About the CCEL

The Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership is a living-learning environment where students collaborate in teaching and learning experiences that integrate academics, student life, and community engagement to foster skills of citizenship and leadership.

The Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership (CCEL) comprises the St. Lawrence Leadership Academy, David Garner Center for Collegiate Volunteerism and the Community-Based Learning Program. Together they offer workshops, guest speakers, credit-bearing programs, counseling, volunteer coordination and other resources to help students develop leadership skills and service experiences.

MISSION: The mission of the Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership is to increase and enhance opportunities for students to be agents of positive social change both on and off campus. The Center combines academic and co-curricular activities within a living-learning community where students work together with community partners to develop and direct community projects that address locally identified needs. The emphasis of the programming is to develop citizenship and leadership skills through: community based learning including course work, independent studies, participatory action research and dialogue training; volunteerism, where students, faculty and staff support and enhance community initiatives that address community needs; and, leadership training, practice, and reflection.

HISTORY: Over the past 15 years, St. Lawrence has developed a series of academic-based engaged learning opportunities for our students that have ranged from individual service learning internships to community-based collaborative team research projects. Directed through our Community-Based Learning (CBL) Program, we have seen the numbers of students who participate in the various CBL programs rise incrementally each year. However, we have also received feedback from our community partners that indicates we need to strengthen our capacity to provide consistent, long-term partnerships in order to be most effective in our collaborative efforts. At the same time, our Division of Student Life in recent years has increased and formalized our student programs that focus on volunteerism and leadership development to provide students with more visible options for personal development opportunities that will complement their academic and life goals. These programs have also seen tremendous growth in recent years.

We now seek to bridge these curricular opportunities with our co-curricular programs in order to provide students with a more integrated, in-depth exposure to civic engagement and leadership across all four of their undergraduate years. In January of 2005, we took the first step to bring together these two different approaches to student civic engagement by physically bringing the staff for the programs together to share a common space. In the fall of 2005, we took the next step by forming a living-learning community based in civic engagement and leadership that will be housed in one residence hall and include within it a (residential) First-Year Program College (FYP) focused on those themes.