Southwestern University received a three-year, $1.3 million Mellon Grant initiative to address racial justice and social change through the humanities. This effort includes the creation of a Director of Public Engagement position, emphasizing a wide-reaching approach to community engagement that transcends traditional boundaries.

• We aim to reinvigorate Community-Engaged Learning by enhancing course offerings, while bolstering undergraduate research and integrating thematic learning within general education. Central to this initiative is fostering connections between our campus and the broader community, ensuring that students, faculty, and staff see their roles as publicly engaged.
• This initiative holds the potential to shift the narrative around higher education’s role in social change, demonstrating that outreach, engaged public programming, research, and teaching, along with the institutional infrastructures supporting such engagement, are vital to our mission and the broader community we serve.

   

What is Our Primary Goal?

To be a publicly engaged campus and co-create with Georgetown communities and beyond.

 

Meet the Director of Public Engagement, Manda Wittebort

Manda Wittebort earned a BA in Developmental Psychology from Rollins College and a Master’s in Higher Education from the University of Denver, driven by her belief in higher education’s role in community development and social change. Her diverse career includes national and international youth-focused positions, such as serving as a CityYear AmeriCorps Member and working with the Peace Corps in the Youth & Families sector. Throughout her work, Manda remains committed to amplifying voices, flattening power structures, and fostering shared visions, particularly with those most impacted.

At the University of Florida, Manda co-founded Changemakers’ Dialogue and Path to Purpose, deepening student leadership in community organizing skills in order to truly support local communities. Currently, as the Director of Public Engagement at Southwestern University, she is dedicated to supporting our university and regional communities’ strengths while co-creating plans for cultural and infrastructural shifts that align with shared values and desires.

Describing herself as a gatherer, bridge, and facilitator, Manda approaches her work with a passion for justice, love, and creativity. Trained in dialogue facilitation, story circles, and individual coaching, she thrives on building authentic connections and fostering personal and collective growth. Having lived and worked across the U.S. and abroad, she brings a wealth of experience in building community and navigating new environments, always with a focus on belonging and purpose.

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What is Public Engagement? 

We define public engagement as the mutually constitutive, mutually beneficial, and mutually reinforcing relationship forged between the students, faculty, and staff on campus and the many, diverse, and multifaceted communities that exist beyond campus–in the pursuit of the public good, social justice, and civic responsibility. It relies on and values the knowledge, expertise, perspectives, and insights of all members of both groups equally; is marked by thoughtful exchange and reciprocal collaborations; and takes a multiplicity of forms, visible and not, disciplinary and not, from public-facing research and creative works to community-engaged learning courses. Public engagement can and should envelop all parts of a university, informing and infusing all aspects of the mission, and be curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular, constituting the basis of an abiding commitment to sustainable partnerships, from the local to the global. 

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Public Engagement at Southwestern University

At Southwestern, public engagement is all about building strong, meaningful, and mutually beneficial connections between our campus community — including students, faculty, and staff — and the many diverse communities around us. Our aim is to work together to promote the public good, advance social justice, and embrace civic responsibility. Community-engaged learning is one path within public engagement.

We believe everyone brings something valuable to the table, and public engagement thrives on the thoughtful exchange of knowledge, experience, and perspectives. Whether it’s through public-facing research, creative works, or community-engaged learning classes, these collaborations take many forms. It touches every part of the university — in and outside the classroom — and reflects our commitment to forming sustainable partnerships, whether local or global.

By engaging deeply and intentionally with our publics, Southwestern and the world we live in are bolstered and enriched.

For more, see some of the organizational leaders in the field like the National Humanities Alliance, and Imagining America. As well a university leaders, such as Georgetown University, Rutgers University, the University of Washington’s Simpson Center, and the University of Illinois.