Rooted and Reciprocal: Faculty and Institutional Strategies to Sustain Community Partnerships Through Creativity and Care

This session will delve into the development and sustainability of creative, community-engaged courses—ranging from murals to community archives and healing arts—rooted in authentic, reciprocal community partnerships. Moving beyond showcasing outcomes, panelists from diverse disciplines, institutional contexts, and levels of experience will offer candid reflections on the evolution of their projects. Discussions will engage participants in strategies for maintaining community trust, establishing guardrails that protect stakeholders from being overburdened, and shifting institutional barriers—structural and cultural—to allow mutually beneficial, community relationships to take root for long-term growth.

Projects include multilingual digital storytelling with refugee women in Maine, Black cultural preservation via oral histories in South Memphis, and street art and mural-making in Chester, Pennsylvania. Project Pericles will also share tools for institutionalizing civic engagement. Participants will leave with practical strategies to reimagine the classroom as a site of mutual care and democratic renewal.