Seed Grant Award: Listening to Harlem; Rethinking Community Engagement

The goal of the project was to conduct oral history interviews with members of the Harlem community to begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of how they perceive and interpret Columbia University’s role as an anchor ally working to address structural and systemic racism as a means to achieve racial equity within the local context of our civil society.  

Drs. Amy Starecheski and Geraldine Downey, the project PIs, partnered with the Columbia University Collaborative for Youth and Family Programs (CU Collaborative) -- a University Seminar established in 2018 to explore and examine the intersection of scholarship and practice around higher education institutions’ (HEIs) civic engagement with a specific focus on youth and families within their communities; and to remove barriers and create synergistic opportunities that will increase the community’s access to meaningful programming.

This project was funded through the Addressing Racism: A Call to Action for Higher Education initiative of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.