Working with Our Neighbors

Ccae In The Local Community And Beyond

CCAE strives to uphold its position as one of the oldest adult learning centers in the country — one that takes very seriously its active participation in the life of the community — giving back to organizational partners, instructors, and students in Harvard Square and beyond. Thanks to the dedication of CCAE staff, and community members working to strengthen our shared network, this fiscal year saw a partnership between Cambridge Center for Adult Education and Harvard University come into focus.

In November 2021, CCAE hosted an online English over Dessert class with Harvard University Housing’s, Graduate Commons. The goal was to provide graduate students and their families with relevant information about English learning, opportunities to get to know local communities, and of course, an introduction to CCAE—a welcoming place to learn. Later, in Spring of 2022, in partnership with Jane Unrue, Director of Harvard’s Scholars at Risk Program, CCAE made a commitment to provide scholarships to refugees pursuing research at Harvard University. Beginning right away we placed these students in our English language classes, guitar lessons, and more.

Thanks to a member of our Board of Directors, several years ago we formed a partnership with Prospect Hill Academy (PHA), a K-12 college preparatory public charter school located on three campuses in Somerville and Cambridge. PHA has nearly 1,150 students from diverse racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. 87% are people of color, nearly two-thirds have a low income, and approximately half come from homes where English is not the primary language spoken. Our ESL instructors, headed up by Fancesca Ferraris, continue to offer free classes to non-English speaking parents of students at PHA.

During 2022, we were proud to partner with Lesley University’s Threshold Program, a post-secondary certificate program for collegeaged students with diverse learning, intellectual, and developmental challenges. For more than thirty-five years, this Lesley program has been helping students with disabilities navigate life with confidence. CCAE gave a presentation in the course Navigating Independent Living for students in their final year of the Program.

Cornucopia: An Intercultural Conversation about Gratitude was a free, open-to-the-public, online partnership event with the Universidade de Caxias do Sul (UCS) in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. For the second time, students from the Modern Languages Department, among them a lot of future English teachers, enjoyed the opportunity to engage with our CCAE community. Participants connected from near and far to reflect on Education, Future, Society, and Language Learning, in the week prior to Thanksgiving. In the more intimate setting of breakout rooms, the Brazilian students and CCAE students, instructors and staff members shared their experiences, lessons learned from the past year, and possible outlooks of the future post Covid. We ended this inspiring evening by sharing reflections on gratitude. This partnership was initiated by our CCAE ESL instructor Liz Ging and attended by CCAE community members all over the world. We are looking forward to the third edition of Cornucopia in 2022.

In the coming year we are eager to reignite our partnerships with Perkins School for the Blind and On the Rise, which were suspended during Fy 21 and Fy 22. In FY 22, we began discussion with Community Servings and anticipate working together again in the new year. We look forward, as well, to strengthening our partnership with St. Francis House, a Boston homeless shelter, which commits to rebuilding lives by providing refuge and pathways to stability for adults experiencing homelessness and poverty.

Donate online: www.ccae.org/ support/donate

Donate by mail: Cambridge Center for Adult Education PO Box 9113

Cambridge, MA 02238