The Certificate in Civic Leadership brings intentionality, advice, and support to students' progress through a wide variety of community-based leadership, research, and service activities. Ultimately, completion of the certificate represents that a student has developed core competencies that prepare them to exercise leadership in a variety of roles as an active citizen.
The Capstone is the final requirement of the certificate and requires students to design and implement a project in collaboration with a community partner organization over two full semesters. Students spend the fall semester learning principles of community partnership and proposal development, and they identify a community partner to build a relationship with and design a project that will enhance their partner’s capacity to be implemented in the spring semester.
The 2019-20 capstone students had the implementation of their projects interrupted this spring due to COVID 19. Just as students were fully engaged in survey disseminations, event planning, curriculum delivery, focus group sessions, and stakeholder meetings, the growing crisis began to have serious impact for the community organizations with which they were working. In March, the pandemic had shut down normal operations for organizations and for Rice itself, making some of the aspects of the capstone projects not possible.
This cohort of students did not let the pandemic stop them from working with their community partners. In fact, the students were able to identify how their partners and the communities they work with were impacted by the crisis in amplified ways. Students working with food insecurity programs through health organizations witnessed the staggering increase in demand for services and vulnerability of communities already coping with difficult situations. A student working with a program to educate others on Intimate Partner Violence reflected on the situation of those reflected on the precariousness for those who are abused being confined at home in dangerous situations, giving her work even more urgency. As formal education as we know it ground to a halt in Houston, a student working on understanding multiple career trajectories for high school students who do not plan to attend college understood the need for her work from a new perspective accounting for the even more evident inequities in access manifested in the new learning from a distance model.
The 2019-20 Capstone cohort reacted with great adaptability to the crisis in which they found themselves. They prioritized their partners’ needs, modified work plans and deliverables, and consulted with stakeholders about how best to build their capacity in the new context that communities and the organizations that serve them required.
The capstone instructors, Danika Brown and Morgan Kinney, asked this cohort to reflect on their experience and create something that they felt represented their journey for the past year, this culmination of their civic leadership development at Rice. We have compiled their reflections into a digital zine – a genre that invites the reader to engage and reflect and interpret with the contributors. We hope you find their reflections as inspiring and as thoughtful as we do. Below is a link to the zine, and after you explore that publication, please scroll down to see the capstone students’ projects.
