In 2016, Scott Myers-Lipton and Bobby Hackett met at an event to celebrate the life of their mutual friend, John Sarvey, and from this point on, they have been working closely together on social action.
In the Bonner Program, Hackett has supported students in doing community service, service-learning, and community-based and policy research as part of this intensive, four-year service-based scholarship program targeting low-income students. But Hackett realized that there was a piece missing in the Bonner Program, as well as the service-learning and civic engagement field in general. Both talked about policy change but they did not have a model or the expertise to introduce a method for engaging students in social action. Upon meeting Myers-Lipton and hearing about his work, Hackett invited him to collaborate on filling that missing piece in undergraduates’ civic knowledge.
Since they met in 2016, Hackett and Myers-Lipton have been working together to spread this model for teaching social action at institutions of higher education across the country. To this end, they have led multiple in-person and virtual webinar series and grown their network of faculty and staff to hundreds of members.
The Institutes on Teaching Social Action are delivered either in three-day webinars (two 2-hour sessions each day) or in-person over two days. We are now holding 6-8 Institutes a year.
We are expanding our capacity by engaging experienced social action teachers in hosting the Institutes. Our "train the trainer” approach will allow us to reach out goal of having a social action course taught on every campus every semester.
We invite you to join us.