Civic Action Planning Initiative
In our desire to deepen the strategic impact of community work, Colorado College is not alone. We engage in this collective visioning and planning process along with a national network of community engagement professionals, practitioners, scholars, and advocates within higher education, organized and guided by the Campus Compact. The mission of this coalition is to "advance the public purpose of colleges and universities by deepening their ability to improve community life and educate students for civic and social responsibility … envisioning colleges and universities as vital agents and architects of a diverse democracy …"
Founded in 1985 by the presidents of Brown, Georgetown, and Stanford, and the president of the Education Commission of the States, Campus Compact has a rich 30-year history of supporting the field of community engagement within higher education. In those three decades, practitioners and scholars within the field have continually engaged in self-inquiry and study to strengthen the theoretical basis of community-engaged work, as well as adapt to an ever-changing civic landscape. Upon their 30th anniversary as an organization, Campus Compact released an Action Statement to build on this academic labor and summarize the latest thinking in the field of the core purposes of community engagement within higher learning. Colorado College signed that Action Statement in 2015, affirming our commitment to preparing young people to act in the benefit of the common good by equipping them with tools to challenge social and economic inequalities.
We contextualize our efforts within this Campus Compact Action Statement:
- We empower our students, faculty, staff, and community partners to co-create mutually respectful partnerships in pursuit of a just, equitable, and sustainable future for communities beyond the campus - nearby and around the world.
- We prepare our students for lives of engaged citizenship, with the motivation and capacity to deliberate, act, and lead in pursuit of the public good.
- We embrace our responsibilities as place based institutions, contributing to the health and strength of our communities - economically, socially, environmentally, educationally, and politically.
- We harness the capacity of our institutions - through research, teaching, partnerships, and institutional practice - to challenge the social and economic inequalities that threaten our democratic future.
- We foster an environment that consistently affirms the centrality of the public purposes of higher education by setting high expectations for the campus community to contribute to their achievement.
You can peruse the Civic Action Plans developed by other institutions of higher education as a result of Campus Compact's Action Statement here.