This article documents how an MSW student in an introductory community practice course took her class assignment and over the course of two years revitalized, democratized, and transformed a sclerotic, corporate-run Home Owners Association (HOA). While the community analysis assignment required the student to interview six of her neighbors, the…

Co-authors Lee and Peters collaborated across 2019-2021 on a community-engaged project with Carclew's ExpressWay Arts. They ask, when your creative practice is premised on relationship building, belonging and care, how do you step away from projects responsibly, meaningfully and carefully? This article explores how establishing rituals of closure…

Community partnerships are essential for vitality in neighborhoods. A growing demand exists for training programs to attract and prepare a highly qualified workforce to serve young children and their families. Personnel across different stages of their career can help address our teacher shortages. Service learning is a useful strategy in…

Feminist community-engaged scholars and practitioners value deep relationship building with their community partners, which can be challenging during periods of disruption. Increasingly, disruptions occur at multiple levels (e.g., pandemics, civil unrest, community/campus violence, partner staffing and leadership turnover, experiences of illness…

This article examines how community art centers of the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration served as a third space, one that was explicitly designed to be different from art museums at that time. Created to employ artists during the Great Depression under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, goals of FAP programs included…

The Workers' Educational Association (WEA) has supported adult learning for over 120 years. Participating in adult learning brings a range of benefits for individuals and communities. These go much wider than solely education benefits and include better health, increased participation in community activities, and increased confidence and critical…

Merging community literacy and archival research pedagogies, this article presents a qualitative study of students' reflections from a course that involves partnering with a community organization to research their archives. The article considers students' reflections about, first, learning archival methods and, second, applying these methods in a…

Often, migrants relocate because of acute disruption: war, disaster, or persecution. Slower forms of violence, however, can lead to lifestyle migration, at once a response to nostalgia and an unsatisfying present. Some young urbanites in Bulgaria seek new possibilities in heavily depopulated rural settings. While rural revitalization is generally…

This article highlights the nascent efforts between College Unbound, Brown University, and Providence College--three very different types of institutions in Providence, Rhode Island--to foster cross-institutional capacity for place-based community engagement. By collectively engaging our institutions, we experimented with what collaboration around…

Community-Based Research (CBR) presents a wide range of benefits in higher education to students, community partners, and universities. Yet on our campus (and many others), CBR remains less common than other high-impact practices (HIPs) such as service learning and undergraduate research due to lack of effective institutionalization. Moreover,…

Youth fields professionals create the conditions in which young people can thrive: They activate the vision for high-quality programs; develop tools, systems, and approaches for designing and sustaining such programs; and form relationships with and among participating youth. However while investments in afterschool programming have continued to…

California is prioritizing equity in education post-COVID-19 by investing in community schools. Districts have an important leadership responsibility to develop the conditions, capacities, and resources for effective, sustainable community schools. Specifically, districts must strengthen system-level supports and infrastructure to ensure…

The Wallace Foundation commissioned Research for Action and McClanahan Associates to study how out-of-school time intermediaries (OSTIs) responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the role they could play in supporting communities moving forward. Citywide out-of-school time (OST) systems encompass a wide variety of afterschool and summer programs and…

The Turtle Mountains are an abundant, forested enclave, standing out from the miles and miles of flat surrounding farmland. At Turtle Mountain, an Anhishinaabe nation in north-central North Dakota near the Canadian border, paved roads run along rolling hills, and the ground brims with multicolored wildflowers and tall, swaying grasses. The woods…

In 2023, the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office launched Vision 2030. This bold plan provides a foundation for transformational change to ensure institutions work for students and provide equitable access to future learners through college. By working collaboratively as a system to advance the Vision 2030 priorities, colleges are…