The upcoming Northwestern Center for Civic Engagement wants to create a partnership based on civic involvement and service, connecting classwork with the community.
The center is being created to help NU students, faculty and staff become more involved in their community by building new connections between NU academics and volunteering and research opportunities.
Robert Donahue, program director for the Civic Education Project based at NU’s Center for Talent Development, cited similar programs at top universities, including Duke, Stanford, Brown, Tufts, and Princeton Universities. He said these programs have been instrumental in formulating how NU’s center will work.
Kelly Kirkpatrick, a SESP senior and one of the student representatives for the group, said she the goal of NU’s center will be unique to the university.
“I see the center as the first step in building strong partnerships between Northwestern and the Evanston and Chicago communities,” she said. “It has the potential to positively transform the way that Northwestern thinks about community relationships and make these kinds of support for citizen engagement part of the mission of the university.”
The center is still in its developmental stages, but with a three-year seed money grant from the McCormick Foundation and support from the provost’s office at NU, it should be operational by Winter Quarter, Donahue said.
Kirkpatrick and fellow student representative Rachel Berkowitz, a Weinberg senior, and another student representative for the group wrote a letter to administrators in May that helped obtain additional support for the center.
Both Berkowitz and Kirkpatrick agree that although there are outlets at Northwestern for civic-minded students, those programs can be hard to find. Current programs include Chicago Field Studies and the Undergraduate Leadership Program, Kirkpatrick said.
“This center will help students connect to those opportunities in a way that they can create a more holistic experience over their four years at NU,” Kirkpatrick said. Donahue stressed that the center is not being created to compete with the existing programs, but to complement them.
“We will help provide better access, collaboration among programs, and mentoring and advising for students who are working to identify the best learning opportunities for themselves,” he said.
Berkowitz and Kirkpatrick said that because the center is still in its early stages, students still have plenty of opportunities to get involved.
“As the center takes off, these students will all be potential beneficiaries of and participants in the center’s resources and programs,” Berkowitz said. “There is a definite push to have civically-engaged students on campus involved in the development of the center.”
