I produced this slide set to document a particular issue, local food and our region's refugee and immigrant communities, which I had been involved with several years prior to working at Guilford College’s Bonner Center for Community Service and Learning (now defunct) and where I was able to expand upon when I was at the Center from 2012–2017.
The slide set is divided into two parts, Before and After, with an Impact and Lessons Learned section at the end. The Before section outlines the problem of Greensboro’s urban sprawl, Fighting Sprawl; followed by Moving the Campus, or how I engaged students with the food insecurity problem; to a look at Three Models of campus response; to the Aha! Moment experienced by students that finally produced a working system that connected campus to community and community (via refugee/immigrant college students) to campus. The After section shows how college Community Engagement efforts, specifically through Service Learning, gave students from refugee/immigrant communities unique roles as Community Insiders to bridge gaps that college studies, programs, and approaches could not. Scholarship Reframed and the rest showed how colleges could truly engage the communities they depended on and how academics could apply their expertise locally and to great effect.
Food insecurity was one of three pressing social issues the Bonner Center tackled while I was there. The other two, dealing with the region's growing refugee and immigrant populations and the problems of housing and homelessness, have remained important issues to the future of our region. In 2018, all three issues came into sharp focus when a fire tore through a refugee apartment unit, killing children and making national news.
