Wofford College Center for Community-Based Learning

12/30/2021

📢WE'RE HIRING!📢

Together with the Wofford College Office of International Programming, we're seeking an administrative assistant to join us in supporting essential co-curricular programming at Wofford College. Please share!

08/19/2020

Each of the three times Wofford College students were fortunate to meet with Congressman John Lewis in Washington, he generously shared his time and talked with them about the importance of speaking out when you see something that is wrong, about the importance of getting into “good trouble.”

Besides the fact that Representative Lewis believed in and wanted to support the power of young people, Sarah Hager, a Wofford alumna and former staff member in Wofford’s Center for Community-Based Learning, is the reason we were able to do that. Sarah worked for Rep. Lewis in his DC office for five years.

Tomorrow night, thanks to James Stukes, the CCBL has planned a Zoom watch party of Good Trouble, a new documentary about Rep. Lewis’ life, with Sarah as our special guest to take a few questions at the end. It could be a nice segue into the last night of the Democratic Convention. Please join us, if you can and are interested. If so, please register by noon tomorrow at https://forms.gle/nei6KHNPGrSrhB5bA, to get the link.

06/20/2020

Downtown Spartanburg. Broad Street, right in front of City Hall. street mural painting. A beautiful, beautiful thing.

06/11/2020

06/10/2020

ANYTHING LESS THAN DEEP, PERVASIVE, CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION WOULD BE SURRENDERING THE VALUES WE HOLD MOST DEAR.

We recognize the killings of unarmed Black people and the disproportionate physical, emotional, and economic suffering of communities of color, which have been exacerbated and exposed in the pandemic, as continuations of our nation’s ongoing and unchecked history of racism and white supremacy; and as antithetical to the values we hold dear, including “self-evident truths” that we are all created equal and all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We join in solidarity with agents of change who seek to shape our collective consciousness and our democracy to align with our espoused values and ideals, demanding that we address structural racism across all our institutions and systems. We heed the call for individuals, organizations, and society as a whole to learn and adopt anti-racist ways of perceiving and being, and to redefine relationships and activities based on anti-racist commitments – and we commit to doing this work in our spheres of influence and supporting others in theirs.

The Center for Community-Based Learning at Wofford College and the programs it houses have always valued social justice. It is one of the learning outcomes for students in our programs, one of the ways we operationalize the mission of Wofford College to “prepare students for extraordinary and positive contributions to a global society,” and a driver in the design and implementation of our community partnerships and community engagement programs. We are now working to make that value more explicit and to move it more clearly and visibly to the center of everything we do with students, faculty, community partners, and society at-large. In the wise and impassioned words of Killer Mike, “Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize.”

We recommit ourselves as participating members of and accountable allies with marginalized and oppressed communities. We recommit ourselves as partners with organizations and coalitions advocating and working for a more just, humane, and equitable Spartanburg, America, and world. We recommit ourselves to educating and equipping citizens – especially, but not exclusively, Wofford students - with the sensibilities, understandings, knowledge, skills, and experience needed to excavate, reckon with, dismantle, and ultimately heal from the culture of white supremacy that has been an animating psychic and structural force in our nation from its beginning, and that Resmaa Menaken writes, “is in our nervous systems.” To replace the culture of white supremacy with one of truth-telling, empathy, love, justice, peace, equity, democracy, and recognition and celebration of our shared humanity.

This will not be easy or simple. But it is possible and very, very necessary. And we will band together – across campus, across Spartanburg, across the Southeast, across the nation and the world - to do it.

We see some using their voices, platforms, and privilege to divide us; to vilify demonstrators, Black and Brown people and communities, the free press; to spread misinformation; to sow distrust and discord; and to incite violence. We reject these anti-democratic messages. We urge these people to stop, listen, and reflect; to accept the invitation this moment of reckoning offers to overcome conscious and unconscious fears of loss of power and status, in order to be better humans and better Americans; to see beyond perceived differences to our common, shared humanity, and to our common, shared interests, which include both justice and peace; and then to use their voices and platforms accordingly.

This is not a zero-sum game. It’s not a game at all. There is no “us vs. them.” We are all “us.” It is time for all of us to stand up, show up, and do the work to ensure that our psyches, systems, and society reflect that. As City of Spartanburg Chief of Police Alonzo Thompson said, after leading a crowd assembled in Morgan Square on June 5, 2020, in 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silent reflection, “George Floyd’s daughter said, ‘My Daddy changed the world.’ Let us leave here and make it so.”

Offered with love,
The Center for Community-Based Learning at Wofford College

08/28/2019

Where Thought Leads...to the Peace Corps. After training, Helen Seddelmeyer heads to Zambia as a secondary English teacher with the Peace Corps. Experiences with community-based learning, The Space in the Mungo Center, and faculty mentors all helped Helen determine that she wants to give back to the world. Read more: https://bit.ly/2Z4AixR

08/27/2019

Don't forget to reserve your spot at the Early Childhood Education and Child Care Forum! Visit www.fpcspartanburg.org/lunch-n-learn today.

07/04/2019

20 local high school students sample what it's like to be a student at Wofford through the iCAN Summer Institute. Read more: https://bit.ly/2RWex0t

05/01/2019

Congratulations, Sandra!

Sophomore Sandra López receives the Newman Civic Fellowship. Read more about this first-generation student, her research and work in the Spartanburg community here: https://bit.ly/2LfnT7P

02/08/2019

Great stuff!