The Center for Civic Engagement is at the heart of Lick-Wilmerding. It empowers Lick-Wilmerding’s mission to be a private school with a public purpose.
“The idea was to promote the school’s mission towards equity, access, and inclusion,” Randy Barnett, Assistant Head of School, said. Barnett was Dean of Students when The Center was founded in 2008.
Over the years, the Center has devoloped and expanded its mission under new leadership.
The Center was originally led by Eva Allison Frank, who left in 2010 after two years. Former Head of School Dr. Albert Adams then hired Dale Allender to be Director of Civic Engagement, and assigned Ravi Lau, a long-time Lick faculty member with extensive experience in public service, to serve as the Associate Director.
Admissions faculty member Christy Godinez Jackson was appointed the temporary director of the Center in 2012, and spearheaded The Center’s development and direction. A year later, in 2013, the job became permanent. Her official title now reads Director of Student Inclusion, Leadership, and Student Engagement. “Public purpose lives and breathes in everything I do,” Godinez Jackson said. “I try to weave it into other programs, whether that’s… our community tutoring program, StuCo, I think they stem from this larger need to give back.”
While some elements of Allender and Lau’s Center are still visible today, Barnett highlighted a key difference in The Center’s old philosophy for community service: “The philosophy was service should not be a required component, so there was no requirement, because people should opt in to service, right? They should have the ethos of service, they should care enough to want to do service. But that meant that service was done by a relatively small portion of the student body, and there were some demographic similarities between [those] who did the service, who felt like they could do the service.” Because the programs that The Center offered were opt-in, the vast majority of the student population did not volunteer through The Center’s opportunities.
Alan Wesson-Suárez, the current Director of the Center’s Public Purpose Program (PPP), began working with Godinez Jackson in 2012. Five years ago, Godinez Jackson, in collaboration with a group of faculty led by Kate Wiley, established the Public Purpose Program to involve the whole student community with the public service work of the Center. Wesson-Suárez assumed leadership of the program. He took over during a time when “a lot of people were really upset with the last program because it wasn’t equitable, it wasn’t consistent. People were having really different experiences with it,” Wesson-Suarez said.
Now, as part of the PPP, community service is required of all students. “Sometimes you have to push people into situations before they understand or see the value in it. Sometimes you have to give someone the experience before they can see the value in it, and if we truly believe in it, we need to educate students,” Barnett said.
The Public Purpose Program is intended to increase the sophistication of learning and engagement in community service each year. Freshman participate in PPP educational programing. Sophomores must complete 40 hours of volunteer service within the school year. Juniors and seniors have more autonomy in developing their engagement. They can take PPP classes at Lick, but they can also find internships or conduct independent studies outside of the classroom.
Wesson-Suárez said, “My focus is communitypartnerships,specifically connecting students to community work and community organizations… we’re not really interested in program for program’s sake. We want it to be productive and help meet some of our goals of the school’s mission.”
Each year, the Public Purpose Program is tweaked and strengthened. This year, one significant change was to rebrand Walk With a Purpose to the Sam Mihara Day of Justice. “Partly, I wanted to rebrand it because I didn’t like having ‘walk’ in the title, just using ableist language… especially when I’m reaching out to instructors who do anti-ableism advocacy… some students also may not have understood what the day was about. [Walk With a Purpose] may have seemed overly lofty or self-congratulatory. [Now], we honor Sam Mihara, a Lick alumn [of the class of ‘51],” explained Ben Cohn ‘08, a Center Associate.
The Sam Mihara Day of Justice has been extended to two full school days from one, and the workshops and scheduling have been altered. The conference’s racial affinity group meetings have also been reworked.
Many Lick classes–in every department–are now designated as PPP courses and engage in public service as part of their course work. “I’d like every course to be a PPP course. It just makes sense to have every course tied to real world problems, real world applications, great work happening in the real world,” Wesson-Suárez said. “There’s something so genuine about the experience when you can put a face to the problem, a face to the solution. A story. A real person.”
Countless programs are run through the Center. While the Public Purpose Program and the Sam Mihara Day of Justice are two of the most visible programs to students, the Center also networks with members of local communities. Wesson-Suárez communicates with volunteer organizations to ensure opportunities for students at Lick, and the Center connects students to internships, both during the school year and during the summer. Godinez Jackson and Cohn work together to organize trips to conferences, sending groups of students each year to events such as the White Privilege Conference and Creating Change. The Center also runs a peer tutoring program, and coordinates with academic departments at Lick to create PPP courses. “In the past, students didn’t realize that the Center holds so many moving pieces… if you think about it, who puts on your dances? Who puts on your spirit week? We hold all the student life pieces, we hold all the clubs, we hold all the student leadership training,” Godinez Jackson explained.
Cohn also said that more programing from The Center should be mandatory. “We often take a backseat to a lot of other academic programing. I don’t want to hate on any other part of the school, I just think this stuff is obviously really, really, really important, and so I would like… to see it get more required.” Cohn recognized that Lick students are often under a tremendous amount of academic pressure, but also believes that the experiences that The Center provides are just as important as the work done inside the classroom.
The Center has always been a magnet for students to relax, meet, and study, and has especially provided a comfortable environment for students of color to gather. Godinez Jackson said that students have told her “that having a staff of color oversee a space is important. ‘I want to hang out in a space where adults look like me.’”
The Center has occupied several different physical locations in the past few years. In Lick’s old main building, the Center was sequestered at the far end of the main hallway, behind a windowed wall. It was flanked on the left by a Spanish classroom and on the right by a gender neutral restroom. The area was smaller than the current Center, and fairly out of the way. “It was smaller, so it was more crowded, and it was super intimidating for me,” Aniket Joshi ‘19 said. Many felt it was too removed from the other social nexuses at Lick: the Caf, library, the gym and even the courtyards.
When the Center moved to the Caf last year during construction, the students that had typically found themselves in a secluded environment were suddenly out in the open. This space provided an opportunity for the greater Lick community to connect with the Center community. Josiah Densby ‘21 first started hanging out in the caf Center during his freshman year. “As time progressed I just found it comfortable being there, cause it was a space where I could eat, or just hang out, just lay down, relax without worrying about who was around me and just being comfortable.”
In the central, dedicated Center space in the new building, students and faculty alike have noted how much more open the area feels. Godinez Jackson said that “being central now, we do see students come in and out that don’t regularly hang out here. They need to print something, they need to get some supplies, they want to just lay on the couch for a while, they want to grab a snack, which is great. We want to have this be a space for all… [we] really appreciate that… the Center has [also] been a place where our most marginal students feel comfort, and I think some of that has something to do with our mission, what we push out, [and] the types of programs that come out of The Center.”
When you walk into the new front entrance, the Center welcomes you from across the busy foyer. The physical space is open. Facing you, an entire wall of glass doors that open into the main building, and there are floor-to-ceiling glass windows on two sides of the space.
Wesson-Suárez noted that, with the front-and-center location, it’s easier for members of the greater community to find The Center when they visit the school, but said that he was initially concerned with the move: “some people like being out of the way, especially if you’re a type of student who feels like you’re always in the way, because you don’t really fit here, you don’t really belong. It’s no secret that a lot of the kids that feel that way hang out here. They feel like they’re the minority in a majority institution, so they find a home here, and I think I was… aware that [sense of safety] might be lost.” Wesson-Suárez’s fears, however, were completely mitigated. “Then I saw that not only was it not lost,” he said, “but because we’re not tucked in the back, our family is even bigger. The people that feel comfortable walking in is even bigger.”
Nora Hylton ‘20 remembered that she really started spending time in The Center after freshman year: “My sophomore year I was able to make closer friends with Seniors and Juniors because I was hanging out there. It was kind of cool, it was like they were my older siblings where we hung out, they gave us advice.”
Other students at Lick who don’t spend a lot of time in The Center appreciate the new space as well. Magnolia Finn ‘19 enjoys the accessibility to resources, “Now I know where everything is, and I don’t necessarily have to ask, which makes me feel more comfortable.” However, she doesn’t think freshman will be spending much time in The Center other than to get materials. “For these freshman, I just don’t think they have those upperclassmen connections. I know for me, I was very scared of older people.”
Densby, among many others, doesn’t want freshman to be scared of hanging out in the Center. “To the freshmen and the sophomores, I would say it’s cool. Y’know, come in, the water’s fine.”
