Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Mission, Vision & Commitments 

Mission 

The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub seeks to facilitate reciprocal and trusting partnerships between humanistic scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences and the community to respond to important social challenges.

Vision

The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub strives to serve as a model for transformative ways of practicing community engagement within higher education.

  • We strive to facilitate collaborations that bring people together to address problems and help create a more hopeful future.
  • We strive to provide a range of programming that meets the needs of our faculty, staff, students, and members of the community and that inspires or assists them to enact change.
  • We strive to create sustainable and meaningful dialogues about contemporary societal issues through the lens of the humanities and humanistic approaches to knowledge creation.
  • We strive to be a physical and virtual space that is welcoming and inclusive to all who seek to connect with The Hub.
  • We strive to be antiracist and decolonial by engaging in practices and programming that collectively enhance equity, combat systemic racism, embrace intersectionality, and are aligned with the fact that The Hub exists on Dakota land. 

Commitments  

Our work within the College of Liberal Arts, the University of Minnesota, and the larger community will be guided by the following commitments as we strive to manifest the mission and vision of the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub. We commit to: 

  1. Doing the “work at home” that is needed to adopt an anti-oppressive orientation and manifesting that orientation in everything that we do. 
  2. Doing no harm in the present and future by actively mitigating potential negative impacts of our engagement work, including negative outcomes related to power differentials between the College and the surrounding communities /community partners.
  3. Acknowledging past harm and the problematic aspects of our reputation vis-à-vis the community, which has included exploitative and extractive forms of knowledge production.
  4. Supporting community-engaged work already being done by members of the CLA community. 
  5. Cultivating and maintaining authentic relationships that are not self-serving but grounded in a spirit of reciprocity, co-creation,  and respect while recognizing that we will not always get it right. 
  6. Prioritizing support for engagement efforts and activities that impact youth, are developed by youth, are centered on youth, as well as identifying opportunities to engage youth programming and activities when appropriate. 
  7. Prioritizing support for engagement efforts and activities and building partnerships that center the needs and concerns of historically underserved communities.

We recognize that fully embracing and engaging with these commitments is an ongoing effort and look forward to the day when they come to be synonymous with the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub.