Take a Skills Course in Fall 2025

Fri, 09 May 2025 15:54:00 -0400

UMBC Community Leadership Skills Courses are officially open to undergraduates who have completed at least 60 credits, and are listed as CLDR 410/610!

Undergraduates can join graduate students and community learners in all of the skills courses. Each course is worth one credit each, and meets for 5 weeks on Wednesday evenings from 4:30 - 7:00pm in the Lion Brothers Building classroom in Southwest Baltimore City, which is on the UMBC Shuttle route as well as public transportation routes. We are offering three excellent Skills Courses in Fall 2025, which are described below!

Please share this information and the attached flier with your networks. Students should contact me if they have any questions. They can read more about Skills Courses instructors on the CLDR website.

Course Descriptions

1) CLDR 410/610 -- Places and Placemaking, with Joby Taylor (8/27 - 9/24)

Places and Placemaking will be a 1 credit class designed to support students in cultivating a strong sense of place and developing leadership skills and experience in the practice of placemaking. The class will meet weekly for 2.5hr sessions for 5 weeks (1 credit time equivalent), mixing synchronous seminar style instruction with outdoor in person sessions. Students will critically explore theoretical and applied perspectives about the key concept of “place” through seminar style discussions, written reflections, and individual projects. Human beings charge the world with meaning and power, and as culture scholar Clifford Geertz reminds us “No one lives in the world in general...Everybody lives in some confined and limited stretch of it—the world around here.” Taking that as our jumping off point for a hands-on skill-based class, the majority of the course will engage students in in-person local outings (and complementary virtual outings) that draw upon historical/cultural background narratives, current social dynamics, and community member perspectives to develop their own sense of place and gain an informed understanding of the ongoing local struggle for meaning and positive community change in our Baltimore area. After participating in initial instructor-designed and led place-based outings, students will then design, develop, and present their own place-based outing for the class. Students will leave the course with skills for developing a vibrant and nuanced sense of place, and leadership tools for facilitating that powerful sense of place and placemaking in others in their classrooms, communities, or workplaces.

2) CLDR 410/610 Grant Writing for Social Change, with Meghann Shutt (10/1-10/29)

Grant Writing for Social Change is a 1 credit class designed to build students’ skills to write and secure grant funding successfully for 501(C)3 organizations. The class will meet weekly for 2.5hr sessions for 5 weeks. It will require writing, editing, critical thinking, and meeting deadlines, and all students are welcome, regardless of their experience in this area. In this five session class, students will learn the fundamentals of grant proposal writing including: ethics in fundraising, finding and vetting funding opportunities, analyzing grant opportunities, usually referred to as Requests for Proposals (RFPs), organizing, writing and submitting compelling proposals, and the do's and don'ts of teaming with organizations. Throughout the class students will choose one project to develop throughout the five weeks we work together. The steps of this applied project will be to: identify, write, and submit a grant proposal for a real nonprofit organization. All assignments will be written exercises that will receive feedback from the instructor and contribute to the ultimate class goal of submitting an actual proposal by class end. For this course-long project, students can choose to either 1) select a real nonprofit organization to work with (needs to be an organization you are already connected with) choose the grant, meet with the organization, write a proposal with them, and actually submit the proposal to the funder or 2) select a grant opportunity and complete the entire process for a well known nonprofit without actually meeting with the organization or submitting it. Essentially you may choose to learn the entire process fully in “practice mode” without submittal and in-person meetings or in “working professional mode” with ending in the submission of a proposal. Please consider your availability, time commitments, and readiness to meet with working professionals before deciding. We’ll discuss more in class!

3) CLDR 410/610 Community Organizing, with Denise Griffin Johnson & Lane Victorson (11/5 - 12/10)

Community Organizing is a practice that supports community development, community cohesiveness, community leadership, and builds community capacity to define, embrace, and create culture and belonging; giving people agency over what they value. The practice of Community Organizing identifies community leadership, builds facilitation skills, planning skills, resource development, increases connections to people and places, and most importantly teaches how best to engage in public discourse so that many perspectives are heard, understood, and valued. The course will provide students with some practical skills for organizing, while also engaging in the framework of traditional organizing and cultural organizing.