F E AT U R E
CCE 15TH ANNIVERSARY
PARTNERS IN PROGRESS Many milestones mark 15th anniversary of Center for Community Engagement By Tracy DeCroce
Seattle University’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE) began with a bold move. One year after its founding in 2004, the center teamed up with the university’s Center for Jesuit Education to host a Tent City on the university’s tennis courts. The move broke ground in several ways, among them making Seattle U the nation’s first university to host a homeless encampment. It didn’t end there. SU students served the homeless residents and offered their expertise in areas from nursing to law. Tent City residents reciprocated with an ad-hoc teach-in, educating the campus community about the experience of homelessness. “It was a phenomenal way for the center to get started,” says Executive Director Kent Koth, who was hired to launch the center. Fast forward 15 years and that founding spirit lives on. The center remains committed to addressing intractable societal challenges—poverty, racism and immigration—through mutually empowering campus-community collaboration.
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It is the kind of revolutionary work President Stephen Sundborg, S.J., envisioned when he plucked Koth from Stanford University to launch the center. At the time, the university was searching for a centralized way for faculty to connect their service-learning courses to the community. As Koth implemented that vision, CCE’s early years set the stage for the Seattle University Youth Initiative (SUYI), the center’s flagship program that has garnered national recognition since its founding in 2011. CONNECTING TO COMMUNITY PARTNERS Koth and his team view the center’s work and its success as inextricably linked to the community partners who share the center’s goals. Today, the university’s service-learning courses exceed 200 a year and the center collaborates with 158 community partners. “It was really apparent how committed CCE was to connecting the partners and the university,” says LaKesha Kimbrough, a former program manager for the Greater Seattle Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a CCE partner. Kimbrough was so impressed
PHOTOS BY CHUCK KUO
