Community-Based Learning: Internships and Community Projects

This Student-Originated-Studies (SOS) program provides an academic home-base for students interested in earning credit through internships with community organizations or projects, while building skills for working in community settings and sharing experiences with a cohort of fellow students. The 6-credit academic core provides a learning community where students share knowledge and experiences, deepen knowledge of local community organizations, and develop skills for community-based work through readings, discussions, and workshops. In addition, students carry out 2-10 credits of internship or project work (an average of 5-25 hours per week depending on the number of credits), for a total of 8-16 credits in the program. This program is also designed to support capstone projects that involve community-based learning, organizing, research, and participation. Students should reach out to faculty before the start of the quarter with a brief description of the project or internship they want to develop, and be ready to start projects and internships week 1 of the spring quarter. 

Through their internship or project work, students will develop strong links to organizations, regional social movements, and community mentors and partners who will be students' guides and hosts in their work. Working in conjunction with schools, advocacy groups, community mentors, or non-profit organizations, students will experience and reflect on what it means to support communities in our region while gaining on-the-ground experience working with local organizations. Internships can involve any focus, such as gender, racial, and economic justice, immigrant rights, education, adult literacy, food security, homelessness, cooperative development, community arts, and public health, among others. Community-based projects could involve oral history, working with community members (elders, artists, laborers, community organizers, etc.), designing a community action plan to address a particular challenge or need, or collaborating with fellow students to jump start a project that engages community. Faculty and the Center for Community-Based Learning and Action (CCBLA) will work with students to develop project proposals and/or in-program contracts for internships with community organizations. Students can contact CCBLA Director Ellen Shortt Sanchez ( shorttse@evergreen.edu ) to explore community opportunities , or contact faculty member Catalina Ocampo Londoño to develop projects. 

For the 6-credit program core, we will meet together as a program to investigate what it means to learn from community-based work, support each other through projects or internships, and deepen our knowledge of local organizations and their connections to Evergreen. Drawing on the principles of popular education, we will share knowledge, develop skills for working respectfully in community, hone equity-minded practices, and explore emergent questions. Through readings and other materials, we will focus on the ethics of community-based work, collective strategies of resistance, and how to nourish community assets and power, while reflecting on the impacts of race, class, gender, sexuality as part of our own and community experience. Through workshops, we will emphasize modes of identifying and valuing community knowledge and develop and deepen skills in documentation, cultural humility, self-reflection, and reflective writing. We will also develop a collective mapping project that documents Evergreen's connections to local community organizations and ongoing relationships between the college and the broader community. This program is ideal for responsible, self-motivated students who value collaborative learning, are enthusiastic about shaping a community of co-learners, and are committed to learning from and with community partners.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

6 - Community Studies

2 -10 - Internship or Community-based Project