Relationships: Develop connections with community members and nonprofit organizations, learning and working with them to tackle challenges identified by our communities.
Belonging to the community: Get outside the “University Bubble” to explore the city and different parts of the Seattle community, each with a rich landscape of complex realities.
Accountability to social change: Reflect on the oppressive systems and policies that have shaped where we are today and explore how they continue to manifest in our communities. These oppressive forces are not gone, they have just shifted.
Personal and professional development: Experience new challenges and explore careers or areas of interest. A great opportunity to develop your resume and expand your network.
As we go about building and evolving the Community-Engaged Courses program, we do so within a longer context of relationships between UW and Seattle neighbors, as well as relationships between institutions and communities more broadly. We work to build a model of increasingly critical engagement, defined by an explicit effort to disrupt historically extractive, harmful, and systematically racist relations between institutions and communities (Gordon da Cruz, 2017).
We recognize that community partners invest a significant amount of time and effort into coordinating-with and co-educating UW students. The placement opportunities that we make available to UW students in the CEC program are community-identified roles, and we are constantly working with partners to assess how our program can reciprocate their contributions to student learning.