Critical Commitments

This course prepares community engagement professionals (CEPs) to critically examine, articulate, and act on their commitments to ethical and effective community engagement practice. Moving beyond surface-level definitions, this course challenges participants to develop a deeper, practice-oriented understanding of how systemic inequities shape community-university relationships and what it means to disrupt them.

Over the course of seven modules, participants will explore foundational concepts and frameworks that undergird equitable community engagement practice, including intersectionality, positionality, power and privilege, culturally relevant and sustaining approaches, and anticolonial stances. Participants will examine how implicit bias, structural inequities, and dominant narratives operate within institutions and community partnerships, and will identify concrete strategies to counter them in their daily work as CEPs.

The course also moves from concept to action, guiding participants to identify and analyze the stated goals and strategies of their own institutions and units, evaluate how well those efforts align with organizational values, and contribute meaningfully to their campus's efforts through informed and accountable practice. Drawing on equity-centered leadership frameworks, participants will explore distributed leadership models that center reciprocity, full participation, shared decision-making, and authentic community partnerships.

By the end of this course, participants will have developed a set of essential commitments and applied strategies for advancing just and inclusive community engagement - core dimensions of ethical and effective practice as a community engagement professional.

Course objectives

Identify essential commitments to advancing diversity, equity, anti-racism, and inclusion as a CEP.
Articulate how (a) your personal experiences, knowledge and frameworks, and (b) your own experiences and social identities through an intersectional lens and as they relate to power and privilege, have impacted your commitments to diversity equity, anti-racism, and inclusion as a CEP.
Recognize your own explicit and implicit biases and how such biases may constrain or enable your efficacy to carry out equity and inclusion work.
Identify the stated goals of your institution and unit as they relate to diversity, equity, anti-racism, and inclusion, as well as the specific strategies being pursued to meet those goals.
Contextually apply your understandings and skills to advance equity-related goals, social justice framework, and commitments through specific practices, activities, structures or policies pertinent to a role as a CEP.
Understand the main concepts and approaches undergirding equity, diversity, and inclusion as they relate to the role of a CEP.