New, dual-site “Center” links service and real-world learning
The long-awaited Connecticut College Center for Community Action and Public Policy (the college’s fourth “Center”) is off and running.
Approved by the faculty in May 1996, the CCC is a resource for service-learning courses, activities and programs. (Service learning is the integration of volunteer service with traditional coursework, structured so that learning is enhanced by service.) It also coordinates college and community resources and builds involvement.
Directed by an advisory board to be formed of community and college members, the center has two sites, one on the Connecticut College campus and the other in a downtown New London storefront scheduled to open in February.
Tracee Reiser, director of the Office of Volunteers for Community Service at Connecticut College, and Stevenson Carlebach, associate professor of theater, were named co-directors.
By linking volunteer service and course work, the center, together with its community partners, will help integrate active citizenship into the college curriculum. “The center will be shaped by its participants, including students, community members, faculty and staff,” said Reiser. “Preparation for citizenship is an integral part of the liberal arts.”
Currently, 10 academic departments list courses with service learning components, which entail ongoing internships or group projects.
Connecticut College students are volunteering at more than 50 different sites in New London and surrounding towns including the Child and Family Agency, the Women’s Center of Southeastern Connecticut, the New London city welfare office, the Lawrence and Memorial Hospital, the Connecticut Legal Services office, and in elementary, middle and high schools. Connecticut College students in the 1995-96 academic year contributed 24,000 hours of volunteer service in New London and New London County.
Before joining the Connecticut College faculty in 1988, Carlebach was an actor and director in the Boston area and taught courses at Boston University and Emerson College. He earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Tufts and a master of fine arts degree from Boston University.
Reiser also received a degree from Boston University. A native of New London, she worked at Centro de la Comunidad in New London and at the Connecticut Department of Higher Education prior to her arrival at the college in 1991.
“Having two chairs is a model that’s much more congruent with the way families work,” Carlebach said, noting that families are the basic building block of communities. “It allows for people to have strength in one area and rely on someone else who has a strength in another area. I’m thankful to have a colleague like Tracee, with her vast experience in community building, as my partner,” Carlebach said.
The college has three other centers: the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts; the Center for Arts and Technology; and the Center for Conservation Biology and Environmental Studies.