How, over 40 years, Carleton’s embrace of civic engagement has evolved
In her first year at Carleton, Angelica Koch ’02 arrived in Northfield from Los Angeles, where she grew up. “I’m of Hispanic, Salvadoran, and Mexican descent. I’m first generation. I came from a low-income family,” she says. “Coming to Carleton was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but also a culture shock.”
For her student job, Koch was assigned to work at the Laura Baker School, a center for persons with developmental disabilities. The work was difficult, but it provided a sense of community she found rewarding. “There was a group of peers there caring for adult individuals with a wide spectrum of disabilities, and they were doing it because they were truly passionate about it.” She’d initially intended to study pre-med, but her time at the school shifted her thinking. The work spoke to her and the values she had grown up with in her community back home. “This was real, and it was exactly the kind of work I wanted to be doing, because I’ve always had a servant heart,” Koch says.
As she began reconsidering career possibilities, Koch took Anthropology of Health and Illness, a course taught by Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg that galvanized her ambition to combine community-based values with medicine. After graduation, Koch was hired as the inaugural director of the HealthFinders Collaborative, a Northfield-based nonprofit medical clinic that provides affordable medical services to underserved residents as well as the uninsured in Rice and Steele counties. She later worked with Feldman-Savelsberg to incorporate a community engagement element into her Anthropology of Health and Illness course, so students learned how theory and practice operate in the real world.
These community-engaged experiences changed the direction of Koch’s career and life. Today, she is the assistant director of community engagement to advance research and community health (CEARCH) at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health and has devoted her career to helping others by working with and within institutions while forging strong, direct ties to the communities they serve. “These experiences showed me that I didn’t need to go down a clinical medicine route to achieve my goals, and that there were other opportunities in the health field.”
Koch’s story is one of many. From the founding of Acting in Community Together (ACT), Carleton’s first formal civic engagement initiative, in 1985, to its present incarnation as the Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE), Carleton students have been taking on community-based work and learning that has enriched their education and frequently led to a lifetime of commitment. One was ACT’s founding director, Julia Scatliff O’Grady ’85, an author and educator who went on to be instrumental in the development of AmeriCorps. “There are some folks like us who had the experience of community engagement at Carleton, even for just a year,” she says, “and the rest of our lives have been in service to that original mission.”
A Growing Commitment to Community
Now celebrating 40 years since its founding as ACT, CCCE is well established in the College, with deep roots in the classroom and the surrounding communities. But in 1985, the idea of community-engaged programming in higher education was a fresh idea with an uncertain future.
That year, Carleton began a novel outreach program to help students who wanted to volunteer find opportunities to help their neighbors. It was born in part out of a conversation Carleton’s president, Bob Edwards, had with a very captivating fellow. In 1984, Wayne Meisel, a recent graduate of Harvard, had undertaken a walk from Colby College in Maine to Washington, D.C., to drum up support for on-campus student engagement and for his organization, the Campus Outreach Opportunity League (COOL).
He visited more than 65 campuses during his trek, talking with campus chaplains, administrators, presidents, or whoever would lend an ear. Returning home to Minnesota, Meisel scheduled an appointment with Edwards. “He was convincing enough that Bob said, ‘Hey, let’s do this,’” says Scatliff O’Grady. “And that was what got ACT going.”
Michael McNally ’85, Carleton’s director of American Studies and John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies, was Meisel’s childhood friend, and he says that tracks. “Wayne had a charisma about him, and he could walk into a room and get people excited about something they had no idea about before he went into that room.”
Soon after Edwards’s meeting with Meisel, Scatliff O’Grady was hired as presidential assistant and began laying the foundations for ACT. “I was excited about that because I’d spent much of my growing up volunteering and being very civic minded,” she says. She says she admires Edwards, who passed away on November 30, for championing this work. “Bob was just an incredible person who realized the importance of taking this step. I think he considered it one of his central achievements, too. He had a fairly formal and traditional education background, yet over the years he came to see its power.”
As Carleton’s first “green dean” (now known as a fifth year), Scatliff O’Grady partnered with student directors to start building ACT from the ground up. “We didn’t have the resources that bigger institutions did, but we had a lot of students who were on fire about the work we were doing,” she recalls. “I think I was running four roles at the same time, so it was chaotic. But the legacy of my time there is that we started ACT and now we have CCCE, and I couldn’t be more excited about where Carleton has taken this.”
Over time, through the later efforts of many—McNally; Laura Riehle Merrill, former ACT director; Deborah Appleman, professor of educational studies; Mary Savina ’72, professor of geology; and Adrienne Falcón ’89, among them—ACT became more fully integrated into the College. “We had a lot of strategic conversations to move this work under the academic side of the house,” says McNally. “It may sound very institutional from an outside perspective, but the curriculum is the coin of the realm at a college.”
Photos courtesy of Carleton College Archives
Whose Knowledge Matters?
Not everyone in academia welcomed community-engaged education into the curriculum. There were arguments in the 1980s and beyond around whether such activity should be part of coursework, or be awarded college credit.
One issue at the core of the argument was around who defines knowledge, and whose knowledge is valued. Is it worth taking class time for students to get to know Laura Baker residents with disabilities, HealthFinders patients, or local farmers? What do these neighbors know that an academic article or lab simulation might be challenged to represent?
Sinda Nichols ’05, current CCCE director, is aware of the critique that what CCCE and other community engagement efforts do can be viewed as adjunct to the academy, and that it has an aura of well-meaning and beneficial activity while being devoid of intellectual heft. “But I think our work is actually quite radical because part of what we’re saying is that knowledge generated outside of the academy is knowledge, too,” says Nichols. “One of our learning objectives is that we recognize and honor different forms of knowledge that reside with community partners. In our field there’s an increasing literature and conversation around this idea of epistemic justice. In the academy, we are going to understand other people and cultures better if we recognize their experiential knowledge.”
“Students need to see that the work done out in the community has relevance to intellectual life.”
For Koch, this notion has been foundational to her work in public health. “I’ve embraced in my tenure, and remind my academic and community partners, that we are all knowledge holders,” she says. “We all are experts in our own lived experiences, and should always have an open invitation to share our voice regardless of status, regardless of degrees or years of education.”
Within the academy, McNally argues for what he calls “epistemic humility,” and argues that the community engagement components of classes can round out student learning and experience in a way theory cannot. “If we are going to do the liberal arts really well, you need to look for knowledge holders in lots of domains, and that’s the argument for having this as part of a college.”
Photos courtesy of Carleton College Archives
Integrated Learning, Local Impact
While points of contact between students and the community involved in course-based community projects may be limited by Carleton’s 10-week term, McNally says community-based work study jobs can have lasting effects. They did for him. Like Koch, McNally—who is co-director of Carleton’s new Indigenous Engagement in Place initiative—worked at the Laura Baker School as an undergraduate. And he too found the experience transformative. Since then he has devoted much of his career and scholarship to civic engagement in and out of the classroom. “You could say that the [course-based] contacts with the community are more gestural than substantial, but they are valuable, and they can also integrate the readings and lectures and other work of the course in unique ways.”
“This work can be incredibly influential on the paths that people take.”
He recently sent a group of students from his class to the White Earth Ojibwe reservation. “It’s about five hours north of here. There was a guy who’s now an elder, whom I still work with, who would take people on a tour of the reservation. On the way up, they encountered a roadkill deer that had been recently killed,” he says. “They stopped and field dressed it and delivered the hindquarters and other parts of the deer to the elders.” Part of epistemic humility is recognizing that this stop along the way is not a distraction from the learning—it is a tremendous gift of knowledge, if students are trained to see it as such.
McNally still recalls the indelible nature of the students’ response to the experience, which was only made available to them by the community focus of the course. “The work that Mike McNally does with Indigenous people is really important to bring into the classroom,” says Scatliff O’Grady. “Students need to see that the work done out in the community has relevance to intellectual life.”
Community engagement is now firmly rooted at Carleton, and the numbers bear this out. Nearly 75 percent of students in Carleton’s class of 2023 took an Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) course—one of some 60 classes each year that address matters of public concern and link the College and the surrounding community—at some point during their undergraduate study. And during the 2024–25 academic year, Carls contributed 48,854 hours to the community through volunteerism, academic projects, or paid community work—equivalent to the work of more than 23 full-time employees over that time period.
These efforts, and those of Carleton students over the past four decades, have empowered numerous area community organizations to expand their programs, make their operations more effective, and serve more people in need. “Our collaborations with Carleton are a core ingredient of our success. We do not have this type of partnership in other communities,” says Scott Wopata, Northfield’s community development director and director of the Community Action Center from 2018 to 2025. “What a gift to be in Northfield and have Carleton here as a partner. Carleton work-study students help support our food shelf efforts in other ways, carbon credits help fund our organization. There have been so many successes.”
A Lifetime of Commitment
Koch believes the benefits of such experiences create more engaged citizens for life, in part because of her own experience and in part because of the effect community engagement and service has had on students and others she has worked with over the years. “This work can be incredibly influential on the paths that people take, and what is really exciting is that it can come to fruition in different ways, depending what communities you work with and how you are giving back,” she says.
“One thing that’s interesting to me across the history of higher education is how we balance the purpose of a liberal arts college like Carleton as an academic retreat from the world, with our mission to prepare students to go out and be leaders in it,” Nichols says. “The work that we’ve slowly advocated for and now built all of this infrastructure and support for gives some legitimacy to the idea that inside a very theoretical, rigorous, very academic education, there’s still room to be a part of the world and learn from it, too.”
Chris Quirk is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York.