Training Future Leaders: A Project-Based Approach at Rutgers-Newark
Every year, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASC&U) convenes a national meeting for members of its American Democracy Program (ADP), started in 2003 as a nonpartisan initiative to improve civic education at public higher education institutions. The Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement meeting (CLDE) brings together university leaders, faculty, students, civic engagement directors, and student affairs administrators as well as community and nonprofit partners.
At the 2023 CLDE conference, a team from Rutgers University-Newark and The Citizens Campaign gave a presentation on an exciting new model for community-engaged learning. Attendees from institutions in Massachusetts, California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and other states were thrilled at how teaching tools from The Citizens Campaign helped students to develop leadership capacity, problem-solving skills, and social capital, not at the expense of community organizations but in true partnership with them, in a spirit of public service.
Dr. Joanna Kenty, the curriculum designer and faculty development facilitator for The Citizens Campaign, introduced the session and moderated the panel. “What brought this group together was a shared mission of empowering students to become leaders in their community – and we define ‘leaders’ as people who bring solutions to make their communities better.” The team of presenters included Michelle Curry, who served as a Newark Civic Trustee for many years before becoming the Civic Trust Director at The Citizens Campaign and supported student work with the Civic Trust; Dr. Diane Hill from Rutgers-Newark, who serves as Assistant Chancellor for University and Community Partnerships as well as teaching in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA); and Epiphany Munz, MPA candidate, who served as a teaching assistant for Dr. Hill.
Michelle proudly introduced herself as born and raised in Newark, and a Rutgers-Newark alumna. In 2015, she was working in human services and looking for a way to help make her city of Newark better for all residents. She found a great fit in the Newark Civic Trust and the No-Blame approach to pragmatic problem-solving that they learned from The Citizens Campaign. The Civic Trust is hyperlocal, intergenerational, highly diverse, and grassroots, drawing together residents from all five of Newark’s wards. They formed committees to advance policy solutions to issues like the digital divide and a lack of civic education in public schools, with expert strategic support from The Citizens Campaign.
These solutions, Michelle explained, were “win-win-wins”: the Trust achieved their goal and developed leadership, the community benefited from the solutions, and the city’s government found new partners in problem-solving. Many Trustees went on to serve on boards and commissions in Newark, including the Board of Education and the Environmental Commission.
In 2018, the Civic Trust brought together a group of stakeholders from Rutgers-Newark, the Newark School District, and Mayor Raz Baraka’s office to announce that Newark was becoming the nation’s first “Civic City,” where training in citizen leadership and opportunities for public service were open to all residents. And in 2021, Rutgers-Newark took the further step of becoming a “Citizen Leadership Training Base,” offering a self-paced online certificate course in Leadership and No-Blame Problem Solving to the whole city on its Continuing Studies platform.
In Spring of 2022, Dr. Diane Hill was set to teach her course on “Building Bridges to the Community” at SPAA. For over fifteen years Diane has administered the Office of University-Community Partnerships (OUCP) that serves as the nexus connecting Rutgers-Newark students, faculty and staff to expand, create and promote reciprocal and mutually beneficial partnerships. She established the Center for Health Equity and Community Engagement (CHECE) and spearheaded the development of a transdisciplinary community engagement and Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) model applicable on local, state, regional and national levels, especially with urban, underserved and minority populations. Drawing on her own history of community work, Diane wanted to design this course to prepare her group of undergraduate and graduate students to be impactful, constructive community partners, including serving on boards. She didn’t want them to just show up a few times in the community to build their resumes; she wanted to instill a public service perspective and train them in the skills that would enable them to act as true partners and change agents. Diane sees this as a natural extension of Rutgers-Newark's work as an Anchor Institution.
Diane worked with Michelle and Joanna to incorporate teaching tools from The Citizens Campaign into her course, using a project-based approach called the Transdisciplinary Intergenerational Community Engagement Model (TICEM). Students chose their own issues to work on over the course of the semester, and used the 10 Steps of No-Blame Problem Solving to use critical thinking and analytical skills in identifying evidence-based solutions that would work for Newark.
Epiphany Munz presented on the student experience. She reported that two students took their projects to the Newark Civic Trust to advance them beyond the classroom, including Zachariyyah Udin, who said: “As a poli sci minor, I learned about what local governments do, but this actually taught me how to be proactive in local government. And so, if I really want to make real, possible change, I see that I’ve gained real skill sets... I think it’s important that people in our generation engage, because there’s a real lack of understanding. We always talk about the issues, but I feel like The Citizens Campaign really gave me an avenue to try to combat them.” Another student in the class, Renee David, said the class helped her realize that “It’s all good to have the good intentions, but if you want to actually solve the problems and everything, you have to get to the root of the problem and actually sit down and listen.” A third student, Jinbo Liu, attributed his decision to begin a graduate program to the experience of community-based research in the course.