Team

“Democracy is neither a consumer good nor a spectator sport but rather the work of free citizens, engaged in shared civic education.[i]” The National Commission on Civic Renewal

Democracy is the ongoing work of the people to create and recreate the places where they live and the communities that anchor their lives. A democratic society is fundamentally dependent upon a citizenry that possesses the capacity and interest to work together as public problem solvers and co-producers of public goods.[ii] This is difficult in a modern world that rarely teaches the skills of citizenship and devalues public work. Yet, we have a generation of students who desire to work as citizens. We also have communities that desperately need them. The Center for Outreach, Volunteerism, and Education (the Cove) at Colgate University is developing a model of team-based community work, as a way to connect our students to the Upstate region in ways that will develop a generation of democratic citizens and a geographic region of healthy communities.

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. Educational institutions have long sought to instill within individuals both the interest and capacity to be public problem solvers and co-producers of public goods. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard wrote in 1908, “At bottom, most of the American institutions of higher education are filled with the democratic spirit. Teachers and students alike are profoundly moved by the desire to serve the democratic community.[iii]” Later John Dewey would write, “the relation between democracy and education is a reciprocal one, a mutual one, and vitally so.[iv]”

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. As Lewis Mumford, David Riesman and others predicted, we have produced a bureaucratic, technical society with a corresponding loss of an ethos of citizenship. We are the lonely crowd, who bowl alone.[v]

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. This is the goods news. More troubling are the motives and world-views behind the renewed commitment to service.

The current generation of students is shaped by a series of interweaving paradoxes. They are cynical about politics, but care about social change. They believe that time is a precious commodity not to be wasted, and yet they are willing to devote large amounts of time to activities that matter.[vi] Given these paradoxes, students are not likely to vote or to engage in formal political activities. However, they are attracted to community involvements through service. A group of undergraduate student leaders recently wrote a Wingspread document for Campus Compact in which they wrote, “For the most part, we are frustrated with conventional politics, viewing it as inaccessible….however, we are deeply involved with civic issues through non-traditional forms of engagement…service is a viable and preferable alternative at this time.[vii]”

Thus, community service provides an opportunity and a problem. It can be an entry point for engaging students in democracy. But it 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.

Abraham Lincoln described a democracy as government of the people, by the people, for the people. The Wingspread students use Lincoln to describe three layers of democracy:

- government for the people where rights and responsibilities are assigned through formal political structures;

- government of the people, where volunteers seek to alleviate immediate needs, and

- government by the people, where individual acts of service are connected to broad frameworks of systematic change.[viii]

It is this last category of “service politics,” that captures the hopes of the current generation of college students.[ix]

In a real sense, the Wingspread students are acting on the advice A. Bartlet Giamatti, the former President of Yale University who stated, “For all the knowledge that we will never succeed in the work of our lives, we must continue to choose to continue. For all the frustrations and fears each of us has and will have in our short time, that will shatter us within and separate us each from each, we must choose to pursue to the end of choosing the best we know for ourselves and for each other, and in that choosing, long and late, we will connect with each other.[x]”

In other words, the students are committed to ideas of equity, justice, and freedom. They see service as a way to work towards those ideals. They are realists who recognize that successes will seem small and defeats common. But, they see a long term commitment to community involvement as the essence of humanity- a way to connect to each other in a common pursuit of a longer dream of healthy, democratic community building.

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. It fails to give students an understanding of the origins of social problems and community struggles. It fails to give students the information and skills to become problem solvers. To quote a recent Colgate student, “The old model of philanthropy left a sour taste in my mouth. It seems self-serving, as if all students are offering is a block of their time, rather than their heart and mind. Think how much we can learn and how much more we can do.”

The real problem with philanthropic models is both the activity (the form of service) and the process (how the service is done). Communities are shaped by social, economic, and political forces. These forces work at multiple levels. To build and sustain healthy communities, we need an activated citizenry that is committed to and competent to work across each of these dimensions. Philanthropy places community service in a narrow corner of the local and the social, where there is no attempt to connect it to the political or the economic at any level.

Thus, philanthropic forms of community service disengage students from community 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. It appears as one more example of how actions cannot produce outcomes in a world that is seemingly hostile to change.[xi] 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.

We have been quoted elsewhere as saying, “students think of service as planting a tree on a Saturday afternoon, which is certainly important. But the experience can be much deeper if they think about why the tree needs to be planted. We want them to embed what they're doing in the greater questions of problems that society faces. So, when you're a Sidekick to a child from a low-income family, what are the special issues he's facing? It's great to spend an hour playing baseball, but more importantly, you're providing a positive role model and a commitment that child really needs. Why do they need that commitment? What does it tell us about modern life? How can you work with others to create formal changes to society that will elevate that need over time.[xii]”

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

Following the work of Harry Boyte and others, we believe the key concept is public work. Here the emphasis is on ordinary citizens coming together to produce things or create processes with lasting civic value. Boyte states, “Public work is work by ordinary citizens who build and sustain our basic public goods and resources. It solves common problems and creates common things. It may be paid or voluntary, done in communities, or as part of one’s regular job. Public work takes place with an eye to general, other-regarding consequences. It is also work done ‘in’ public: a mix of people whose interests, backgrounds, and resources may be quite different.[xiii]”

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.

The core of a public works conception is problem solving. Problem solving requires having frameworks for understanding the complexity of communities. It also requires learning to work across the spectrum of social, political, and economic institutions. Producing public works requires students to identify root causes of issues and to work towards solving problems. This simply cannot be done without understanding communities in their complexity and working across social, economic, and political venues to move them forward. Hence, community service becomes the serious business of long term consequences defined by the Wingspread students.

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 did it? 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.

Q #2: Where are the needs and opportunities? Q #5: How well did it work?

Q #3: What do we have to offer our community? ` COMMUNITY WORK

Obviously, there are many variations within the model. Students work across the five stages differently depending on a range of circumstances. The model was specially developed to get away from proscribed, static, stale organizational models of service. We want to create a fluid process that encourages innovation, problem solving, communication, and personal development. To do this, 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.[xiv]”

It is also through this sort of publicly spirited conversation that people learn. To quote Nina Eliasoph, “Theorists since Aristotle have argued that regular political conversation is a defining feature of a healthy democracy; that in a democracy, the substance of political life is a public discussion; that the ways we can talk about our concerns go far is shaping them; that the ability to discuss politics allows citizens to generate power together.[xv]” Through conversation, we generate attachments to the wider world, come to understand the wider world, develop a vision for the wider world, and generate power to transform the wider world.

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:[xvi]

· 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.[xvii]

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.[xviii]” Contrarily, the Wingspread students remind us that “colleges and universities do not teach us the community building/organizing skills that we need[xix].” 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] The National Commission on Civic Renewal, A National of Spectators. College Park: University of Maryland, 1998. pp.8-9.

[ii] There are lots of different ways to frame these end goals. We have chosen to adopt the language of Henry Boyte. In general, we find the work being done by Boyte and others at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Hubert Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota to be inspiring and consistent with our thinking and mission at Colgate.

[iii] As quoted in Harry Boyte and Nancy Kari “Renewing the Democratic Spirit in American Colleges and Universities.” In Higher Education and Civic Responsibility, edited by Tom Ehrlich. Oryx Press, 1999.

[iv] John Dewey, 1956. Philosophy of Education. New York: Littlefield, Adams & Co. p. 34

[v] Lewis Mumford, 1951. The Conduct of Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Orlando Patterson’s piece on David Reisman in the May 19 NY Times beautifully articulates this point.

[vi] Interesting studies include: www.kff.org; The Vote Smart Pew ( www.vote-smart.org ); Harvard Institute of Politics Study www.ksg.harvard.edu.

[vii] Long. 2002. p.1

[viii] Harry Boyte has laid out a similar conceptualization in a number of his papers. See for example Boyte and Farr, The Work of Citizenship. Available at http://www.publicwork.org/home.html

[ix] Sarah Long. 2002. The New Student Politics. The Wingspread Statement on Student Civic Engagement.”

[x] A. Bartlet Giamatti, A Free And Ordered Space. W.W. Norton, 1990. Pp.303-304.

[xi] Many people have written about this issue. We find two sources particularly useful: Craig Rimmerman, 2001. The New Citizenship. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Harry Boyte, 1991. Community Service and Civic Education.” Phi Beta Kappan (June).

[xii] This is an expanded quote from an article by Rebecca Costello . A Home for Service. The Colgate Scene. November 2001, available at http://offices.colgate.edu/cscenter/

[xiii] Harry Boyte and James Farr. 1997. The Work Of Citizenship and the Problem of Service-Learning. In Experiencing Citizenship. Edited by Richard Battistoni and William Hudson. Washington: American Association of Higher Education.

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

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

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

[xvii] 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.

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

[xix] Long, 2002. p. 8.

From Community Service To Community Builders

Q #3: What do we have to offer our community? ` COMMUNITY WORK