Spring Into Discovery-Intentional Spring Break 2022
Students planned a Bonner Meeting that included team bonding with many different games.
Vision and Values
Building on the long legacy of Emory & Henry’s commitment to connecting learning with civic responsibility, the Appalachian Center for Civic Life seeks to help our students become active and engaged citizens of this region, the nation, and the world. We seek to move beyond the traditional understandings of service-learning that tend to be centered around logging volunteer hours. Instead, we create opportunities for our students to be involved in a variety of civic engagement projects designed to meet specific learning objectives and that lead to tangible outcomes in the community.
Our focus is on the interconnection of place, citizenship, public policy, and social capital. The Appalachian Center for Civic Life employs a place-based model of civic life, one that connects citizenship and learning as part of a response to the long, environmental and human history of a place.
The mission and work of the Appalachian Center for Civic Life at Emory & Henry College is guided by seven key values:
We believe everyone has the potential to contribute to the building of strong communities and that each person’s story is of value to the life of a place. We also believe that every place has worth and potential independent from the values, practices, demands, and assumptions of global economic structures.
Social capital underwrites two guiding principles on which the Center is founded. First, that everyone has within themselves gifts, talents, and vision to make a difference in the lives of others and in their places. Second, that every place has the potential and the assets to be a safe, healthy, and good place for all its people.
We understand place as an ongoing, dynamic process that involves three interrelated elements. The natural environment includes such things as the landscape, natural resources, climate, and geology, all of which help to determine the type of social and economic relationships that occur in a place. The built environment includes all the things human beings impose upon the landscape in order to live on it, make use of it, and profit from it. The third element is the human culture and history of a place. All of these elements continuously interact with one another in complicated ways.
To know and understand a place in all of its complexity is to learn and acquire the skills and insights necessary to respond productively to the conflicts in that place and to become part of the ongoing creative processes of that place.
At the core of the Appalachian Center’s mission is an understanding that all human beings deserve equitable economic, political, and social rights. Social justice is an understanding that all human beings, by the very nature of their humanity, should have equal access to education, economic security, good health, general well-being, and opportunity. Those actions, structures, and policies that make up the work of citizenship and which seek to enhance, broaden, deepen, and enrich human lives and relationships within a place fall under social justice.
Social justice is also about our relationships with one another, with the natural world, and with the past, present, and future. Both place and justice are social processes that involve human lives and relationships.
Service is of two kinds, both equally important and critical to the life of a place. First, service is meeting the immediate needs of persons. The hungry must be fed, the homeless sheltered, the ill comforted, the troubled eased, the stranger welcomed. Working in food pantries, serving as a tutor in the public schools, care giving for a sick and aging relative or neighbor, participation in community clean-up days, making apple butter to raise money for a community group, are all examples of this first aspect of service.
Second, service is also working for the long-term systemic changes necessary to prevent hunger, homelessness, abuse, lack of healthcare, and a host of other issues; it is not enough to address the immediate needs of persons in trouble, we must work to change the conditions that have resulted in the troubles. Public policy, public service, civic leadership, mobilizing for social change, and community organizing are all aspects of this second aspect of service; collaboratively working from a variety of perspectives to identify the root causes of the troubles around us and then working to address those root causes.
Citizenship and civic responsibility are central among the Appalachian Center’s mission and goals. We do not think of citizenship in legal terms so much as we draw from Wendell Berry’s understanding of membership in a place. Citizenship entails full participation in and responsibility for the full life of a place.
We understand empathy as vital to citizenship. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another human beingfrom their point of view.Empathy requires imagination because it involves more than mere recognition of emotional experience; rather, it is about an ability to share the thoughts, feelings, and perspectives of other humans, to fully realize the reasons they experience the world in a way different from yourself. This is thinking beyond the self and it is utterly necessary for the shared work of citizenship.
The Appalachian Center is committed to the collaborative work of building a durable, inhabitable, and democratic future in all places. As a part of membership in a place, citizenship involves care and stewardship as well as working to ensure that the place is safe, healthy, and good for all people, both now and long years in the future.
Our vision of citizen education and place-based education includes an expectation that all members practice honesty with one another. Because all places, all learning, all service, and all citizenship is fundamentally relational, mutual honesty is essential if relationships are to be enduring and transformative.
The Appalachian Center is committed to an honest citizenship, one lived out in the honesty of daily relationships with students, with staff, with the communities surrounding the College, with our community partners, and with the wider and expanding circle of people around the world. Fundamental to the work of the Appalachian Center for Civic Life is an understanding that honesty is the first step toward a true and vital membership in a place.
