“Find colleagues who are more willing to say yes than no.”
Natalie Person, Dean of Community Engagement at Rhodes College, gave this advice as our annual Program Directors conference opened in Memphis, a city Rhodes treats as both classroom and teacher. PDs had plenty to say yes to throughout the next two days as they:
- learned from several of Rhodes 200+ community partners onsite at the National Civil Rights Museum and the Memphis Listening Lab
- heard from Rhodes faculty, staff, students, and graduates about campus dialogue and the Liberal Arts in Prison Program
- workshopped six Catalyst Grant projects, from a faculty fellowship at Chatham that helps instructors in every field redesign courses around civic engagement to a data hub at Bates that connects courses with community organizations.
- turned commitments for the year ahead into six-word stories and embodied accountability.
Asked what Project Pericles membership provides, one participant wrote: “Feeling of belonging to a greater purpose.”
Also in November’s Periclean:
- Our role facilitating a new learning community for the Jessie Ball duPont Fund’s Place and Belonging cohort, five campuses building place-based learning into their curriculum
- The Purpose in Practice Student Fellowship for Spring 2027, with applications due November 30
- A Power + Character Educators Workshop with Citizen University, Bard College, Bonner Foundation, and Rutgers in New Brunswick, January 11-12
- New thought leadership, including Jason Vadnos on Gen Z and the midterms in The Fulcrum
- What our staff is reading this month