img-1

Women’s Emancipation and Development Agency (WOMEDA) Executive Director Juma Massisi (seated, center) facilitates conversation among women and Amizade students in Kayanga, Tanzania, as part of research that supported a successful United States Agency for International Development grant award for WOMEDA.

img-2

DukeEngage students Jeline Rabideau and Jenny Denton worked with middle school girls, such as ​Katie, in Western North Carolina to enhance literacy skills through digital storytelling projects focused on their families.

img-3

DukeEngage independent project student Alex Saffrit collaborated with a community member, Moses, in Nkokonjeru, Uganda, on a solar cooker project.

img-4

Ernesto Alaniz, community maintenance leader, Villanova civil engineering student Allie Braun, and Water for Waslala program manager Iain Hunt cooperate to inspect a new water tank near Santa Maria Kubali, Nicaragua.

Propose a Guest Blog Post

Thank you for considering a guest post. Our contributors are academics and practitioners, community organizers and community members, global service-learning skeptics and supporters. Together, we are working toward careful and conscientious global partnerships that advance human rights and ecological sustainability.

Site Guidelines

We define community-based global learning as a community-driven learning and/or service experience that employs structured, critically reflective practice to better understand global citizenship, positionality, power, structure, and social responsibility in global context. It is a learning methodology and a community-driven development philosophy that cultivates a critically reflective disposition among all participants (Hartman, Kiely, Boettcher, & Friedrichs, 2018, p. 21).

This field is large and diverse and coming from many different disciplinary spaces. The site serves as a space in which to invite people outside one’s home discipline into conversation about issues that matter to all of us. The blog posts are invitations to deeper dialogue and field building.

We typically request 1,000 – 2,000 words and many contributors have managed to get in that neighborhood, but some find brevity impossible. Either way, we can work with it. Especially long posts are split up over multiple entries. So, to give two examples,

Our readers are interested in and involved with this growing field. They are researchers and practitioners, faculty, staff, students, community members and nonprofit partners. We see an average of 100 visits a day, and that’s growing. It’s become our practice to include citations in text and at the end of posts (APA format) as many of our readers are quite interested in sources. Thank you very much for considering a post to share with the site and community. To propose a post or submit a draft, email your idea to buildingbetterworld(at)gmail(dot)com. Please include a 3 – 4 sentence bio and a photo and caption relevant to your submission.