Related Issue
November–December 2024
Service & Advocacy
Community Engagement
A letter from the President
By Christina Paxson / November–December 2024
November 1st, 2024
At Opening Convocation this year, I highlighted the rich array of opportunities our newest students will have to engage with our local community in a way that enriches their educations and makes positive contributions to Providence and Rhode Island. I challenged them to consider how they will be involved in this work, whether it be by tutoring high school students, working on vaccination campaigns, or supporting immigrant communities, among so many other options.
Brown’s commitment to community engagement is not new. For decades, Brown students, faculty, and staff have actively collaborated with local organizations and residents in ways that support K-12 education, improve the health of Rhode Islanders, support the local economy, and address many other community challenges. In many cases, these community connections are fostered through the Swearer Center for Public Service. But numerous academic units across Brown—like the School of Public Health, the Department of Education, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and many more—regularly weave community engagement into their teaching and research.
Brown has a distinctive approach to community engagement, which is grounded in two core beliefs. One is that community engagement and knowledge production are mutually reinforcing. What we do in the community is not divorced from what we do in classrooms, laboratories, and libraries. In fact, our knowledge is the most precious asset we can bring to local communities.
Another is that community engagement must be grounded in mutual respect. This takes self-awareness and humility. It means acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers, and that we may not even be asking the right questions. Building strong, reciprocal relationships with community members and organizations requires that we take the time necessary to build bonds of trust.
It means acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers... and we may not even be asking the right questions.
This approach has resulted in deep connections between teaching, research, and community engagement. To give a few examples, a team of Brown researchers working with Rhode Island’s Nonviolence Institute has collected data to track the results of various interventions to address violence in the city. And Meredith Hastings, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, has engaged student researchers to measure air quality in Providence and track how pollutants spread across the city. Their work resulted in an injunction against a local scrapyard after a fire spewed hazardous smoke that drifted across the city.
In some cases, students focus on community engagement outside of Rhode Island. For example, a course offered last spring by Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Erica Walker on rural public health brought together students from Brown and Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Jackson, Mississippi, that has been Brown’s partner for 60 years. The students worked together on a project to address environmental pollution in a small rural town in Mississippi.
One of my priorities is to strengthen Brown’s work in community engagement. Last spring, Vice President for Community Engagement and Executive Director of the Swearer Center Mary Jo (MJ) Callan unveiled Brown’s new “Community Engagement Agenda: A Call to Partnership and Action,” which will take our community engagement efforts to the next level.
This plan addresses one of the biggest challenges of building strong community partnerships—building the right connections—by making it easier for potential community partners to learn how to connect with Brown, and by helping Brown students and scholars identify community needs. MJ and her team will promote coordination across the campus, identify community needs and match them with campus resources, and help build upon relationships with the local community by leveraging shared interests to create impactful partnerships.
Brown is deeply committed to advancing this work. I am confident that together we can drive toward a new era of partnership to make an even more meaningful and positive difference in Providence and Rhode Island.
