PLACE Collaborative
The PLACE Collaboratory, an initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation and facilitated through Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP), brings together a group of 11 academic-community partnerships from diverse sectors and regions across the country, to explore the use of the arts as cultural strategy for community building, listening and transformation. Pitzer College was invited to be involved in this national PLACE Collaboratory and awarded $37,000 for grant activities July 1, 2019 - July 1, 2021. Pitzer's PLACE leadership team consists of Pitzer undergraduate students Amanda Gomez and Ray Hill-Cristol, and alum, Christian Cabunag, and CASA faculty director, Tessa Hicks Peterson alongside community partners from Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice (Lyzzeth Mendoza, community engagement and policy director; Jessica Hernandez, digital media coordinator, and Ramon Morales, community leader) and from the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective, (Najayra Valdovinosoto, youth programs coordinator).
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Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP) is a national higher education initiative, hosted by and in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). BTtoP’s work is grounded in three commitments: that undergraduate education should be holistic and transformative; that “educating the whole student” must include students of all backgrounds and interests; and that the first two commitments require significant change in higher education. BTtoP advances this mission through innovative practice, research, advocacy, and institutional change.
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BTtoP has received a two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a new project titled the PLACE Collaboratory. PLACE (Partnerships for Listening and Action by Communities and Educators) brings together a network of academic-community partnerships involving eleven colleges, community colleges, and universities in four communities (Newark, Baltimore, Greensboro, and Los Angeles). The partnerships will use public-humanities and public-cultural projects to help set public agendas grounded in community voice. Some partnerships will be anchored by a single university; in others, multiple institutions will join together in regional collaboration. All the partnerships will involve undergraduates as key participants, culture-makers, and often cultural brokers.
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PLACE will work as a committee of the whole, communicating regularly and convening twice a year to define shared goals and values, confront common challenges, and learn together. The goal of the local projects will be to develop action plans grounded in community voice and enabled by academic-community partnership. The goal of the larger collaboratory will be to distill best practices for authentic partnerships, to model the role of the humanities in sustaining them, and to use networked collaboration to disseminate them across higher education.
