October is an exciting month for the Building a Better World Forum, as we are building on insights and relationships from the 2012 International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) and Intercultural Horizons conferences. Additionally, we are pleased to welcome Annie Wendel, a Providence College Senior (Public Service), as Social Media Manager. Annie, who recently returned from a semester in South Africa followed by an immersion experience in the Solomon Islands, is deeply concerned with this work and is looking forward to helping facilitate our conversations.

The recent surge of conference-going forced us to more systematically structure some of our thinking and consider how we will all continue discussion in the months to come.Two related PowerPoint presentations are available here: Several BBW Forum contributors presented one of the pre-conferences at IARSLCE, Research Driving Better Design, Practice, Evaluation, and Assessment in Global and Immersive Service-Learning, while the Forum co-founders presented some of the components in their forthcoming book at Intercultural Horizons.

Through these conference conversations, other contributors have come forward, including Imagining America Fellow and Western Kentucky University Community Engagement Coordinator Nadia DeLeon, who is contributing a post on colonialism, charity, and development that we will run on Wednesday. We are also looking forward to compiling some of the conversations developed at these conferences to facilitate movement toward global service-learning standards of best practice. That process will begin later this month, when we’ll also feature some of the incredible programs we’ve learned about through these conversations. In the meantime, please send any guest blog ideas or topic requests to buildingbetterworld(at)gmail(dot)com, or simply comment below.