Civic Reflection News Update — February 2008

Seed Grants Update

We are now building on what we have learned to foster civic reflection programming in partnership with national networks in the fields of service, philanthropy, and civic dialogue. Stay tuned!

New On Our Website

New in the Resource Library

The Resource Library is an extensive collection of questions and readings designed to spur reflection on civic activity. Following are recent additions to the library along with a few questions they raise.

"His" Grace by Mikhail Naimy

• How should leaders be held accountable?
• What is charity? What inspires it?
• How does gratitude (or lack of gratitude) affect the exchange between giver and receiver?

"What I Learned from My Mother" by Julia Kasdorf

• What is the virtue of humility, or humble service?
• Is it possible to be too generous?
• What does it mean to belong to others?

"The Land Ethic" from A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

• Can we use up the resources upon which we rely?
• How can leaders inspire change?
• What is our responsibility to the natural world?

"The Old Cumberland Beggar" by William Wordsworth

• Should we only help those who (we believe) will help themselves?
• What are the dangers in forming customs or traditions around one's giving?
• What is poverty? How should it be met?

New in the Facilitators' Forum

The Facilitators' Forum provides an opportunity for leaders of civic reflection conversations to share their experiences and insights. Recent submissions include:

• "Saving the Crippled Boy" by Jan Beatty and "Compassion: The Wish-Fulfilling Jewel" by Sogyal Rinpoche. AmeriCorps members use Beatty's poem and Rinpoche's parable to delve into the difficult feelings, like fear, that can accompany service.

• "A Bed for the Night" by Bertolt Brecht and Specimen Days (excerpt) by Walt Whitman. University students, faculty, staff and community members in a service-learning program use poems by Brecht and Whitman to get fresh perspectives on the question, "What does service look like?"

• "Second Inaugural Address" by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's speech prompts retired volunteers to discuss compassion and forgiveness in their own lives as citizen leaders.

Program Spotlight

Civic Reflection and Service-Learning in Vermont

During the 2007-08 academic year, the Service-Learning Program at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont has been holding a series of monthly civic reflection conversations that convene students, faculty, staff and members of the Northfield community around the program's core vision: to be the common thread that connects academic, student, and community life. Participants in "NUSL Civic Reflections" have helped to select the readings, drawn from The Civically Engaged Reader, and the questions to be explored. Among the texts the group has discussed so far are essays, stories and poems by Jane Addams, Graham Greene, Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks. In this first year, the program has been so popular, and retention so high, that Service-Learning Coordinator and series facilitator Michelle Barber has maintained a waiting list of would-be participants.

Barber thinks that the series has been successful partly because of participants' enthusiasm for choosing the readings. "They were deep into the book before the series even started. I would hear them say, 'Oh, I really liked this one!' and 'Did you read that one?'" The students, she says, regularly tell her how much they enjoy the intellectual and social stimulation and the experience of being on a first-name basis and an "equal playing field" with adults, including professors. In the 2008-09 academic year, half of the current participants will continue with the program and half will be new. Barber anticipates that the mix of readings and perspectives will remain dynamic as the program evolves.

Civic Reflection News & Notes

New Anthology on Philanthropy

Giving Well, Doing Good: Readings for Thoughtful Philanthropists, edited by Amy A. Kass, is just out from Indiana University Press. This thematically organized anthology brings together a new set of readings, from the classic to the contemporary, which illuminate fundamental questions about the ideas and practice of philanthropy. Giving Well, Doing Good is designed to offer guidance to donors, trustees, foundation staff and nonprofit leaders, and to promote a philanthropic practice that is more responsible, effective, and civic-spirited. Its editor, Amy A. Kass, is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago and a leader in the practice of civic reflection.

Teens and Retirees in Ohio Join for Civic Reflection and Service

RSVP of Akron, Ohio, recipient of a Project on Civic Reflection seed grant in 2007, has extended its civic reflection program to include a shared service project. High school students and senior volunteers who participated in the Civic Reflections series in the fall of 2007 have continued to meet, and this spring they will read nature poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins and work together to install eco-friendly lighting in low-income housing in Akron. For more details, click here.

Michigan Public Library Holds Civic Reflection Dialogues

Beginning in March, the main branch of the Capital Area District Library in Lansing, Michigan will hold a monthly civic reflection discussion group open to the public. Eric Ederer, a reference librarian at CADL, has been facilitating Great Books discussions at the library for several years. He sees civic reflection as a natural extension of the power of literature to bring people together, and hopes to draw a diverse group of participants to the Civic Reflection Dialogues. The reading list includes classic and contemporary texts, from Epictitus to Dave Eggers.

Ederer will be discussing civic reflection in a brief interview on Lansing Public Radio, WLNZ-FM, at 9:45 a.m. CST on Tuesday, February 26. To listen, click here and select the "Listen Live" icon.

Civic Reflection with Campus Compact and AmeriCorps VISTA

Campus Compact and AmeriCorps VISTA built civic reflection sessions into their national meetings, held jointly in Austin, Texas from January 27th-31st. Project on Civic Reflection staff made presentations and led discussions of carefully selected short readings. Meeting participants included Campus Compact state directors and national office staff and VISTA project supervisors and leaders from 25 states. Campus Compact, a national coalition of over one thousand college and university presidents, advances the public purposes of colleges and universities to improve community life and to educate students for civic and social responsibility. AmeriCorps VISTA, founded in 1965 as Volunteers in Service to America, is the national service program designed specifically to fight poverty.

Reflecting on Justice with the Illinois Humanities Council



The Illinois Humanities Council has been conducting a civic reflection program, Reflecting on Justice, with the Logan Square Neighborhood Association since June 2007. The program has been very well received by staff, two of whom will be trained as facilitators. Readings, selected to help participants think in new ways about issues they confront in their work, have included poems by Eduardo Galeano, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Frost, Billy Collins and Imtiaz Dharker.

Civic Reflections at City Hall in Valparaiso, Indiana

A civic reflection series centered on the theme "What is 'Our Town'?" is meeting monthly in City Council chambers in Valparaiso, Indiana through spring 2008. The conversations, facilitated by a diverse group of community members from education, business, government and the nonprofit sector, bring together city leaders and residents to discuss questions like What kind of community do we want to be? As we grow, what should change? What should stay the same? Among the readings being used to illuminate these questions are prose and poetry by Abraham Lincoln, Langston Hughes, and Thornton Wilder.

At the invitation of the New York Council for the Humanities, Adam Davis led a demonstration civic reflection session at the New York AmeriCorps Project Directors Training, held on December 17, 2007 in Saratoga Springs, NY. The meeting was attended by about 75 project directors from across the state.

Chicago's Inspiration Cafe held a breakfast followed by a civic reflection conversation about homelessness on January 20. Led by Adam Davis, volunteers and homeless clients of Inspiration Café read poems by Bertolt Brecht and Anna Swir and reflected on what homelessness is, how people respond to it, and how appeals around homelessness can be made and heard.

Staff News & Notes

The Project on Civic Reflection is pleased to welcome Beth Marco as our coordinator of programs in service and volunteerism. Beth will coordinate the efforts of PCR and its partners to help make civic reflection an integral part of the service experience from high school through college and beyond.