As an educator and a historian, I am sometimes struck by how much of what I learn can also be described as what I re-learn. I think we all have learning experiences that are powerful partly because they recall for us important lessons we had, if not forgotten, at least allowed to recede for a time.

The need to re-focus and re-emphasize on what we used to know is very much in my mind as we power up CA’s new Center for Community Engagement. Although housed for now in the Upper School, the CCE is a cross-divisional effort that combines offices that support Service Learning, Experiential Learning, and Diversity & Inclusion work both on campus and in the wider community.

What is this Center? As the name implies, it will help to connect folks at CA, building ties among students and employees to engage in projects and relationships with each other. As importantly, the Center will provide myriad opportunities for students and faculty to build ties to the Triangle area, in lots of ways.

Here are some examples, drawn from just the start of the year:

• Leo deSouza ‘18 dropped by to share some highlights from his summer internship with ScaleShark, a new local company that provides businesses from around the globe a chance to expand to the Triangle efficiently. ScaleShark’s CEO reached out to CA in the spring with the idea of hiring two CA interns for the summer, and Leo and Milen Patel ’19 spent the summer helping a start-up business grow.
• Trish Yu, our Upper School Chinese teacher, approached the CCE for ideas about connecting with a Triangle company with expertise operating in China. She is developing a new trimester class for next year on communicating in the Chinese business world, and is piloting aspects of that course this year with her advanced students. We have a meeting scheduled with an executive from Lenovo (CA alum parent Dave Cree) next week to explore this possibility.
• We have joined HQ Raleigh, a coworking community in downtown Raleigh, that has helped to incubate hundreds of new companies in the last few years. HQ Raleigh is itself a B-corporation that emphasizes the need for private companies to be good citizens and contributors to their communities, and we felt that their mission aligned well with CA’s own community values. We will build relationships through HQ with lots of potential hosts of CA Work Experience students and further develop internship and other opportunities there.
• We have finalized plans for this year’s Sophomore Service Days (this week!) and the September 8th Grade Service Day, and are gearing up for lots of service in October: a Red Cross Blood Drive, Middle School Bagels for the Cure to support breast cancer research, and the annual Yam Jam of the Society of St. Andrew to combat hunger in our community.
• We have begun conversations with outside organizations about expanding opportunities for students to do service with them as part of intentional, ongoing relationships. These include a school and a well-known community organization. We will announce more details as these plans come to fruition.
• We have begun planning for this year’s Triangle Diversity Alliance Conference, which CA will host in the second trimester. TDA is our collaborative effort with four other local independent school in support of our ongoing, deep commitment to making our school and our community a welcoming and inclusive community for all our students and neighbors.

Now, this sort of work is not exactly new to CA We have been committed to service, diversity, and inclusion for over 20 years! But the new ingredient in the mix is a thoughtful commitment to connect these efforts to learning that is transformative and integrated.

Over the last several years, guided by our Strategic Plan’s focus on learning that is “relevant, personalized, and flexible,” we have been working to expand the ways CA students can do real-world learning. These have included a more robust set of offerings during our end-of-year Discovery Term and the opportunity for juniors to participate in the Work Experience Program, which 72 juniors took advantage of last year. The positive feedback from both the students and the numerous community partners for the WEP were part of what convinced us that the Center for Community Engagement’s time had come.

As we grow this Center, we will keep updating as we learn new lessons. Part of experiential learning best-practice is to build in proper time and attention for reflection and improvement, and that will be true for both the students and the adults working with them.

This year, for instance, we are offering our first for-credit course called Community Engagement (EXP-400), and the students in the course chose their focus for the year back in March and have helped design the course with me. They chose to focus on poverty and inequality in Raleigh, so we will have lots of ways to approach this complex and important topic throughout the year. In lots of ways, the course will serve as a melding of the three offices within the Center, since the students’ learning will be immersive and expeditionary; they will interact with and support an extremely diverse set of experts (think, everyone form city leaders to those served by a variety of public and private social welfare agencies), and to serve the whole community by—we hope—helping us identify some ways to ameliorate some of the disparities we come to understand better throughout the year.

We could not be more excited to launch the Center for Community Engagement, as we re-commit to learning that is deep, meaningful, and transformative both for us and for our community. We welcome your collaboration with us as we move forward together!