The Hunger Project: Exercising Civic Leadership with the Community for the Common Good in and Introductory Leadership Class
Contemporary trends in leadership education emphasize paradigms of learning and educational practices associated with developing responsible citizens, furthering higher education’s civic mission. Yet, few introductory leadership courses include an explicit civic component (Johnson & Woodard, 2014). Service-learning is a high-impact practice designed to link the classroom and community in meaningful ways (Kuh, 2008). This application brief illustrates how Kansas State University faculty, students, and community partners engaged in a semester-long service-learning experience for the purpose of exercising leadership to make progress on the social issue of food insecurity. We describe how service-learning can be a catalyst to explore and engage the learning nexus of social challenges, leadership, and civic engagement in an introductory leadership course.
This paper reports a study of clergy attitudes concerning an ecumenical Christian agency. A sample of clergy in Middletown (N=126) were asked about whether any of2 7 activities were appropriate for such an agency, about the importance of these activities, and about the appropriateness of various tactics for such an agency. The results were analyzed for the entire sample by church-type and by the theological views of the respondents. Broad support was found for only three activities: lessening drug abuse, lessening teenage pregnancy, and lessening family abuse. Beyond these activities, conservatives and liberals favored different ecumenical programs. The paper concludes with comments about developing interchurch agencies.