September 1, 2024

This past year I was a Campus Compact Equity & Engagement Fellow along with my co-editors of the book Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices, which was published in 2023. We spent the year promoting the book through a series of on-line talks and workshops that drew from insights and principles related to the publication and explored the diverse ways that anti-racist community engagement principles can be put into practice on and off college and university campuses. That experience allowed me to continue to reflect on what anti-racism means within a community-engagement context.

Anti-racism is a term that on one hand is quite specific—the work against, in opposition to racism, and on the other hand it is a term that points outward to an array of practices. Having been involved in assembling the amazing projects and stories in the Anti-Racist Community Engagement book, I realized that those initiatives reconfirmed my commitment to community engagement within my own work—in CESL and within my own creative practice. My colleague and co-editor, Christina Santana, has written about our collaborative work as an emergent strategy (following the guide of adrienne maree brown’s work) in support of epistemic justice, which John Loggins describes as work of “creating spaces for us to really value and honor the wisdom that comes from community, the wisdom that comes from experience.”

I recognized that anti-racism approaches in community engagement are a natural pairing since the principles of reciprocal justice-based engagement are in complete alignment with anti-racist practices that value relational ways of being. Those principles and practices thoughtfully leverage and amplify community voices, support new knowledge creation, invert power dynamics to center marginalized experiences, and decenter whiteness, the institution, and normative frameworks that have historically sought to maintain oppressive structures and systems. And I came to see that anti-racism is also about new ways of seeing—and seeing the very things racism obscures, undermines and destroys—humanity, abundance, critical hope and joy. And it is those insights that I’m using as my frame, my tether, my light, to guide me through this upcoming academic year.

This academic year, we also celebrate the 25th anniversary of the creation of an office dedicated to community-engaged learning at UMass Amherst. While this is our “official” anniversary of the founding of the office, the unofficial beginning of community-engaged learning can be traced back to the strong tradition of civic engagement beginning with the cooperative spirit of the institution’s agricultural mission and extending to student and faculty activism in the 1960s. Formal efforts to organize service-learning at UMass began in 1993 when a group of faculty asked Provost Glen Gordon to establish the “Provost’s Special Committee on Service Learning” “to encourage and expand the range of service-learning courses.” One year later the first cohort of Service-Learning Faculty Fellows informally gathered to discuss and develop the first service-learning courses on campus. But it was not until 2000, with the development of the Commonwealth Honors College, that a formal Service-Learning office was established on campus. That year the “Office of Community Service-Learning” (OCSL) was established to provide support and integrate service-learning into the Honors curriculum. Over the years the office expanded to support engaged learning more broadly on campus and in 2010 the office moved from the Honors College to the provost’s office to serve all students and faculty on campus—and was renamed “Civic Engagement and Service-Learning” (CESL).

With the emergence of service-learning, first informally delivered by faculty, then organized through the Honors College, and, today, coordinated across campus through CESL, the impact and potential of reflective community and civic engagement on campus has grown. Our perspectives and insights have also grown and our work to develop meaningful relationships with community partners has deepened through a critical praxis that continues to develop anti-racist and anti-oppressive strategies that are asset-based and reciprocal.

We are planning for several interrelated events to celebrate our 25th anniversary in Spring 2025 and will announce those soon. I hope you all join us and celebrate the work we have done, as well as look forward to the innovative and impactful work we hope to do in the years ahead.

Best wishes for a productive and meaningful academic year.

Joseph Krupczynski