“Still in the top five most impactful experiences I’ve had in leadership development.”
That’s how James Williams remembers the 2017 Project Pericles Debating for Democracy National Conference, where he represented Goucher College as a sophomore. Nearly a decade later, he says it also “cemented my life-long call towards bolstering my community.”
James is not alone.
While our early programs largely focused on developing faculty who were interested in bringing civic learning into their classroom, including college presidents Ron Cole (Allegheny College) and Milton Moreland (Centre College), Project Pericles’ work has always been in service of supporting students.
We know that civic learning programs at their best create ripe opportunities for students to flourish: intellectually, professionally, and civically. As we continue to highlight our work from the past twenty-five years, we offer a reflection on how Project Pericles’ programs have affected thousands of students nationwide.
Whether through Debating for Democracy (D4D), our Mini-Grants, Student Voices Student Choices, or the Civic Story Lab, our work over the years has created numerous pathways for weaving community-engaged civic learning into the fabric of our higher education institutions.
We invite you to learn more about them, and how they have touched thousands of students like James.
Debating for Democracy
Often, students’ participation in civic engagement is confined to their own campus and community. In 2006, Project Pericles sought to tackle that constraint by launching Debating for Democracy (D4D)™, a program designed to break down campus silos and bring together civically passionate students from across the nation. By creating new opportunities for conversation, advocacy, and education, D4D helped students across the Pericles consortium engage not only with public issues, but with each other.
Over the course of the program, 3,700+ students, faculty, alumni, and staff participated in D4D’s “On the Road” workshops and National Conferences. “On the Road” workshops were campus-based trainings across the Consortium where students, faculty, and staff developed skills in advocacy, community organizing, creative action planning, and effective communication. The National Conferences, by contrast, were two-day, Consortium-wide convenings bringing together student representatives for workshops, panels, debates, and networking, with presidents, community leaders, and media partners also in attendance.
As Sean Alexander of Hendrix College noted about his experience at a D4D National Conference, “Getting to know other students was the most valuable part of the conference because it helped to change and reaffirm my own social beliefs and connect with people who want similar changes in our world.”
Concurrently, the D4D Letters to an Elected Official Competition showcased students’ ability to propose innovative policy solutions to a wide range of public issues. In this Competition, student teams wrote letters to elected officials on civic issues, with five winning teams each receiving $500 to advance their cause.
The program had a lasting impact on student participants, which included influencing their professional direction. Competition award recipient and Hendrix College alumnus Tejas Soman ‘18 advocated for legislation that would restrict the names of juveniles tried in criminal court as adults in the media. He worked closely with Dr. Peter Gess in his advocacy and his participation in the program led to something much bigger than any recognition our program could offer: lifelong mentorship by Professor Gess.
After the experience of Debating for Democracy, Tejas continued to take more public policy classes with Dr. Gess, and ultimately chose him as his thesis advisor. Now a student at New York Law School, Tejas continues to appreciate the significance of the intentional feedback, advice, and motivation that came from the relationship.
“It’s important to get that experience one-on-one with a professor or mentor,” he says. Debating for Democracy played a key role in shaping one for him.
Mini-Grants
While our programs primarily target students within the Project Pericles consortium, we recognize that a healthy democracy depends on uplifting civic and community-engaged learning at campuses across the country. To that end, we launched our Mini-Grants program in 2022, a program open to students and faculty at any institution.
Through our Mini-Grant program, we have supported over 200 faculty members and reached thousands of students across 120+ campuses. Our funding has promoted civic engagement activities across private, public, minority-serving, technical, and community colleges, with the goal of fostering better futures regardless of geographic and socioeconomic differences.
While Mini-Grants are predominantly designed for faculty, students can be the primary leaders too. For example, Sydney Tirschwell of Carleton University’s Class of 2025 received a Back to School for Democracy mini-grant in her senior year. Motivated by how firsthand experiences with public policy impacted her own family, she used her Mini-Grant to develop depolarization and discourse skills among her campus community. With Project Pericles funding, she successfully organized several Braver Angels Depolarization Workshops on her campus, which taught students practical skills to critique opposing political views without stereotyping, demonizing, or ridiculing others.
Her efforts led to both the formation of long-term relationships with faculty across campus and changes to course curricula. Sydney explains that “professors reached out wanting to learn how to integrate polarization work into their courses,” including former Carleton president and current faculty member Steven Poskanzer. It was Sydney’s hope that through depolarization education, her campus could become more open, empathetic, and engaged. “It’s been so cool to see how the community wants to learn about depolarization. The work will keep going after I leave,” she said. Sydney is now serving in the Peace Corps.
Student Choices – Student Voices
From 2016 to 2019, Project Pericles facilitated the Student Choices – Student Voices program (SCSV), which responded to growing public concerns about low rates of student voter and civic participation. SCSV was based on three key principles:
- Sharing information on candidates and issues
- Fostering constructive dialogue
- Supporting voter registration
Through inter-campus, student-led Task Forces, student leaders registered thousands of voters across the country and increased access to nonpartisan voting information for students and faculty.
The SCSV initiative employed a great deal of flexibility in Task Force implementation, and encouraged creative problem-solving across campuses. For instance, Pitzer College focused on absentee voting and successfully enabled around 300 students to vote or receive absentee ballots, while Wagner College hosted a student-produced film festival addressing topics relevant to local and national politics.
Most importantly, the SCSV initiative helped participants take proactive steps in molding their own future. For example, Ryan Perez (‘20) served as the student leader of Macalester’s SCSV Task Force, which held voter registration tabling sessions, an anti-gun-violence march, and an array of additional events throughout 2018.
Ryan remarked that the opportunity gave him “valuable skills” and “shaped [his] career interests in ways [he] would not have imagined at the beginning of [his] first year in college.” His interest in voter engagement eventually led to an internship with a state senator, and he currently serves as the Leadership and Organizing Director at Comunidades Organizando el Poder y la Acción Latina in Minnesota.
Civic Story Lab
Most recently, we launched our Civic Story Lab, which empowers undergraduate students to document and participate in civic transformation through hands-on engagement with unique forms of creative storytelling. Throughout the semester, students explored both civic action and narrative creation, developing artifacts that ranged from podcasts to photo essays to zines.
Storytelling is a civic skill, and as Allegheny College student participant Nathan George observed, “There is no blueprint for encouraging people who rarely get to tell their stories to share their experiences on a public platform.”
Through narrative change projects, campus teams created opportunities for new ways of understanding civic issues. At Hampshire College, students partnered with the Belchertown Nipmuc Farm Conservation Alliance (BNFCA) and the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band to amplify stories about Indigenous-led stewardship. Meanwhile, Pace University partnered with Hell Gate, a subscriber-funded, worker-owned news outlet, to provide students with intensive training in news reporting and professional journalism.
As Bethune-Cookman University student Kimora Drake observed, “This experience helped me learn to use my voice in politics and be part of it rather than just learn about it.”
Across twenty-five years, students who participated in Project Pericles programs both learned about civic life and practiced it. James Williams found a lifelong commitment to his community; Tejas Soman, a mentor and a path into law; Sydney Tirschwell, depolarization work that outlasted her time on campus. They represent many others who carry Periclean experiences into their communities, careers, and everyday lives. What they do next, both at their institutions and beyond them, will be the cornerstone of our democracy for the next 250.