Gary Kirk has recently been hired as the executive director of the center.

The center is intended to allow faculty, students and community partners to work collaboratively, both locally and internationally, to better understand and address regional priorities and challenges, according to the college. It also is intended to expand community-based teaching and research opportunities; provide expertise and support for academic departments to meet learning goals for civic engagement; and ensure recognition of outstanding community engagement work by faculty, students and staff.

“Dickinson’s partnership with its neighboring community and its Center for Civic Learning and Action are clear examples of higher education serving the public good,” said Eugene Tobin, senior program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“We are grateful for the Mellon Foundation’s support and thank them for recognizing the value of civic engagement through learning and action,” college president Margee Ensign said.

The Mellon Foundation grant deepens Dickinson’s integration of academics and community action by ensuring faculty involvement and curricular development define the new center. It also allows the center to launch with a slate of new activities and extensions of existing partnerships, according to the college.

One example is the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, an online repository of documents and records from the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School. More than 250,000 pages of documentation have been digitized with the help of Dickinson students to make primary source documentation about the school accessible online and to provide resources for teaching. The project is based upon community reciprocity by encouraging “citizen archivists,” including the descendants of CIIS students, to contribute their own documents, photos, family stories and creative works to the digital site created at Dickinson.

Other examples of the more than 45 existing partnerships the center will lead are two faculty-community Learning and Action Networks in support of community-engaged research, teaching and learning, one focused on community health and another on north Carlisle neighborhoods, one of the most ethnically and racially diverse areas of Carlisle and the most economically disenfranchised.