What a wonderful surprise for me to get a call from the Peace Corps a couple weeks ago asking about having the new Director, Carrie Hessler-Radelet, come to Baltimore to meet our Shriver Peaceworker Fellows and learn about their community development and service work!  After a bit of quick planning, our Peaceworker Fellows and graduate students Greg Couturier (School of Social Work) and Brooks Binau (Geography and Environmental Systems Department) hosted Director Hessler-Radelet and a small group of us for a full morning of program tours and engaged conversations... (continue reading)

Thanks to a grant from OneMain Financial, UMBC will join Loyola University in launching the first two formally designated Kiva University chapters in Maryland. Kiva U seeks to engage students and educators in a global effort to expand financial inclusion, foster community, and have a tangible positive impact on issues that matter to them... (continue reading)

What does BreakingGround look like in practice? It's another question I'm asked all the time, and because BreakingGround takes many forms (engaged scholarship, courses, projects, events, cultural practices, everyday interactions), there is no simple answer. But these three videos involving people at UMBC working on issues relating to food, community, health and justice, convey a sense of the range and spirit of BreakingGround activities... (continue reading)

Mainstream media coverage tells us that Detroit is a failed city, a story told through images of desperately unemployed people, abandoned city blocks, and crumbling factories, images that can provoke fearful speculations of people in Baltimore. Are we next? But the recent Allied Media Project conference in Detroit was filled with artists, youth leaders, media activists, students, teachers, researchers, writers, filmmakers, and community organizers who gathered to think about current and long-term solutions to seemingly intractable social problems. I was struck by the insistence that we learn our histories and tell our present stories in order to be able to imagine the future tales of these two cities--one where I was born and the other where I have lived for the last 25 years... (continue reading)

The American Democracy Project's annual meeting took place earlier this month in Louisville, Kentucky, with UMBC sending 18 participants: the largest of all the campus delegations. Our team of students, faculty and staff members led two presentations and hosted a roundtable discussion about practicing democracy on campus, shining a spotlight on The Garden (winner of this year's SGA Prove It! competition) and the STRiVE student leadership retreat. Here are thoughts from members of the UMBC delegation about what we did and what we learned in Louisville ... (continue reading)

Louisville, Kentucky: home of Muhammad Ali, Helen Hume, the Louisville Slugger, Diane Sawyer, the Kentucky Derby, and craft brews of bourbon and beer. But what does it have to do with Baltimore? After being in Louisville with a delegation of 18 people from UMBC attending the annual conference of the American Democracy Project, I think there are some similarities worth considering. Enjoyable attractions are not the full story ... (continue reading)

What exactly is BreakingGround? It's a question I'm asked all the time, because this UMBC initiative defies conventional categories. Guided by UMBC professor Bill Shewbridge, students in his TV production course tackled the challenge of answering the question by capturing BreakingGround stories for UMBC's "In the Loop" program. Here are three of those short segments... (continue reading)

Most students who enroll in my course, Studies in Feminist Activism, expect to learn about the history of feminism and feminist movements. We do that, sure, but the course also encourages students to see themselves as activists, as part of the history of feminist activism. They do so by organizing activist projects addressing issues they are personally passionate about that affect their communities, from UMBC to their hometowns, Maryland to the globe... (continue reading)