Supporting Black Lives through Service-Learning
Updated 9/29/22.
The Center for Community Engagement, Learning, and Leadership (CCELL) supports LSU
students, faculty, and staff in their collective demands for systemic change in our
on and off-campus communities. We champion the student-led initiative to rename school
buildings to better represent LSU’s values through honoring people of “outstanding
character,” as LSU Policy Statement 70 calls for, rather than honoring people who
owned slaves, fought to preserve slavery, committed genocide or lynching, advocated
for segregation, disenfranchised Black voters, and/or supported racism. We echo our
students, faculty, and staff in their calls for unity in the face of injustice, inequity,
and inequality.
As the university’s sole facilitators of service-learning, we accept our responsibility to help students gain the necessary information and skills to fulfill their desire to become truly engaged citizens. We collaborate with our faculty and community partners to create academic experiences that better prepare LSU students to handle not only today’s social and economic challenges, but also to guide them through the crucial work of unearthing and uprooting the seeds of inequity and injustice.
Through our Engaged Citizen Program, we support and recognize LSU undergraduate students and their extraordinary commitment to serving alongside and learning from their community. We offer faculty workshops every semester with the fundamental goal of examining service-learning pedagogy critically and transforming community engagement in the interest of a more equitable democracy. We will continue to develop programming and outreach efforts to make the justice-centered changes to our world that our students, faculty, staff, and community partners want and deserve.
Holding true to service-learning’s foundational reflection component, our team at CCELL has asked “What? So what? Now what?” as we meet this moment with energy guided by the spirit of collaboration and critical reflection. We believe in reciprocal bridge-building and invite everyone to reach out to us and to each other with ways we can best serve our campus and local communities.
We are curating a list of service opportunities aimed at supporting Black lives so members of our communities who want to do local, national, or international service work aligned with #BlackLivesMatter goals and values will have the additional resources to do so. If you know of an opportunity you would like added to the list, please email our team at ccell@lsu.edu.