About Us

Mission

The Office of Leadership and Civic Engagement prepares students to serve as change-makers. We develop, promote, and advance civic engagement, leadership development, and meaningful service to create positive social change.

What Influences Our Work

We develop Changemakers, students who are active participants in society accountable to and responsible for the common good. Their willingness to act and ability to lead transforms visions into reality. In doing so, they are able to negotiate diverse views and adapt behaviors to work with others as agents of positive and ethical change.

Social Change Model (SCM)

Established in 1994, the original version of the Social Change Model approaches leadership as a purposeful, collaborative, values-based process that results in positive social change.

OLCE’s Foundations of Community Engagement

We aim to prepare students to engage with the community ethically and effectively. The foundations guide our work with students, faculty, and community partners to inform program design, implementation, and evaluation, and to ensure that our work aligns with our values.

Culturally Relevant Leadership

This model incorporates efficacy and contextual dimensions of campus climate into ideas of individuals’ capacity and identity to engage in the leadership process. This model seeks to compel leadership educators to challenge old paradigms of leadership and learning, in order to consider new ways to educate students and develop leaders capable of challenging inequity to create social change.

Leadership for Liberation

As a response and in addition to the SCM, leadership for liberation means preparing students to grapple with complex, interconnected systems of oppression and domination that prevent the envisioning of a liberated world. This work espouses that in order to create a better world, we must shift systems, structures, and cultural norms that give rise to and support vexing and wicked problems of inequality.

CLDE’s Emergent Theory of Change

As campuses continue to strive for a more socially just, civically engaged, and democratically-minded future, this model asks practitioners to think critically around our purpose, learning outcomes, pedagogy, and strategy when engaging in civic learning and democratic engagement.