Campus Compact is excited to welcome Clayton Hurd as its new director of professional learning.

As director of professional learning, Hurd will work to build a diverse set of accessible, high quality resources to support faculty and staff who work in community and civic engagement. One of his major projects will be managing the implementation of Campus Compact’s new Community Engagement Professional Credential – the first program of its kind. He will also guide Campus Compact’s partnership with Stylus Publishing to provide leading-edge publications for the field, support the creation and maintenance of web-based knowledge resources, and oversee a redesign of our member survey.

“I am excited to support community engagement professionals across the country by providing more professional development opportunities that allow them to access and learn from the diverse and evolving body of knowledge and practice that exists in the field,” said Hurd.  “I am also committed to helping establish new, inclusive spaces for practitioner-scholars to get together to share and create new knowledge, reflect on the critical ethical concerns and commitments that guide their work, and constantly refine their own engagement practices.”

Before arriving at the Compact, Hurd served as the senior program director of public service research and graduate student engagement in the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University, supporting graduate and undergraduate students interested in linking their passion for community service and social justice with academic study and research in their fields of interest. He also served as a lecturer in Stanford’s Program on Urban Studies, teaching a range of courses on topics of public scholarship, community-based participatory research, and housing justice.

Previous to his time at Stanford, he held a dual appointment as assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Service-Learning at the College of Coastal Georgia, and assistant professor of education and director of the Office of Service-Learning at Colorado State University.

Beyond his administration and teaching experience, Hurd has extensive experience in community-based ethnographic research, including work in Central and South America on indigenous rights and education (Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala) and in the US Southwest on issues of U.S.-Mexico immigration, community organizing and public schooling, and social sustainability. In addition, he has also coordinated a number of cross-cultural service learning projects in both the United States and abroad related to K–12 education and youth development, environmental justice, and housing and health services.

His most recent book, Confronting Suburban School Re-segregation in California (November 2014, University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the political and educational processes that have contributed to increasing White/Latino school re-segregation in suburban areas of the United States. The study explores the core issues at stake in citizen campaigns to re-organize school districts in ways that accomplish Latino/White segregation as well as the expressions of resistance being mobilized against these potent campaigns, particularly from those within the working-class Latino community.

Hurd received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a B.A. with honors in development studies from Trinity College in Connecticut. As a college student and young adult, he served as an AmeriCorps volunteer for the San Francisco Food Bank, worked as an outreach coordinator for the Hartford Food System, interned with the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group (ConnPIRG), led a chapter of Habitat for Humanity, and helped facilitate various after-school tutoring and academic development programs for working class youth (e.g., Public Achievement, AVID, Migrant Education and ESL). When he is not working, he loves playing basketball, reading, hiking, biking, hanging out in coffee shops and playing ultimate frisbee.

He can be reached at churd@compact.org.