Batool Behnam, Graduate Assistant with Swearer Center’s community partnership team and current master's student at Brown’s School of Public Health, is concentrating on Global Health and graduating this Spring 2024. Through research, teaching and community services, Behnam’s dream is to reduce inequalities among communities.

Paris Dior ‘25, a Social Innovation Fellow at the Swearer Center, is also pursuing the Nelson Center’s Entrepreneurship Certificate while concentrating in International and Public Affairs.

From an extremely strong pool of nominees, a committee representing student, staff, faculty and community partner perspectives selected Scott AnderBois and Myles Lennon as the 2024 recipients of the Howard R. Swearer Engaged Faculty Awards.

Maya Laur ’24, Swearer Center Storyteller and Community-Based Learning and Research (CBLR) Fellow, is also pursuing the Engaged Scholarship Certificate as a Modern Culture and Media Studies concentrates. Laur shares her academic and personal experience engaging through the Swearer Center, reflecting on opportunities that allowed her to put her studies of multidisciplinary art forms into practice for social good.

Maya Laur '24 shares creative pieces on local organization, 134 Collaborative

In 2022, Brown University “established an official land acknowledgment that recognizes and honors its location within the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett Indian Tribe” as one of the “five commitments Brown is making to build understanding of the relationship between its campus community, Indigenous peoples of the region and the land on which Brown is situated.”

Founded in 2017 in cooperation with the Moses Brown School, the SquashBusters Providence chapter is part of a national community-based organization that introduces squash to young people in urban public schools.

This month is the last in a series of spotlights on the value of courses connecting CBLR with other curricular programs: COEX, RPP and WRIT

This month, our partners both on and off-campus have highlighted ways to engage with local communities aimed at celebrating, empowering and connecting the voices of Black community members all year round.

Each year, the Swearer Center's Community Advisory Board (CAB) invites individuals and groups in Rhode Island to submit nominations (including self-nominations) for three awards recognizing organizational work. The CAB Awards aim to highlight and support the work of agencies in the public and social sectors that are moving the needle in key areas.

Swearer Center Laidlaw Scholar, Marisol Jimenez '25, has connected her interest in community engagement, an integral part of her high school experience, with her academic pursuits here at Brown.

This month’s spotlight focuses on public sociology and community engagement, with excerpts from Dr. Prudence Carter’s ASA presidential speech and reflections from two former Swearer Center graduate proctors.

Jay Philbrick ’24.5, is a Bonner Community Fellow, Laidlaw Scholar and Swearer Center Student Advisory Committee member. An Applied Mathematics-Economics and Computer Science concentrator, he is interested in using economic research and software development for social change.

The Swearer Center is pleased to announce the inaugural recipients of the Royce Graduate Student Research Awards.

The Swearer Center congratulates the graduates of our first cohort from the Engaged Scholarship Certificate (ESC) program.

Riley Stevenson ’26, has connected her interest in Environmental Studies and International and Public Affairs on campus with community action and activism in Providence through the Bonner Community Fellowship.

Luke Hurton '24, a current Royce Fellow, came to Brown intending to study Psychology and soon declared his concentration in Anthropology as well.

Courses that engage students in collaborative, community-engaged research projects provide meaningful learning experiences for students, value to nonprofit or government partners, and rewarding opportunities for instructors to connect their teaching, research, and broader interests/impact.

Tania D. Mitchell, a leading researcher in critical and engaged pedagogies in higher education, argues that “core tenets of intersectionality can be employed to inform and create a community engagement practice that addresses the interconnected structures of inequality in order to affect meaningful change.” (Mitchell 2017, 35)

Bisola Folarin '26 is a member of the 2026 cohort of the Bonner Community Fellowship (BCF).

When Nijpawi Gordon '25 was in high school, she volunteered at a children’s hospital in Thailand. However, it was not until Gordon came to Brown that she realized she wanted to pursue her interest in pediatrics.

Rishika Kartik ’26, a current Royce Fellow with the Swearer Center, has combined her interest in accessibility and art through her Fellowship project.

Sociology concentrator Riley Schornak '24 discusses her experience pursuing an Engaged Scholarship Certificate (ESC) on the intersections between health and the environment from a social sciences perspective.

Urban Studies concentrator Ayan Rahman ‘24 shares his experience studying social and environmental issues induced by climate change