Funding the Future We Want
Collaborative writing is one of the joys of my job. Whether putting together presentations with colleagues or jointly coming up with facilitation agendas, I love the back and forth that happens when good minds are thinking together. Over the past year and a half, I had the chance to experience that joy while writing with one of our Engaged Ambassadors, Amber Haywood ’21. Amber provided excellent data and analysis into an important question: how does the Cornell’s Einhorn Center for Community Engagement live into its anti-racist commitments?
Amber’s analysis of Engaged Cornell grants provided incredibly important information about the ways that we can support Black and Indigenous communities through funding. The big takeaway is we did ok when we weren’t funding with an explicitly anti-racist set of criteria, but we did a lot better when we did have those criteria in place! In our case study published in Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, we make the case for using an anti-racist lens as part of programming and funding, and we provide some suggestions on what others can do.
Amber’s research deserves to be shared beyond Cornell, and we decided to co-author an article to share with the wider academic community. Writing a publication for peer review is a process of patience as well as action — from taking the initial ideas and forming them into a draft, getting feedback and revisiting the draft to satisfy the editor, and then waiting on the actual publication — it’s a long road. But I’m excited to share the final article. Our praxis piece sits among a number of other excellent pieces that explore racial justice in experiential and service-learning.
Happy reading!
