Miami University Center for Community Engagement in Over-the-Rhine

The uniqueness of the Center for Community Engagement is its relationship with the Over-the-Rhine People's Movement and other important organizations within the inner city of Cincinnati that struggle for human and racial rights as well as social justice. Accordingly, it is a site for learning and for producing knowledge that intersects with the needs and demands of a social movement. The Center pr

ivileges human and ecological needs as leading priorities in urban development, and challenges the profit motive as the dominant arbiter in urban social policy. The Center's firm conviction is that such learning in support of broader community transformation is best served by direct social engagement. Part of the Center's mission is to create a "community of practices" that generates learning and knowledge based upon social participation within a cultural community of color. These activities enable faculty and students to experience the realities of race and class first hand, which are not usually encountered by many students who, owing to their backgrounds, rarely get closer to the study of inner city life than what they read in a textbook. Such experiences are not reproducible on Miami's Oxford campus.