Swearer Center for Public Service
Mission, Values and Committments
Our Mission
The Swearer Center is a community of scholars, students, practitioners and community members who works together to build on community strengths and address community challenges. Our work engages all as co-learners, co-teachers, co-actors and co-creators of knowledge and action. Through the creative capacities of our students, staff, faculty and community partners we explore, build and implement collaborative and strategic projects, programs and initiatives. Our work yields transformative learning, and positive sustainable change, through collective action.
Our Values
We strive to work towards social justice by recognizing community agency, developing civic responsibility, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, and practicing anti-racism guided by the following values.
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| Collaboration | We work together and prioritize participatory processes in our planning, decision-making, and assessment to advance shared goals. |
| Critical Reflection | We inquire, listen, and learn to deepen our understanding of ourselves, our contexts, and our work. |
| Change | We focus on continuous improvement in pursuit of sustainable results, redressing systemic inequities to foster a socially just future. |
| Care | We recognize our interdependence and nurture relationships to promote our collective well-being through inclusivity, kindness, and fun. |
Our Commitments
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Whose knowledge is recognized and honored? Whose time and priorities matter? Whose pressures, success and failure, opportunities and constraints drive decisions? These questions are core to university-community engagement. They are about fairness and mattering, respect and inclusion, empathy and agency and they are at the heart of Swearer Center’s work.
The Swearer Center catalyzes student learning and commitment to social responsibility, it supports faculty inquiry and scholarly excellence, and it invests in partnerships, initiatives, and programs that contextualize and integrate Brown within the broader local community, centering communities as places of rich and complex history, strengths and assets, and deep expertise. Our work is premised on decentering ourselves and the university, engaging, respecting, and heeding community expertise, perspectives, and priorities in our decision-making, and doing all we can to ensure a mutuality of benefit when Brown engages with communities.
Community Engagement
Making a positive impact locally has long been woven into the fabric of Brown’s mission and commitment to serve the community, the nation and the world. Brown University is deeply committed to working with community partners to positively impact Providence and Rhode Island. Our engagement is not limited to this place. The university’s mission is “to serve the community, the nation and the world,” and faculty, staff, students and alumni have deep connections in many places.
At the same time, Brown is anchored here. The university’s commitment is to ethical principles and effective engagement practices that ultimately contribute to more equitable, healthy and sustainable communities across our state and beyond.
Brown’s Commitment to Community Engagement
By aligning university practices with community benefit, the university's Community Engagement Agenda: A Call to Partnership and Action will help advance and amplify this work. It offers our entire community an opportunity to work with local communities by converting shared interests into meaningful and enduring outcomes.
Our History and Founding
Learn more about the history and founding of the Swearer Center.