affirmed;

· Just Community- a place where the sacredness of person is honored and where diversity is aggressively pursued;

· Disciplined Community- a place where individuals accept their obligations to the group and where well-defined governance procedures guide behavior for the common good;

· Caring Community- a place where the well-being of each member is sensitively supported and where service to others is encouraged; and

· Celebrative Community- a place where the heritage of the institution is remembered and where rituals affirming both tradition and change are widely shared.

Colleges continue to struggle to create and sustain themselves as communities of learning. Through our work at the Cove, we are challenging our students to create and sustain these sorts of communities through service at Colgate.

Outside Communities: we want to be a catalyst for community development throughout the Upstate New York region (and sometimes beyond!). Communities face a variety of challenging in the globalizing world. In the Upstate New York region, many of our communities are struggling with:

· The assault on local cultures and struggles to maintain cultures that matter to communities and their residents.

· A non-responsive political system which perpetuates despair and lack of hope for a better future.

Because the root causes of these and other community needs are complex and challenging, so are the projects designed to address them. We work across social, economic, and political venues to focus on community building and problem solving. We want to start and complete projects, thereby leaving communities stronger. As a criteria, we often select projects that might not otherwise get done, but whose completion will make a real impact on a community.

Only by working towards solving problems will students avoid the cynicism and apathy that leads to retreatment from public life. Only with life long commitment from trained citizens will communities prosper in the emerging world.

Team Work: the work of producing healthy communities is joint work. We are moving beyond individual acts of service to joint projects of producing public goods. By working in teams students learn how to organize their peers, how to work collaboratively to identify and solve problems, and how to work within communities of difference. These are the basic tools of citizenship.

Partnering With Difference: we want to place our students in direct conversation with people who are often different from themselves. Democracy is a system predicated on the public as a “we.” Yet, we live in a world where the “we” is less apparent. People tend identify themselves through complex matrixes of race, class, gender, sexual identity, and lifestyle. As people come to embrace and define their lives based on these identities, we all must develop the skills to work across difference. The challenge is to find ways of associated living in a world marked by difference. We must develop skills to construct, celebrate, and thrive in communities marked by difference and connection [v].

Training With Basic Skills of Organizing and Community-Building: Craig Rimmerman reminds us, “people are not born as citizens; they need to be educated and trained [vi].” Contrarily, the Wingspread students remind us that “colleges and universities do not teach us the community building/organizing skills that we need [vii].” We provide students with training at every stage of the process. We see training as life-long and as multifaceted process of mentorship. Students are both the person being mentored and as people doing mentoring for others. Often times the two aspects of training are contained in the same act. You acquire training through the guided mentorship of others.

Liberal arts education is about the development of the mind and the heart. As such, liberal arts colleges are ideally poised to develop models that link universities to the common good through work in communities. The core of a democracy has to be the generation of an active citizenry. The core mission of higher education must be the development of students who have the capacity and interest to be full participants of a democracy. In other words, students who are capable of and committed to becoming public problem solvers and producers of public goods. This requires education that trains students in the following:

The Cove is a place for students to grapple with the complex issues that we all confront in a rapidly changing world. We seek to instill within students a passion for the world of ideas, a better intellectual tool-kit of ideas and skills, and habits of using their tool-kits as engaged citizens and creative problem solvers. In doing so, we are also developing models for reigniting universities as places committed to and successful in civic renewal.

[i] Much of our language here is derived from the work of Harry Boyte and others at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Hubert Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota.

[ii] Richard Guarasci and Grant Cornwell. 1997. Democratic Education In An Age of Difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pages 8-9.

[iii] Nina Eliasoph. 1998. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy In Everyday Life.” Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. P.8

[iv] Ernest Boyer, 1990. Campus Life: In Search of Community. Lawrenceville, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[v] For us, the essays in Guarasci and Cornwell have been essential for capture both the challenges and starting points for thinking about community service as it relates to these issues.

[vi] Rimmerman, p. 4. Rimmerman talks about these issues using the concept of the new citizenship

[vii] Long, 2002. p. 8.

Community service should be a life long habit embedded throughout every aspect of a person's life: The COVE offers support and coordination for student-led organizations, service learning programs, summer internships, alternative spring breaks, residential life opportunities, and an extensive career service program that focuses on not-for-profit work and public service.

Community needs are best addressed through a model of social entrepreneurship: The COVE provides students with the information and resources to: 1. identify problems in the community, 2. to creatively pull from their coursework and intellectual skills to devise ways they can be helpful in solving those problems, and then 3. to form alliances with community groups to make these projects happen.

Service should enhance civic engagement: Community service activities should equip people with civic and political skills needed to fully participate in every facet of a democratic society.

"A good community service center should put itself out of business by creating communities that are filled with opportunities, not needs."