Student Purpose
Student, Civic and Community Engagement Opportunities
Facilitated by UrbanCORE, the Charlotte Collaborative Impact Corps (the Corps) is a network of UNC Charlotte undergraduate students and student organizations with an interest in engaging with local organizations and entities to address the cultural, economic, educational, environmental, health, and social needs of the greater Charlotte region. The Corps would help students identify, cultivate, and articulate their civic motivation for social change or action. The Corps would support student groups with a community-based learning curriculum, development opportunities, and a framework to create meaning and reciprocal relationships with community partners.
Bonner Leaders Program
The UNC Charlotte Bonner Leaders Program develops civic leaders by connecting students to Charlotte-area organizations through curriculum, internships, and community-based research in order to achieve a just and equitable society.
Student Success Innovation Lab Fellowship
UNC Charlotte, Johnson C. Smith University, and Novant Health are collaborating to address the challenges of attrition, delayed graduation, or academic under-matching by engaging current students to research, identify, and test solutions that may have opportunity for scale. This Student Success Innovation Lab Fellowship (SSILF) is a cutting-edge initiative that would pair six UNC Charlotte students with six JCSU students in a year-long program preliminarily designed by Novant Health and UNC Charlotte.
Community Engagement Pathway and Student e-Portfolio System
Community Engagement Pathway and Student e-Portfolio System is a tool to guide you on your community-based learning journey as you thoughtfully and productively address the cultural, economic, educational, environmental, health, and social needs of the greater Charlotte region. This tool helps you navigate numerous opportunities to engage with the greater Charlotte community, and encourages you to build on those experiences while cultivating and articulating your own civic identity. This pathway illuminates the connections between your community-based learning experience, your academic journey, and your broader personal and professional purpose.
Link to the Community Engagement Pathway in Canvas.
Link to the ROADMAP FOR ENGAGEMENT one-pager.
Community-Based Learning and Service-Learning
Service-Learning is an educational approach that pairs academic concepts with meaningful community-based learning experiences. Courses with the SL designation combine scholarly exploration of the concepts of citizenship, public service, community engagement, social issues, or justice with the opportunity for reflection, intellectual challenge, and skill development via direct, practical, hands-on experience. A significant percentage of the course is devoted to engagement with community partners. For a list of courses, please visit the course catalog and search for the SL designation. Please visit the Career Center Competency Compass to connect your service-learning experiences with career competencies.
Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement
49er Democracy Experience
Education and civic engagement go hand-in-hand. At UNC Charlotte, the entire University community is able to learn about and get involved in the issues, discussions and democratic processes necessary to shape a productive society.
Deliberative Dialogue Series
At the 2020 North Carolina Campus Compact Civic Engagement Institute, the UNC Charlotte team set a goal to create a proactive and purposeful process that can be implemented across campus that would provide training and tools for faculty/staff/students to facilitate civil discourse or generative conflict approaches in classrooms, residence halls, faculty meetings, and beyond. Creating such a training process might better prepare the campus community to respond to unanticipated events and will help build a culture of this kind of interaction across campus.