The globasl network emerged to advance just, inclusive, and sustainable social change through community-campus partnerships. Many of the same people present at the co-founding of globalsl also fueled the development of Community-based global learning: The theory and practice of ethical engagement at home and abroad, just released by Stylus Press. You can find the introduction available as a free PDF on the publisher’s page. As lead author, I had the privilege and opportunity to write the acknowledgments, which I’m including below as well. I could not possibly give enough thanks to the individuals and communities that have inspired the formation of this volume – the same people who I know will continue to push and stretch and strive to critique and further improve this work moving forward. If you like, enjoy the acknowledgments below. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, there’s a 20% discount for orders through Stylus Press until the end of September (2018): use code CBGL20 at checkout. – Eric Hartman

With Deepest Gratitude: A Book is Done

When did this book first emerge? Certainly not when I sent in the formal proposal. I have deep gratitude for the many muses named in this section, and numerous collaborators not named here. In 2006, I co-presented with Richard Kiely, Jessica Friedrichs, and Chris Boettcher at an Amizade-West Virginia University global service-learning institute in Oglebay, WV. At the end of the multi-day retreat, Kimberley Colebank, then the Director of Civic Engagement at WVU, pointed her finger in our direction, circling the four of us, searching for words, “You all … you all… you all need to write a book about this.” That was the first moment I felt confident that a book might emerge through our work.

But the formative learning came much earlier. In 2001 I was in Pittsburgh, looking for work at the intersection of political inquiry and civic practice. Michael Sandy, then Executive Director of Amizade, took me on as a volunteer, then an hourly employee, then a full-time staff member. That office was the place I met Jes Friedrichs and Chris Boettcher, both of whom have become lifelong friends. Every day, one way or another, we worked on connecting Amizade’s original ethos as a community-driven cross-cultural volunteering program with the insights of the civic education landscape and the contributions of scholars and activists working to advance global citizenship and ethical engaged learning.

It was not in the office nor in the classroom, however, that most of the central ideas in this book were born. Matthias Brown in Petersfield, Jamaica, leveraged his role as the founder of a community development organization to envision an approach to global learning partnerships that would come to be known as Fair Trade Learning. Along with Mr. Brown, a vast network of community organization leaders taught all of the authors a great deal about walking humbly and with openness to others, diverse ways of being and knowing, and the hard work of attempting to build more inclusive, just, and sustainable communities.

These contributors and collaborators are quite literally too numerous to name. But some of the carriers of kindness include: Patrick Sandoval and Sharron Etcity of the Navajo (Diné) Nation; Wayne Goutermont, JoLynn Sharrow, and Patrick Hoppe of Gardiner, Montana; Joseph Sekiku and Juma Massisi of Kayanga, Tanzania; Billy Kane and Derick Wilson of Northern Ireland; Jean Carla Costas of Bolivia; and of course Dan and Geli Weiss of Brazil. Dan founded Amizade and sparked this network in 1994. Several faculty members, instructors, and facilitators also played key roles “from the inside” in ensuring that Amizade and our work were never co-opted by institutional and bureaucratic logics. Deep thanks to David Brumble, Monica Cwynar, Monica Frolander-Ulf, Reinhard Heinisch, and Jen Saffron for their insights and commitments there. None of this work at and through Amizade would have been possible without a continuously dedicated and dynamic office staff, including – at different times – Marcedes Minana, Rebekah Harlan, Katie Baucco, Anna Ciaccio, and Sarah Orgass. Amizade students and interns have deeply influenced our work and thinking, sometimes quite formally, as in the case of Chad Martin, who rose from student to intern to program facilitator, board member, and finally board chair.

Richard Kiely also began his journey with this work in 1994, with a collaboration between Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3) and Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Richard extends his appreciation to Donna Nielsen and Paula Moore, Professors of Nursing at TC3, and Earl Bowie, Puerto Cabezas community leader and pastor, along with an extensive network of community collaborators, all of whom have sustained a vision for social change in Puerto Cabezas that continues to inspire and deliver quality community-driven partnership work. Their lifelong friendships and mentorship have led him on a deep personal and intellectual journey that has sparked numerous contributions to this field.

In 2003 Chris Boettcher and I presented at the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement in Salt Lake City, Utah, where Richard was presenting some of the many lucid concepts in his dissertation, including an articulation of transformational learning in global service-learning and the notion of the chameleon complex. We knew immediately that we and Amizade would benefit from more collaboration with Richard, and were thrilled when he accepted Michael Sandy’s invitation to present at Amizade’s retreat for global service-learning instructors and facilitators later that winter. The community gathered at that rural retreat center was inspiring, and included Lina Dostilio, Karin Cotterman, Joseph Croskey, and several other folks who have continued to advance ethical and inclusive work in higher education. I have been fortunate to have Richard as a friend, colleague, and mentor ever since.

In the fall of the following year, 2004, I enrolled as a doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA). GSPIA proved to be a place that offered me significant training in development studies, human rights thinking, and critical, participatory perspectives, while also allowing me the freedom to develop a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary dissertation on the topic of ethically educating for global citizenship. Paul Nelson and (upstairs, in political science) Michael Goodhart were both instrumental in my journey there and in the years that followed.

As I was writing my dissertation, Michael Sandy moved on from Amizade, and I was honored to find myself in the Executive Director role. Following three years as ED of Amizade, I stepped down, supremely confident that Brandon Blache-Cohen, the person I hired as Chief Operating Officer, would steward the organization to new heights as its 4^th Executive Director. He most certainly has. I left for love – following Shannon Wheatley to Arizona State University (ASU), where she was a Lecturer in Political Science and I was able to find a role in Global Studies. This continuous movement between scholar and practitioner roles is foundational in my worldview and critical to the genesis of this volume.

On January 18, 2011, from an ASU email address, I sent a proposal to Stylus Publishing, imagining a book that would convey what colleagues and I had learned about community-based global learning, through research and practice, from community, individual, nonprofit, and university perspectives. Since that proposal was submitted and accepted, I have lost both parents, gotten married to Shannon Wheatley Hartman, served in visiting, tenure-track, and administrative positions in higher education, at diverse institutions all across the country, and – with all credit and gratitude to Shannon, become the father of two extraordinary daughters.

There is a great deal of change and transition, as well as sources of steadiness in the preceding paragraph. Some of the transitions are relevant to this volume. Though I now work at one of America’s leading liberal arts institutions, I have also worked at rural and semi-urban Flagship R1 institutions, a community college, a private master’s institution, and anchor institutions in urban environments. My co-authors also represent extraordinary institutional diversity. What our work reveals is that it is not institutional type nor student population that matters here. What matters is the existence of a critical mass of campus and community collaborators who are committed to working through shared inquiry and action with integrity and co-leadership. Professionally, I have been fortunate to be part of several such sustaining networks.

In addition to formative work with Amizade, I had the opportunity to serve as a Visiting Professor for two years in the Providence College (PC) Global Studies Program. Drawing on several years of foundational work that Rick Battistoni, Keith Morton, Joe Cammarano, and others put into building the first Public and Community Service Studies major in the country, Nick Longo and Nuria Alonso Garcia now work with other collaborators to advance a community-engaged, local and global, 4-year global studies experience. Those two programs at PC stand out as programs that have clarified how community-based learning and collaboration can become part of institutional fabric and institutional commitments. It was through one such commitment that I was fortunate to work with Michelle Carr on a campus-community oral history collaboration that celebrated Rhode Island’s diverse and inclusive community.

I left PC for a tenure-track role in the Staley School of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University. Remarkably, The Staley School works with nearly 1,000 leadership studies minors, from all across the institution. They work with anthropologists and engineers, biologists and business majors, in an interdisciplinary space dedicated to better understanding personal leadership roles and responsibilities in a manner that fosters more diverse and inclusive communities. The Staley School showed me an impressive model for reaching high numbers of students, carefully and intentionally, across disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives. With deep thanks to the leadership of Mary Tolar and Trisha Gott, as part of the Staley School’s 1^st Leading Change Institute, I was able to convene practitioners and scholars from around the world in a week-long dialogue on ethical partnerships; a dialogue that has continued to spark publication, collaboration, and application. It wouldn’t have been possible without the support and collaboration of Lori Kniffin, as well as several dynamic and insightful students, including Hannah Carlgren, Olivia Harding, Nicole Kraly, and Garrett Wilkinson.

Even as the book was proposed, Richard Kiely and I were talking about ways to put portions of it online. Those ideas were the genesis of globalsl, which now operates as an online knowledge hub and multi-institutional network. It is a network of individuals who are relentless in their efforts to responsibly leverage higher education resources to support social change advancing more inclusive and sustainable communities. Through that network I have worked with and learned from Jessica Evert, Brian Hanson, Ben Lough, Florence Martin, Anna McKeown, Janice McMillan, Eric Mlyn, Amanda Moore McBride, Nora Reynolds, Rachel Tomas Morgan, Cynthia Toms, Richard Slimbach, Rafia Zakaria, and many other inspiring innovators.

Today, I am grateful to serve as Executive Director of the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, a campus-wide center dedicated to fostering ethical global learning since the year 2000. As this book goes to publication, we have just completed an interactive, inquisitive, inspiring, and intellectually stimulating symposium on Seeking Global Citizenship. We were fortunate to gather for more than a week with visionary community-based leaders and social change makers with whom the college has partnered for several years and sometimes more than a decade. Though we had never all met together in person before, we now see one another’s strengths, stories, and depths of complexities in a way that would have been impossible without sustained and diverse forms of being in real, person-to-person community with one another.

I have certainly failed to name individuals who have been instrumental in my growth in this work. I imagine that the amount of life lived and lost in the seven years from proposal to publication makes writing acknowledgments especially difficult.

As co-authors, we wish to honor and remember a friend who was our first external reader, Susan Hicks. Susan was killed by a vehicle as she commuted home on her bicycle. She was a dedicated international educator and careful collaborator. She was thoughtful and humane, and filled with exuberance for a life well lived. Her review restructured this book, and made it better.

I suppose nearly everyone who completes a book must view their project as a unique product of community support, with deep thanks to broad networks of persons near and far, sped and slowed by the quotidian and critical moments of life and death. But I have tried to name the kindnesses and collaborators who have sustained me and us in this life and work.

Any successes I can claim track back to my good fortune of an extraordinary family, led by a mother and father who believed in the fullest potentials of their children, held them to high standards, and – at every stage – seemed to find ways to love and nudge forward without smothering. With my brothers and our wives – and in the case of our father, along with Andie, our half-sisters and their families – we were able to share our love and thanks with our parents before they left. This will forever be one of the things for which I am most grateful. Without the confidence and drive instilled in me by my parents, I have a hard time imagining this book emerging as it did. That they each managed to live full lives and be good parents is something I appreciate more and more every day, and I am thankful to have in Shannon a partner who embodies deep love for our children, intellectual curiosity and playfulness, and compassionate commitment to all persons.

This book is, at best, one stepping stone on a journey toward a version of higher education that is more clearly supportive of the co-creation of just and sustainable communities. Critics will find flaws in it, as do I, on re-reads and reconsiderations. These flaws sit with me, of course, more than anyone else. But I am grateful for the opportunity to present this work in this way, and thankful to Stylus Publishing for that opportunity. As we move forward together, my hope is that readers will engage critique in the spirit of steady, loving confrontation (MLK’s articulation of nonviolence), so that we may all continue to see one another and collaborate with one another in this shared journey toward more just possibilities.

Eric Hartman is executive director of the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship and co-founder of globalsl.