Welcome back to the academic year in North America! We have an exciting slate lined up for the next few months as we continue to assemble, organize, and share leading resources and reflective pieces on careful and conscientious community-engagement around the world.

Soon we will be sharing updates from the field from our regular contributor Julia Lang as well as Dr. Shari Berkowitz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders at Mercy College in New York.

We have also begun to organize a GSL Best of the Best list compiled last year by Melody Porter, Associate Director of Community Engagement at the College of William and Mary. Porter and colleagues asked members of the Break Away and Higher Education – Service-Learning (HE-SL) listserves to share their favorite resources relating to community engagement and alternative breaks. While this website was mentioned as a resource, there were many additional contributions. We’re going to steadily share those additional contributions here.

Following months of conference proceedings, written feedback, conference calls, and efforts to integrate a very broad constituency of voices, next week we will release draft guidelines on Fair Trade Learning for comment and feedback.

Related, we anticipate two posts upcoming from researchers who are focused on community impact assessment in global service-learning. They’re both part of a pre-conference panel centered on community outcomes at the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement.

Finally, we are very excited to announce the addition of a new intern at the Building a Better World Forum, Elizabeth Rosenberg. Elizabeth is a masters student in Social Work and Public Health at the University of Maryland Baltimore, where she concentrates in community and population health, community action, and social policy.  Her global service-learning experience began while studying abroad in Hacienda Vieja, El Salvador. She continued this work in the University of Maryland Leadership & Community Service Learning office, where she trained and advised trip leaders of international alternative break trips. She has served internationally with several service-learning teams as well as collaborating with Break Away: The Alternative Break Connection. She aims to share her experience with service learning and to learn from other active citizens and global stewards.

As always, thanks for reading, thanks for the emails, tweets, and likes, and please like our new Facebook Page to keep up with posts, share them easily, and continue engaging in dialogue about careful and conscientious community engagement around the world.

– Eric Hartman