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For Partners

Welcome Community Partners!

The OCEL aims to build long-term and asset-based community partnerships in Poughkeepsie and the Greater Hudson Valley that center community voice. The OCEL connects students’ and faculty members’ passions around social justice issues, academic interests, teaching goals, and research inquiries to community-identified projects through Community-Engaged Learning (CEL), community-engaged curriculum, and community-based research projects.

The OCEL works alongside partners to brainstorm ways Vassar students and faculty can support your work, projects, and inquiries. OCEL community partners act as co-educators and co-mentors of our Vassar students and faculty to create meaningful place-based experiential opportunities for growth and community impact.

Community-engaged projects and experiences are varied but include these criteria:

  • Address a specific community-identified interest, inquiry, project, or idea;
  • Includes working with and learning alongside a community partner;
  • Enhances classroom learning by making connections between the community-based work and the academic work;
  • Centers structured critical reflection.

If you're interested in connecting with us, please complete a short partnership form so we can learn more about your work.

Examples of Past CEL Student Experiences

  • Community outreach support
  • Policy research
  • Grant-writing
  • Creating digital and other marketing and social media content
  • Programmatic support
  • Translation services
  • Tutoring or early literacy curriculum development and teaching
  • Using technical skills like GIS to create mapping projects
  • Youth programming support
  • Data entry, data analysis, and report writing
  • Video editing, voice-overs, recording books or materials
  • Fundraising

Examples of Past CEC Courses

AFRSxEDUC-215-51 Homes Schools Communities
Instructor: Erin McCloskey
Community Partner: Exodus Transitional Community

This course draws on varied and rich experiences of all participants to read about, share and discuss the ways our homes, schools and communities intersect to create experiences for youth. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different school structures and different behavioral and instructional approaches. We explore how school structures such as standardized testing, tracking, and curriculum design influence students' experiences in and out of school. Throughout the course we grapple with the continued significance of socially differentiating factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and citizenship in shaping public policy and youth's experiences.

MATH-301-51 Topics in Adv Math and Stats - Collaborative Consulting for the Community
Instructor: Ming-Wen An
Community Partners: Howland Chamber Music Circle, Poughkeepsie Farm Project, Hudson River Housing

Studying statistics for the sake of knowledge is fascinating, but applying statistics to make a potential impact in your community is even better! In teams of 3-4 students, you will collaborate with non-profit community partners on a project from start to finish. You will build on your statistics foundation, applying skills in communication, teamwork, problem formulation and solving, data wrangling and visualization, and statistical analysis. You will be expected to present regular updates to your partners and the class, work together with your student team and partners, learn new skills and statistical methods as project needs arise, and produce a final “product” (e.g. technical report with key findings or recommendations) that can benefit and be useful to your partners.

Dancing To Connect (DANC 282)
Instructor: Miriam Mahdaviani
Community Partners: Poughkeepsie High School and Battery Dance
In this course, students learn ‘a dance for social impact’ methodology that enables youth, regardless of dance experience or background, to create and perform their own dance stories. Battery Dance’s Dancing to Connect program has been used as a tool for building bridges between communities, resolving conflict, and empowering marginalized populations across the United States and 70 countries. Instruction in the methodology takes place in two parts. In Part I, students learn the sequential activities that stimulate critical thinking and creative movement, by creating an original dance work that reveals individual stories. In Par​t II, students gain first hand-experience implementing the methodology with Poughkeepsie public school students that also yield new dance works. The culmination of this course is a final performance that showcases the works created.