Building a Better World: The Pedagogy and Practice of Global Service-Learning

Students, community members, faculty members, teachers - everyone who collaborates to build a better world, who struggles with the relationship between education and transformation, who is deeply concerned with social challenges, injustices, and building a better future for our children and grandchildren - this site is for you.  We have:

• Web resources relevant to community-driven development, justice, human rights, and critically reflective experiential education
• An interactive resource database where individuals may download or contribute materials to support critically reflective global service-learning
• A global service-learning discussion group
• An overview of our book, Building a Better World: The Pedagogy and Practice of Global Service-learning
• Inspiration and rejuvenation for those dedicated to building a better world through conscientious and thoughtful service, learning, and connection across cultures

This site was started by several individuals who have worked with community organizations around the world. We have benefited immensely from the insights we've been afforded through that work. We continue to struggle, try, discover, and learn on a regular basis how we can better align our lives with community-driven, fair, just efforts to build a world that better recognizes each individual's core human dignity. Our particular vocation has been global service-learning, but we recognize the substantial connections between any individual's interests in justice and resources shared through these pages. We have therefore deliberately built a platform that allows ongoing sharing, building, questioning, and collaboration from all visitors to this site. Our current resources include information on community development, global citizenship, human rights, fair trade, conscious consumption, sustainability, education, transformation, and reflection. We should mention, while we have collectively worked with dozens of universities, cooperated with numerous community organizations, and situated our work within broad research and discussion, many of us were strongly influenced by our ongoing work with the nonprofit organization Amizade Global Service-Learning. While we continue to learn from others, cooperate with Amizade, and form new partnerships, we look forward to the discussion and ongoing efforts to build a better world.