Live, Learn, and Listen in New York State
There are three constants for me in this work. There is the magic of matchmaking. There is the power of the hidden story. And there is the collaborative potential fueled by connections seen across the State of New York. These constants are my touchstones because, in them are ways to trace the path back to this university’s Land Grant Mission, to examine fundamental questions about who is learning, what is being learned, and how learning happens. What does that work look like daily? I see connections, uncover stories; I live, learn, and listen in New York state.
Matchmaking
In my role as New York state partnership liaison in the Office of Engagement Initiatives, I facilitate the pairing of community partners with faculty around issues of common interest. As an office we do this well, not only because we’re aware of the networks around us, but because we explicitly work to make them healthier. Partnerships help us learn the things that we don’t know, access information we don’t have, and imagine possibilities we can’t see. To offer a few examples — students work with partners throughout the duration of their undergraduate studies in community food systems to increase their understanding of questions related to food security, food sovereignty, and food justice. Graduate students earn a certificate of engagement in public communication while learning, from cancer patients, how to more effectively communicate the results of cancer research so that it is more accessible to a wider public audience. Living with Water, part of the Rust to Green initiative created to foster sustainable community development in post-industrial cities, teaches students a participatory action research approach, engaging local and state government officials with residents and artists to achieve community flood resilience. As interest in locally produced goods grows, Cornell faculty and students evaluate small-flock-based fiber market value chains and connect rural and urban fiber-textile industries. Exploring challenges produced by mass incarceration through first-hand experiences with prison education, students in a “Prisons, Politics, and Policy” class, collaborate with local organizations that offer support services to formerly incarcerated persons.
Partnerships help us learn the things that we don’t know, access information we don’t have, and imagine possibilities we can’t see.
Matchmaking is what OEI can contribute to a beginning relationship, the catalytic work to spark partnerships like these. Partnerships that start with people’s assets. Partnerships that evolve over time. Partnerships that draw from principles of good practice and aspire to balance power among partners, share resources, and credit the partnership’s accomplishments.
Stories
The best stories are the ones we could never anticipate. If it were your job to stay attuned to who is learning, what is being learned, and how learning happens, what would you see? You might see a child, 9 or 10, come biking full speed down an empty road in Tioga county, stopping abruptly to read these letters painted on a vegetable stand: FREE. Unsure it’s for real, he turns his head to look all directions, cautiously, suspiciously, before hastily stuffing his pockets with zucchini and speeding away.
If it were your job to stay attuned to who is learning, what is being learned, and how learning happens, what would you see?
One of the staff at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tioga County saw this, and shared the story of the boy’s surprise. In this work I aspire to notice and share important stories too — To see in a boy’s surprise, not a story that’s only or mostly important to those designing programs for increased youth engagement, those who work with Seed to Supper, or those who built the free vegetable stand. To see a story about how countercultural it is to offer something for free; how hard it is for people to trust it, and how easy it is to do. We can see a kid who stuffed his pockets with free zucchini — end of story. Or, we see him pause mid-flight on a bike, to grapple with the unusual. We see him observe and incorporate what’s out of the ordinary for him, still adjusting the lens through which he’ll choose to interpret how the world works.
New York State
In this region we find a grounding of challenges and possibilities. There is nothing I can say about a philosophy born out of the land-grant system, which hasn’t already been said better by Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) educators and documented by people who know it matters.
… local people identifying and setting their priorities based on their direct experiences, and drawing on outside external perspectives and resources …
Ken Schlather, executive director of CCE Tompkins County for over 15 years, applied for this job while still immersed in intense work abroad. For the interview, he flew in from Nicaragua, and has described how, on that day, being back in his own community felt like being in a foreign culture. What moves me about his account is not only the “one-travels-far-to-find-what-is-near” nature of it. It is the fact that, feeling both foreign and familiar, he recognized something that he’d learned everywhere else: Every evidence of success in development projects he’d witnessed around the globe was linked to local people identifying and setting their priorities based on their direct experiences, and drawing on outside external perspectives and resources only on their own terms. And there it is — democracy as a way of life. Democracy in action. People will find ways to come together to make informed decisions about water, sanitation, food, and energy; housing, education, childcare, public green space, networked infrastructures of communication, transportation; who can afford to live where, under what environmental conditions, and according to whose justice.
How universities choose their commitments to the communities around them, and how this evolves into something larger, will undoubtedly impact the ways many people survive and thrive in this region. And students will learn that where we see it from and with whom is not without consequence. What connections will be made? Which stories will be told? What issues of joint concern will be visible to us in the places we live?
As formative as Cornell is, it is not this university forming anyone’s idea of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, possible and impossible. For better or for worse, we do that to ourselves. That kind of power, we’ll find, lives not with academic institutions, but in the everyday discourses of everyday people, everywhere.
