Description
This small volume reflects on three years of success in mobilizing students at the campus, state, and national levels during Campus Compact's Raise Your Voice (RYV) campaign. Written by five RYV student leaders, Lessons Learned includes a frank discussion of barriers to engagement and how to overcome them, including ways to collaborate, cut through bureaucracy, and mobilize students; a new working definition of civic engagement that incorporates voice, action, and reflection; a look at the role of higher education in fostering civic engagement and preparing students for public life; and ideas for how to begin the process of building an active, civically engaged campus.
By Tara Germond, Ellen Love, Liz Moran, Sherita Moses, and Stephanie Raill.
Note: The material in this volume makes up the first chapter of Raise Your Voice: A Student Guide to Making Positive Social Change.
Sample Chapter
Lessons Learned on the Road to Civic Engagement
This document grew out of the Raise Your Voice campaign, a nationwide Campus Compact initiative aimed at increasing civic engagement among college students. After nearly three years of work, those connected with Raise Your Voice (RYV) — students, faculty, campus staff, and state and national Campus Compact staff members — wanted to assess its progress and reflect on the lessons learned from organizing this ambitious initiative.
From its program structure to the organizing tools students used in mobilizing their campus, RYV provides valuable insights into the role of civic engagement in higher education. This document attempts to capture those lessons, based on the ongoing reflections of the campaign's state coordinators and of RYV's student leaders, collected in interviews, dialogues, and an intense three-day "Lessons Learned" conference in Chicago in June 2004.
We share these lessons learned at a time when practitioners and scholars are continually developing the concept of civic engagement and its relationship to higher education. Here we describe the strategies that RYV student leaders found most effective and important, and share what we've learned about what inspires our peers to action and what sometimes discourages them about political and community engagement.
The authors - five RYV student leaders and participants in the Chicago conference - have captured the words of RYV participants in order to deepen the dialogue on the meaning of civic engagement in higher education. We also seek to provide faculty and administrators with students' perspectives on the college experience and, most importantly, to inspire current and future student leaders to work to create a culture of engagement on their campuses.
RYV and Student Engagement
In 2001, Campus Compact - a national nonprofit association dedicated to fulfilling the civic purposes of higher education - convened the Wingspread Summit on Student Civic Engagement. At this gathering, student leaders from around the United States talked about their experiences with and perceptions of civic engagement and democracy, education, service, and politics. The summit led to two groundbreaking initiatives: the publication of The New Student Politics: The Wingspread Statement on Student Civic Engagement (Long, 2002), Campus Compact's first published student statement on civic engagement; and the beginning of the Raise Your Voice campaign, which eventually involved hundreds of thousands of students across the country.
Supported by a $2.8 million multiyear grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and based on the insights of the Wingspread students, Campus Compact developed and initiated the RYV campaign with three distinct goals:
- Increase college student involvement in public life and connect these actions with a larger national student movement on civic engagement.
- Document student civic engagement activities and issues important to college students.
- Mobilize higher education in a way that gives greater voice to students and makes civic engagement central to student learning.
