Laying the Foundation

An East Asian philosophy class visits Chinatown and the Chinese Cultural Center to understand the community, its makeup and identity. A statistics class tours the Albany Park and North Park neighborhoods to better comprehend how redlining and zoning inequalities translate from classroom maps and data to real houses and real streets. And, students visit Cabrini Green, learning about the history of urban renewal, public housing, concentrated poverty, gentrification, and inequality in American cities. These are just a few examples of how North Park students have been serving and learning with local communities via the Catalyst 606 program since its inception in 2017.

Today, North Park University’s new Center for Civic Engagement—an outgrowth of Catalyst launched earlier this year—is incorporating, expanding, and deepening this work.

“The main idea is to build more of a city-centered ethos on campus,” said Dr. Richard Kohng, assistant vice president for the Center for Civic Engagement. “We are enhancing and elevating North Park’s commitment to the just flourishing of cities by honoring the work that is going on in our neighborhoods.”

The Center for Civic Engagement enacts this mission through four core divisions: the Catalyst Hub, the Community Assets and Program Evaluation Consortium, the Community Development Hub, and Public Policy Engagement. Crux, North Park’s discipleship cohort for first-year students and one of the programs in the center’s new Catalyst Hub, provides a holistic approach to transformation in Christ, equipping students for a lifelong journey of faith and formation.

Kohng joined North Park as Urban Outreach coordinator in 2010 and coauthored a report proposing a potential Center for Civic Engagement. This year, with the encouragement of President Surridge and Provost Carr, Kohng began implementing that plan.

“The Center for Civic Engagement elevates North Park’s unique distinctives as a Christian, city-centered, intercultural university,” Surridge said. “Faculty and students learning and working alongside community leaders across Chicago is yet another example of North Park living into