Earlham Joins Indiana’s Community-Engaged Alliance, Creates Opportunities for More Civic Engagement

Earlham faculty and staff looking for a way to stay community-focused in the classroom and increase civic engagement now have an exciting partnership through which to focus their efforts.

The College is partnering with Indiana’s Community-Engaged Alliance (CEA) to provide a focus on local social impacts and civic and economic development of our communities. This can be through research, grants, professional development.

What does that mean? It means faculty can easily apply for things like a Supporting Engagement and Authentic Dialogues (SEAD) grant, for example, and use that to bring their students out into their community for increased engagement initiatives — and feel empowered to do so themselves, without having to go through conduits like O’Jeanique Twyman, director of Earlham’s Center for Social Justice. She’s happy to help however she can, to be clear — but faculty can and should feel empowered to work with CEA themselves directly to build community engagement and events.

To date, CEA has 43 member campuses — Earlham was a founding member and is rejoining the Alliance after some time working with other organizations — and since 2016 has engaged over 143,000 community members and 48,000 students through its programming.

In a similar vein, the week of Oct. 7 Earlham will be partnering with CEA and Indiana University East to launch National Voter Education Week, as part of CEA’s Spreading the Word speaker series — yet another resource for Earlham faculty and staff. Faculty can either host speakers or submit to give a talk with funding from the CEA. For National Voter Education Week, speaker Rowdy Farmer, Ph.D. candidate in human communication at Arizona State University, will come to IU East’s campus for a joint event with Earlham to present “Intentional Interactions: Building Communities of Respect Across Differences.” In addition to being a Ph.D. candidate, Farmer is a postdoctoral fellow in dialogue and program associate at Wabash Democracy and Public Discourse at Wabash College. He studies how citizens communicatively create, sustain and heal democratic communities, and his research focuses on creating ways people can organize against destructive political forces like polarization and disinformation. Also studying problems and solutions to policy implementation, ultimately, Farmer is focused on helping citizens do democracy more effectively.

“We’ve intentionally chosen Rowdy for his background and expertise as a speaker,” says Twyman. “This election, and especially the more recent elections that students may be more familiar with, have been turbulent. They’re not the norm. We’re just trying to help students understand that you can have productive conversations across differences. Just because you disagree does not mean you have to be disrespectful. We’re purposefully trying to bring two different campuses together, two different types of students, two different kinds of atmospheres.”

The Earlham Center for Social Justice is also separately bringing in speaker Lisa Renze on Wednesday, Oct. 2 for a media literacy workshop as part of this new partnership with CEA. This workshop is intended to combat disinformation and misinformation and promote fact checking — all crucial skills for media literacy. The event is free and no tickets are required.

“The speaker series has lots of different categories,” says Twyman. “For our purposes, we chose the civic discourse category.” Other categories include K-12 engagement and partnerships, service-based and community-based learning, and teaching and learning for democracy.

In addition to speaker series and retreats, CEA also provides various grant opportunities. All upcoming grants have a deadline of Oct. 1. These include the Learning Community Grant for support in designing and implementing workshops and communities to better prepare faculty and staff for community engagement; the High Impact Practices Grant for creative community projects that support the development and implementation of practices that strengthen existing community partnerships and help build the next generation of leaders; the aforementioned SEAD Grant for building authentic relationships between campuses and communities and the Election Engagement Grant for supporting nonpartisan election engagement for student bodies during the 2024 election.

Other opportunities with CEA include AmeriCorps VISTA programming, workshops and seminars with various affiliate groups and a summit and research symposium. Twyman is excited for it all and hopes other faculty are too.

“There’s a lot of things we can do here in our own backyard,” says Twyman regarding being more engaged in the community. “CEA’s goal is to help us do that, to focus on the community that we’re in. My goal is to just let Earlham know we have access to this resource.” Interested in getting involved? Reach out to CEA to get started by applying to be a speaker, checking out a grant, attending a digital workshop and more, all directly via their website.

By Jay Kibble, writer/editor for Earlham’s Office of Marketing & Communications

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About Earlham College 

Earlham College and Earlham School of Religion foster a collaborative learning community that inspires and motivates students with transformative opportunities and experiences so they can become catalysts for good in a changing world. Located in Richmond, Indiana, Earlham is one of U.S. News & World Report’s Top 100 national liberal arts colleges and offers one of the top 20 classroom experiences in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.