Last year, Communication senior Kristen Cragwall helped develop and implement a 10-week curriculum to teach Civil War history through creative drama at a school in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.
The two-quarter independent service learning project combined two of Cragwall’s passions. Now, as one of five fellows for Northwestern’s new Center for Civic Engagement, Cragwall said she hopes to help other students fulfill goals that are equally enriching.
“I wasn’t sure I could reconcile my interests in community service and theater, but a couple of dedicated professors made me see that I could,” Cragwall said. “Hopefully the Center for Civic Engagement will help other students develop similar projects.”
Center Director Dan Lewis, a SESP professor, said the Center’s purpose is to make students’ search for public service opportunities more “purposeful and rational.”
The Center was created as a result of efforts by both NU faculty and students committed to public service, Lewis said. For several years, a group of faculty from the various undergraduate schools have been meeting to discuss how to improve NU in the area of public service. It was out of these meetings that a detailed plan for the Center was developed, based on existing centers for public service at peer institutions like Duke and Stanford Universities. During the search for a university president last year, students submitted a letter with 500 signatures to the search committee endorsing the Center’s development.
“There are lots of things at Northwestern to do with civic engagement and public service,” Lewis said. “But students just bump into them; the goal of the Center is to be a portal for civic engagement at Northwestern.”
Housed at 1813 Hinman Ave., the Center will share its headquarters with the Undergraduate Leadership Program and Chicago Field Studies. The grand opening and ribbon-cutting for the Center is scheduled for Oct. 22. An open house will follow the ribbon-cutting, where attendees will have the opportunity to look around the Center and get information about its programs, said Center Fellow Margy LaFreniere, a Weinberg senior.
Many of the fellows are leaders in existing campus service organizations, a qualification which will help them make students aware of what NU has to offer. The fellows will spend the year working on developing the center and its programming as well as advising individual students and student groups about becoming engaged in service learning. Associate Director Rob Donahue describes the fellows as “role models who show how service is integrated into learning.”
Donahue said the Center will function similarly to the NU Study Abroad Office, in that it centralizes and connects different programs and opportunities from throughout the University to help students find the one that best matches their interests. Students can meet one-on-one with Center staff or fellows to explore their options.
By connecting students’ course work with programs and volunteer work, Donahue said the Center makes civic engagement more “intentional and logical and gives a more significant impact to the work.” He said the Center will also “break down the charity paradigm,” or the idea that any volunteering is beneficial to the community, regardless of the volunteer’s actual commitment to the work.
In addition to helping students find the right civic engagement opportunity for them, the Center will work with professors in all of NU’s schools to develop service learning classes and curricula, Donahue said. Center Fellow Parv Santhosh-Kumar said although many NU students engage in service, the next step of integrating service and learning “is only happening a little bit” on campus.
“(The Center) has an enormous opportunity to help students merge discrete parts of their education in a productive and meaningful way,” the Weinberg senior said.
Fellow Lauren Troy, a SESP senior, said it’s the process of integrating academics into service that makes the Center’s mission different from other service clubs and student organizations on campus. She said she hopes the Center engages students in a “circular process” in which their learning influences the service they pursue and the service, in turn, influences their learning.
Lewis said by providing meeting spaces for students to work on their projects and making faculty available on site, he hopes the Center will be an “incubator for student ideas about public service.”
“Northwestern can really be the best place in the country to go as an undergraduate interested in public service,” Lewis said. “The Center is the mechanism for pulling all of this together for the university.”
