Claremont, Calif. (June 26, 2019)–Pitzer College, along with ten colleges and universities across the country, form Partnerships for Listening and Action by Communities and Educators (PLACE), a project of Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP). PLACE is supported by a two-year, $800,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), which serves as the host and partner to BTtoP. Pitzer’s participation will be led through its Community Engagement Center.
The PLACE collaboratory brings together a network of
academic-community partnerships to do civic-engagement and public-humanities
work. Using cultural practices like oral history or photo-voice these
partnerships will develop shared public agendas that ground the setting and
solving of community issues in community voice. They may involve such
significant themes as community development, wealth disparities and
environmental justice, but the agendas and action plans will be set through
listening and dialogue. All the partnerships will include undergraduate
students as key participants, culture makers and often cultural brokers.
The collaboratory of eleven colleges and universities will also
work as a committee of the whole, communicating and convening regularly to set
shared goals and values, confront common challenges and learn
together. The goal of the larger collaboratory will be to distill best
practices for partnerships grounded in community voice, to model the role of
the humanities in sustaining them and to use networked collaboration to
disseminate them across higher education.
“We are thrilled for the opportunity to pursue the PLACE
initiative,” said David Scobey, the director of BTtoP and principal investigator
for The Mellon Foundation’s grant. “Its focus on the value of community
engagement to higher education, and the potential contribution of higher
education to community betterment, is at the heart of our mission. So is the
innovative focus on the humanities as a way of fostering authentic engagement
and democratic agenda-setting. And we believe strongly in the power of
networked collaboration to make change in higher education. We are grateful to
The Mellon Foundation and our colleagues at AAC&U for supporting this
proposal and to our partnering institutions for joining us.”
Pitzer is one of four participating PLACE Collaboratory
institutions in the Los Angeles area, which include College of the Canyons, the
University of LaVerne and the University of Southern California. Nationally,
other participating institutions include Rutgers University-Newark; the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County; five institutions in the Greensboro,
North Carolina, region (Elon University, Greensboro College, Guilford College,
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University and the University of
North Carolina, Greensboro).