Community Engagement & Leadership

There are many ways to define, think about, and approach leadership. CEL defines leadership as a process of influencing and advancing change for a more equitable world. CEL supports a community-engaged leadership framework. Our beliefs about leadership inform the ways we think, talk about, and practice leadership.

Community engagement, also called civic engagement, is not a term most people use regularly. However, most of us have experience with what community engagement is all about! Community engagement is active participation in your community and being invested in what happens in your community. It includes direct service, policy and governance, community organizing and activism, community-engaged learning and research, and social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility. Learn about the Pathways of Public Service & Civic Engagement. 

Principles for ethical and effective community engagement inform our practice. The principles (Reciprocity, Accountability, Preparation, Respect & Inclusion, Safety & Wellbeing, Reflection & Evaluation, and Humility) guide our work with students, community partners, staff, and faculty to inform program design and implementation as well as to ensure that our work aligns with our values. 

This work and these principles were adapted from the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University.

Leadership is about knowing, being, and doing. We must know ourselves and what we are working towards. We must be ethical, principled, authentic, open, caring, and inclusive. We must act on our commitments in socially responsible ways (Komives, Lucas, & McMahon, 2013). Fundamentally, leadership is about practicing our values and core beliefs in thought, feelings, and behaviors individually and collectively to take action on a shared purpose. 

Leadership is for everyone and CEL's Leadership Model supports all students in growing their leadership potential and capacity! 

CEL's Leadership Model allows students to learn more about themselves in four key areas (Values, Strengths, Social Positionality & Consciousness, and Social Causes & Pathways) while making commitments to how they want to be and act, or how they want to practice community-engaged leadership. Each area of the model encourages reflection upon the question: Who am I as a leader and what am I working towards? The model directly informs our workshops and influences all of our programs and services. 

Komives, S. R., Lucas, N., & McMahon, T. R. (1998). Exploring leadership: For college students who want to make a difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Our unit strives to ground our work in scholarship, theories, frameworks, and models that are culturally responsive and apply a critical lens to leadership development and community-engaged learning. Below is a curated list of some of the core resources that inform our program design, service delivery, and daily work with students and community partners.

• Ash, S. L. & Clayton, P. H. (2009). Generating, deepening, and documenting learning: The power of critical reflection in applied learning. Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, 1, 25-48.
• Avila, M., Gecan, M., & Peters, S. J. (2017). Transformative civic engagement through community organizing. Bloomfield: Stylus Publishing, LLC. 
• Bertrand Jones, T., Guthrie, K. L., & Osteen, L. (2016). Critical Domains of Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning: A Call to Transform Leadership Programs. New Directions for Student Leadership, 152, 9-22. 
• Clayton, P.H., Bringle, R.G., Senor, B., Huq, J., Morrison, M. (2010). Differentiating and assessing relationships in service-learning and civic engagement: Exploitative, transactional, or transformational. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 16, 5-22.
• Dolgon, C., Mitchell, T. D., & Eatman, T. K. (Eds.). (2017). Cambridge handbook of service learning and community engagement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Dugan, J. (2017). Leadership theory: Cultivating critical perspectives. New York, NY: Wiley Publishing. 
• Haas Center for Public Service, Stanford University. (2022, June). Our Approach. Stanford University, Haas Center for Public Service. https://haas.stanford.edu/about/our-approach
• Komives, S. R., Wagner, W. , & Associates. (2016). Leadership for a better world: Understanding the social change model of leadership development, 2nd edition. A publication of the National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs. New York, NY: Wiley Publishing. 
• Komives, S. R., Longerbeam, S. D., Mainella, F., Osteen, L., Owen, J. E., & Wagner, W. (2009) Leadership identity development: Challenges in applying a developmental model. Journal of Leadership Education, 8 (1), 11- 47. 
• Kretzmann, J. P. & McKnight, J. (1993). Building communities from the inside out: a path toward finding and mobilizing a community's assets. Northwestern University: The Asset-Based Community Development Institute, Institute for Policy Research.
• Mitchell, T. D. (2014). How service-learning enacts social justice sensemaking. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 2(2), Article 6. 
• Mitchell, T. D., Donahue, D. M. & Young-Law, C. (2012). Service learning as a pedagogy of whiteness. Equity and Excellence in Education, 45(4), 612-629.  
• Mitchell, T. 2008. Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2): 50-65.
• Museus, S., Lee, N., Calhoun, K., Sánchez-Parkinson, L., & Ting, M. (2017). The Social Action, Leadership, and Transformation (SALT) Model. Ann Arbor, MI: National Center for Institutional Diversity. Retrieved from https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/ncid-assets/ncid-documents/publications/Museus%20et%20al%20(2017)%20SALT%20Model%20Brief.pdf.
• Museus, S. D. (2014). The culturally engaging campus environments (CECE) model: A new theory of college success among racially diverse student populations. In M. B. Paulsen, Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (pp. 189-227). New York, NY: Springer.
• Routenberg, R., Thompson, E., & Waterberg, R. (2013). When neutrality is not enough: Wrestling with the challenges of multipartiality. In L.M.  Landerman (Ed.), Art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators (pp 173-197). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
• Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.