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Samuels Center - Transforming Civic Engagement at Brandeis - Descriptive Transcript
Bobbi
I'm Bobby Samuels, Barbara Samuels, but everybody calls me Bobby. Both Vic and I grew up in families that cared about the world around them. At Brandeis I think although there weren't things like the Waltham group or specific community engagement activities in the air that we breathed here there was a sense of the need to care about the wider world than what was happening in The wider world.
Sara
Broadly the Samuel Center aims to bring students, faculty, staff, Community Partners, activists, artists together to work collaboratively to create a more just, ethical, and sustainable world. Right, we aim to do the work of tikkun olam and in so doing the goal is for Brandeis to become a leader in community engagement, to make community engagement a really central part of a Brandeis education.
Bobbi
I taught in a school of education, so I taught future teachers and teachers working on master's degrees, and one of the projects I was involved in uh we chose to have our teacher future teachers working at a community center doing literacy work. And it was through that initial activity that I realized how much work it took for a faculty member to set up a project like that, and yet over time I saw how beneficial it was to those students. Instead of just learning it academically but actually learning it experientially was so much more important and so much more lasting, so when we started talking about community engagement it seemed like an obvious step from that to move into including more community engagement in classroom situations.
Sara
Brandeis is deservedly really well known for its student-led Community engagement. So this is the work of the Waltham Group which was founded in 1966 so it's really a deep and core part of this University. We hear from our partners that they love our students, that our students do extraordinary work in the community, that they add capacity to these organizations that are doing really vital work in education in serving people who are homeless or marginally housed in language literacy, like our students are doing all of this. What's been missing in my opinion is a centralized structure that brings together what the students are doing uh on the student affairs side of of the university, and the academy.
Bobbi
Our motto is truth unto its innermost Parts, but tikkun olam is so much a part of Judaism and my Judaism, Vic and my Judaism. That Brandeis is a Jewish sponsored University it seems to me needs to be in the forefront of community engagement and community activity among universities. Lots of universities do a lot of community engagement, but Brandeis ought to be in the forefront.