Siena’s Center for Academic Community Engagement (ACE) hosted its second annual Engage for Change Conference Wednesday, May 18 on campus. The Engage for Change Conference aims to connect local community engagement practitioners (faculty, students, community organizations) by encouraging sharing of best practices and model programs and to push community-engaged scholarship forward in the Capital Region.
The focus largely involves the evaluation of tangible outcomes that result from these partnerships as well as how these relationships may be incorporated into pedagogy for student benefit and community action.
This year’s conference featured Campus Compact Invited Speaker Barbara Jacoby, a faculty associate for leadership and community service-learning at the University of Maryland, and the Spendiff Endowment Honored Faculty Speaker Fred Boehrer, who has been teaching service-learning courses at the College of Saint Rose since 1997.
The day-long program included four concurrent topical sessions throughout the day with discussion on a range of issues, including: Radical Engagement in the Black Lives Matter Movement, Service Learning in Nursing Education, Poetic Reflections on Community Service, and Finding Meaning in Life by Being with the Dying.
Siena’s Center for ACE develops and supports academically grounded, sustainable, developmental, multifaceted, community partnerships that connect students, faculty, staff and community members with the needs and assets of the Capital Region and beyond through community engagement. In the tradition of St. Francis, ACE places the creation and acquisition of knowledge in dialogue with the needs and assets of the greater community through reciprocal partnerships. ACE echoes the life of St. Francis by engaging all community members in co-creation of knowledge and community change. ACE, together with others, builds a campus culture of service that values the contribution of diverse voices within and beyond campus.
