Conceptual Framework: Place-Based Community Engagement in Higher Education

In their work on Place-Based Community Engagement in Higher Education, Erica K. Yamamura and Kent Koth (2018) outlined five key principles of place-based community engagement (PBCE). First, PBCE “focuses intensively on a definable geographic area” (p. 18), enabling intentionality and focus to partnerships and projects. Second, PBCE “invites universities to put an equal emphasis on campus and community impact,” (p. 20) enabling university and community partners to work together on mutually beneficial strategies and goals. Third, PBCE efforts “present a long-term vision and sustained commitment to partnership” (p. 20). PBCE is not built on the short-term, but on longer-term participation in the health of a community. Fourth, PBCE invites “university-wide engagement that animates the mission and develops the institution” (p. 126). This principle recognizes the potential for increased university vitality by bringing multiple areas of the university ecosystem together in focused PBCE. Finally, to manage and support the “multiple variables and many partners” involved in PBCE, PBCE draws upon “the concept and practice of collective impact” as a “structured form of collaboration” (p. 21).

In a later section of this chapter, I will evaluate the experiences of a particular program at WP through the lenses of those five principles. However here, a brief summary of our initial institutional steps toward place-based education will serve to provide a thumbnail of that process. Upon President Cook’s inauguration, WP identified the city of Portland, and particularly our neighbors within the city who are a part of historically underserved and/or systemically marginalized, as the who to whom we wanted to be good neighbors. WP took early steps to lower tuition rates, actively recruited students from our home place, and worked to increase access to higher education to many first-generation college students and others who may not have previously had access to higher education at a private institution or at all. This effort led to some early results where even though Portland is billed as one of the “Whitest cities in the US” (Badger, 2015), now 63% of WP students identify as people of color. In addition, 57% identify as the first generation in their family to go to college. This demographic shift has led and is leading the WP community deeper into engaging racial/ethnic diversity and confronting our historical “Whiteness” as well as the complicated story of race and class within the Portland metro area. This journey also has led and is leading the WP community deeper into engaging the complexities of religious diversity, striving to get to know and love those neighbors of different religious traditions and backgrounds, and those who stand outside of all traditional religious institutions. This pursuit of getting to know and finding out how to actively, practically, and concretely love our particular neighbors has led the community to also dive deeper into engaging the questions of sexual diversity, something that is significant in our city and that Christian colleges and universities have mixed reputations in handling (Trentaz, 2015).

WP’s focus on making the work of “collaborating with and for our urban environment” (Warner Pacific University, n.d.-a) an institutional priority has brought implications throughout the university. Early initiatives encouraged the weaving of an eye toward the urban location throughout the curriculum. Departments and divisions have continued to cultivate and nurture community partnerships for internship and field education placements, service-learning sites, and co-curricular and curricular experiences in the city. All incoming first-year students (and many transfers) take a course engaging a particular theme in/ of our city in their first semester as part of orienting to WP. All students have a service-learning requirement that has been redesigned to meet specific tangible needs within our city in eight different categories: Compassion, Ecological Justice, Economic Equity, Gender Equity, Interfaith Relationship, Racial/Ethnic Equity, Support for the Elderly & Disabled, and Youth & Child Support. Our service-learning staff communicates and connects this work as a way for students to engage in WP’s Christ-centered identity “through utilizing their skills, passions, and education to work toward social justice through consistent direct service in the community” (Warner Pacific University, n.d.-b).

The voices and the presence of our neighbors arc woven throughout curriculum, student programming, chapel, and other areas of the university. New programs arc developed, at least in part, in response to the needs and opportunities our city holds by offering what we have learned in our own path toward diversity and inclusion and in order to grow the university’s enrollment. In this past decade, WP has made intentional and strategic efforts to answer the question of how we might make higher education available to the city of Portland and how the city of Portland might shape our education. This strategy is in part about survival and it also places us squarely within the core of our theological history and identity. However, is there a difference between being invested in our city and being an engaged institutional neighbor? How does that live at the program level? These arc questions that the undergraduate program in Ministry and Community Engagement has sought to delve into more deeply.