Reversing the Telescope: Community Development Within Colleges and Universities

This report represents the culmination of a two-year project supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) that scanned the civic microcosm of our colleges and universities. Much attention has been paid, including by us, to the ways in which colleges and universities engage with their external communities. As we learned more about ways to support faculty and institutions whose focus was on their external communities we had this deepening suspicion that something was missing, namely, the community members who work on our own campuses, often in the lowest paid positions and from the communities the campus purports to serve. This is a story of our attempt to define the issue, to identify promising practices, and to understand where our own campus communities fit into campus civic engagement efforts. In some ways this is the best kind of project in that while we may have started it, it is you who will keep it going – sharpening the ideas, raising new questions, learning from new initiatives, and ultimately making our colleges and universities truly democratic institutions. [authors]