Civic learning at Grinnell happens across the student experience. Academic community-engaged learning, the residential curriculum, and co-curricular community-engaged learning each provide opportunities for students to connect their learning with communities, relationships, and complex societal challenges.
The Civic Education and Innovation team works in partnership with faculty, staff, students, and community partners across these areas, helping connect and strengthen opportunities for civic learning rather than owning or delivering all of them. By building relationships across divisions and between the College and community, we help students recognize connections among experiences that may happen in different settings—and understand them as part of a broader civic learning journey.
Mission:
CEI creates opportunities for students to learn with communities, understand the systems that shape our shared lives, and develop the relationships, knowledge, and skills to participate thoughtfully in shaping the future.
Vision:
Every Grinnell College student will have opportunities to explore and deepen their civic learning—whether by building relationships, examining their place within complex systems, connecting civic values with other aspirations, or developing their capacity to participate thoughtfully in their communities and the wider world.
Commitment:
At Grinnell, we are committed to helping students explore how their personal, professional, and civic aspirations can contribute meaningfully to the communities and systems of which they are a part. Through hands-on, community-engaged learning, the Civic Education and Innovation team in the CLS helps students develop the knowledge, skills, relationships, and reflective practices needed to understand complex challenges, recognize their own positionality and agency, and contribute with intention and humility. By examining how their efforts intersect with those of community partners, organizations, institutions, and others working toward change, students learn to see their individual contributions not in isolation, but as part of broader relationships and systems—and to identify meaningful roles they can play in advancing more equitable and sustainable change.
Our Civic Education and Innovation Model
Our Civic Education and Innovation model recognizes that meaningful civic engagement can take many forms. Service addresses immediate community needs; advocacy seeks to influence policies, practices, and public understanding; and systems inquiry helps us understand the relationships, structures, and patterns that shape complex challenges. Students may engage deeply in one or more of these approaches. The goal is not for every student to do everything, but to understand how different forms of civic action relate to and complement one another—and to see their own contributions as part of a larger ecosystem of people and organizations working toward change.
Core Civic Values:
- Flourishing Community We prioritize fostering a flourishing community centered on mutual trust, compassion, curiosity, agency, and rest.
- Intentional Self-Reflection Equitable relationships require continuous self-reflection, assessment, and the humility to change.
- Diversity & Inclusion Civic education and innovation should critically evaluate power dynamics and honor the strengths and voices of all participants.
- Collaborative Partnerships Community-centered partnerships should be grounded in trust, mutual respect, collective empowerment, and co-creation.
- Sustainability Civic collaborations should be contextually responsive, well-researched, fiscally responsible, and focused on creating positive change. Civic activities should take into consideration their social, economic, and environmental impacts as well as their alignment with effective, systemic solutions.
Overarching Civic Learning Goals:
- Students will see themselves as a part of interconnected local communities that they are responsible to and for.
- Students will be able to reflect upon and articulate how their civic commitments intersect with their concepts of social justice, long-term change-making, and flourishing community.
- Students will learn to navigate and integrate their identities, values, academic interests, and civic work.
- Students will take part in equity-minded collaboration.
- Students will make a practice of continually assessing and prioritizing personal and communal sustainability in their civic activities.
