African Americans and Community Engagement in Higher Education: Community Service, Service-Learning, and Community-Based Research

Looks at town-grown relationships with a focus on African Americans.

This book discusses race and its roles in university-community partnerships. The contributors take a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multiregional approach that allows students, agency staff, community constituents, faculty, and campus administrators an opportunity to reflect on and redefine what impact African American identity—in the academy and in the community—has on various forms of community engagement. From historic concepts of “race uplift” to contemporary debates about racialized perceptions of need, they argue that African American identity plays a significant role. In representing best practices, recommendations, personal insight, and informed warnings about building sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships, the contributors provide a cogent platform from which to encourage the difficult and much-needed inclusion of race in dialogues of national service and community engagement.

“[African Americans and Community Engagement in Higher Education’s] balance of theory and practice, as well as historical and contemporary contexts, can provide tools for achieving cultural competency in community service in any discipline, through informing the transition from ‘doing’ to ‘being’ community service.” — Teaching Theology and Religion

“This book validates the African proverb ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ The topics are right on the mark and highlight the benefits of service-learning as an instrument of individual and community involvement and empowerment.” — Festus E. Obiakor, coeditor of Culturally Responsive Literacy Instruction