Looking Back

By Nick Owchar

As a young teen, Annie Voss ’26 knew her community was in trouble.

Growing up in Athens, Ohio, a rural town in the heart of Appalachia, the now 21-year-old environmental analysis major saw suffering in her community. The region’s collapsed coal industry not only hurt the local economy and environment, it created a cycle of despair and devastating opioid addiction that continues today.

What could a high schooler do about it? Voss decided to get involved.

She joined a foundation that funded collaborations between her town’s university and community organizations to address crushing economic issues and help people find relief. The work gave her a vision of how such partnerships can effectively bring about change.

“The CEC is one of the big ways, besides CASA Pitzer, that you can really get involved with a project directly touching lives outside of Pitzer and the 5Cs.”
— Annie Voss ’26

After her arrival at Pitzer, Voss wanted to continue this kind of work. She sought out the Community Engagement Center (CEC), where she became involved in engagement, fundraising, and philanthropic activities similar to what she was doing in Appalachia. 

“The CEC is one of the big ways, besides CASA Pitzer, that you can really get involved with a project directly touching lives outside of Pitzer and the 5Cs,” she said. “I’m a real advocate for our CEC. It is an amazing resource. I wish more students were aware of just how many opportunities are available to them.”
 

As Voss suggested, the CEC is an important source of community engagement at Pitzer, but it isn’t the only one. The CEC belongs to a thriving activist landscape as rich and diverse as the plant species of The Outback. 

In addition to the CEC, students work with Critical Action & Social Advocacy (CASA) Pitzer, the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability (Voss is there now as a Conservancy Fellow), the Justice Education Initiative, the Institute for Global/Local Action & Study, The People’s Pitzer, the Melvin L. Oliver Racial Justice Initiative, and cross-departmental collaborations like the Storyteller’s Festival and the Adelanto Water Justice Coalition, to name a few.

But that hasn’t always been the case.

A quarter-century ago, the community engagement scene for Pitzer—and U.S. higher education—was starkly different. 

“What everyone was doing to serve surrounding community organizations didn’t come close to what these organizations really needed,” said Lourdes Argüelles, a former Pitzer faculty member who was one of the campus voices calling for a new model of engagement.

True to its innovating nature, Pitzer pivoted in the 1990s toward a new community engagement focus. As CEC and CASA Pitzer recently celebrated their 25th anniversaries, Participant looks back at how that pivot resulted in the creation of these two programs. 

It was a hard-fought effort that has resulted in a vibrant community engagement culture that is helping many like Voss to produce real, meaningful impact.

Parachutes and Submarines

In the 1990s, the College’s community engagement outreach was in desperate need of a change. It was true for most schools across the nation. Community engagement programs in higher education at the time went by another name—“service learning.” 

It was a very superficial approach. 

“We decided to start something different so that students would work closely with grassroots groups and get more immersed. We wanted to create more of a commitment in them.”
— Lourdes Argüelles

Here’s how it worked: A student would be placed by an agency in a community organization. The student would spend a semester learning about the organization, earn credit, and leave when the semester was over. It was a very one-sided model that focused only on what the student received. Pitzer professors Alan Jones and Argüelles were among the first to critique it. They called for a new approach grounded in reciprocity. Students shouldn’t only benefit; organizations should, too.

“Alan and I were co-teaching a course on community psychology, and we were pretty unhappy about this whole thing,” she said. “Students would parachute into an organization and then leave and call this their ‘community work.’ We decided to start something different so that students would work closely with grassroots groups and get more immersed. We wanted to create more of a commitment in them. That approach was pretty unknown at the time.”
 

One reason Argüelles and Jones were dissatisfied with service-learning programs had to do with geography. Both lived in working-class areas of the Inland Empire, beyond the idyllic student experience of college life in what many call “the Claremont bubble.” They wanted students to gain a better understanding of how much people in surrounding communities struggled and worried about money, discrimination, and how to care for their families in times of sociopolitical precarity. They also wanted students to learn from and recognize the incredible assets of knowledge and resilience existing in these communities. You couldn’t do that if you stayed inside the bubble. 

“Geography really matters,” said Jones, an emeritus professor of neuroscience who later became Pitzer’s dean of faculty and retired from Pitzer in 2011. “We wanted students to really understand the hard knocks going on in many communities around us. You can’t do that with a parachute program. You need a deeper approach. I guess you could say we wanted to replace the parachute with a submarine. We weren’t quite sure what the new approach was going to look like, but we knew it had to be something different.”

The Lessons of Study Abroad

That “something different” started in the mid-1990s as a pitch to Ontario city officials. 

The proposal’s key strategies included setting up internships that would place Pitzer students in public schools, youth centers, community mental health centers, and city offices. It also mapped out how these firsthand experiences would be connected with interdisciplinary academic courses that provided a theoretical framework about urban issues. When the program first started, these courses weren’t taught at Pitzer but in the basement of the Ontario Public Library. The courses were taught by Argüelles, Jones, and other Pitzer faculty on a voluntary basis.

It was a good beginning, but far from what Argüelles, Jones, and a handful of faculty, staff, and students wanted. 

A major influence on the new program was the College’s successful study abroad programs in Nepal and elsewhere around the globe. Why not apply lessons from those programs closer to home, especially since immigrants from around the world were settling in the Inland Empire, redefining its demographics and navigating new challenges brought to bear upon the area?

Ontario’s proximity to Pitzer, its eagerness to have a Claremont Colleges presence in the community, and the city’s diversity made it a natural choice for testing this program. Jones described Ontario as a “wonderful lab for urban studies.”
 

By the late 1990s, this experiment in a new kind of service-learning model took shape as the Pitzer in Ontario External Studies program—Pitzer in Ontario (PIO), for short—which is known today as CASA Pitzer. When it started in 1997, the program enrolled just 10 students, eight of whom were part time: That meant that they did everything in the program except live in apartments or with host families in Ontario, which was central to the program’s early immersive focus (home-stay requirements ended in 2004). With no budget for a support staff of its own, the program relied heavily on the study abroad team at the time, especially Carol Brandt, Mike Donahue, and Jamie Francis.

The following year, in 1998, the College leased a foreclosed home—and later purchased it—in a residential neighborhood near downtown Ontario on H Street. It served as PIO’s central hub: Students attended classes there, put on seminars, and conducted meetings and research. Visiting Pitzer lecturers stayed there, and so did the program’s early directors, including Jones, Doug Anderson, Juan De Lara ’96, and Marie Sandy.

Pitzer students who wanted to learn a language were placed with local families who spoke that language. Students returning from a semester abroad could also live with a family from the country where they studied and learn more about their immigration experiences. Students lived, worked, and studied in Ontario, forgoing classes on the Pitzer campus.
 

The program’s immersive nature wasn’t just limited to the internship and living with a host family. Students also attended community meetings and toured Ontario, Los Angeles, and Tijuana, where they visited maquiladoras (factories) and barrios as part of a two-day U.S.-Mexico border trip that ran for many years but was halted in 2011 due to rising violence at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Early guest lecturers included peace activist and former gang member Dewayne Holmes, an architect of the 1992 Watts gang truce, who led workshops on conflict resolution. Students also learned from Alan Wapner and Debra Porada, two members of the Ontario City Council, about how municipal governments work. Students kept diaries, wrote fiction inspired by their experiences, and analyzed their responses to daily life. 

In their efforts to avoid a program that created “community engagement tourists,” Argüelles and Jones said it was important to honor surrounding working-class communities and treat them as “centers of learning”—not victims of injustice incapable of finding solutions on their own. 

“These communities are full of people with so much experience and knowledge,” Argüelles said. “I refer to them as centers of learning, but what I think we should really call them is ‘centers of wisdom.’ That’s what they truly are. We wanted to tap into that wisdom in a way that was respectful—and that showed the people helping us at the grassroots level were appreciated and compensated, too.”

Complementary Dynamics

Pitzer in Ontario was a winning idea, but there was still a problem. 

One of the program’s limitations, Jones noted, had to do with the old issue of parachuting. Even if students decided to get involved for more than a single semester, their involvement was still limited by their graduation—and sometimes that meant leaving an organization in the middle of an ongoing project.
 

To reduce the jarring instability that this might cause, Jones said the College recognized the need for a more permanent infrastructure alongside the PIO program. This second program would foster longer term relationships and stability between faculty and partner organizations. 

In 1998, the year that PIO moved to a house in Ontario, the College launched the Center for California Cultural and Social Issues (CCCSI). Designed in consultation with community partners, the CCCSI incorporated five-year plans and provided a framework for the program’s evolution. The center was made possible by two major grants, totaling $1 million, from the W.M. Keck and The James Irvine foundations. 

The grants supported faculty and student longitudinal research projects about issues facing the state, curriculum development, community-based partnerships, and fellowships. Taken together, the CCCSI and PIO struck a balance between the short- and long-term needs of community organizations and the engagement mission of the College.

Changing Faces, Names, and Missions

For Jones, any program that manages to operate for a quarter of a century or more should be considered a success. Over the course of his academic career, and especially as a dean, Jones said he watched many programs launch with great fanfare only to lose momentum and disappear.

“Some programs survive, others don’t. The funding runs out, or there might be too much turnover in the program’s staff. But that’s just the nature of what you sometimes see in academia,” he said. “You always hope that a program will take root, but that type of development takes time.”

Jones believes an important factor in the early success of PIO and CCCSI was their connection with Pitzer’s culture of social responsibility. Both programs became expressions of a core value—and that organic connection aligned with the interests of faculty and students, not to mention philanthropic organizations that provided support. 

Just as important, he added, was stable leadership—something that is still true today. In the years since he and Argüelles started the programs, other members of the Pitzer community have stepped in and stayed involved to the present day.
 

They include Professor Susan Phillips, whose 14-year tenure included overseeing both PIO and CCCSI (she left to become Conservancy director in 2018); Professor Tessa Hicks Peterson, who arrived at Pitzer in 2006 and took over as the CCCSI’s director in 2008 and later became PIO’s director in 2018; and Tricia Morgan ’08, who has worked with CCCSI for more than 16 years and now serves as its director. Hicks Peterson has worked closely with Morgan (and with Phillips, too), and the two have provided a strong sense of continuity for these programs as they’ve continued to expand and grow.

For Hicks Peterson, who was involved in civil rights and social justice nonprofit activism before joining Pitzer’s faculty, another reason for their long-term success involves flexibility. 
 

“The model that Alan, Lourdes, and others first envisioned for Pitzer’s community engagement efforts has undergone changes over the years because it had to,” she said. “You have to respond to the changing pedagogic needs of students and disciplines, as well as the shifting priorities of the local social movements, collectives, and organizations Pitzer partners with. Standing still isn’t an option.” 

In 2016, PIO sold its neighborhood location and moved to its current site in the historic Frankish building on Euclid Avenue. The move enhanced the program’s community visibility on the city’s main drag. With that move also came a name change: The new name CASA Pitzer reflected the program’s more intensive focus on critical action, advocacy, and participatory community-based research conducted by a small cohort of students each semester.
 

The CCCSI’s identity has evolved, too, thus meriting a name change to the Community Engagement Center, to a more immediate, urgent focus on sustaining the College’s many partnerships.

Today, Morgan and her CEC team support some 50 community engagement praxis classes—a term referring to semester-long internships that are a graduation requirement for every student—and some 500 students involved with these and other projects every year. She said that there are praxis classes in nearly every major. Regardless of a student’s academic discipline, that means there are ways to integrate community engagement and social justice into their learning.

On the community side, the CEC provides organizations with various services, including written translation and live interpretation services in a wide variety of languages. The CEC also hosts many events, including the annual Storytellers Film, Arts, and Poetry Festival for Pitzer, and works with more than a thousand community members each year.

“The CEC provides important relational, pedagogical, and logistical support to students, faculty, and community members,” explained Morgan. “We support Pitzer’s community engagement work, but we don’t do it alone. In addition to faculty who lead much of these efforts and have started many of the continuing programs and relationships we help support, Pitzer has many other centers of community engagement and action. We embrace a decentralized approach that stays true to what Alan and Lourdes originally envisioned; it’s a deeper, more meaningful, and impactful connection to the community that is now part of the very fabric of Pitzer.”

A Thriving Landscape

Pitzer’s culture of social responsibility, which Jones said supported a new engagement model in the 1990s, has also led to the creation of many other programs ever since.
 

For its 16th consecutive year, in fact, the College’s blossoming of engagement programs in a wide range of areas—from voter registration and civic work to developing meaningful partnerships with local day laborers, Native and Indigenous communities, and incarcerated students—was awarded with another Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement earlier this year, an honor reserved for a select number of higher education institutions that have developed winning models that merge learning with community service.

It’s an exciting affirmation of the many efforts undertaken over the past 25 years, but it’s hardly a time to rest on one’s laurels. In fact, CEC and CASA Pitzer—and their peer programs and organizations—are continuing to explore new partnership opportunities and strengthen existing ones at the institution level. They also continue to confront the challenge of finding enough steady financial resources to support this work.
 

For Voss, whose experiences with the CEC and Conservancy have deepened and enriched her understanding of community engagement, she hopes more support is forthcoming. Community engagement has defined her undergraduate experience at Pitzer and further developed those skills she first tested as a highschooler. She said it’s important that future generations of students be given a chance to benefit in the way she has.

“I can’t imagine Pitzer without its community engagement programs. Our students need this. This is what they come here for,” she said. “If we didn’t have these programs, there would be so many lost opportunities for students and community members to work together in the fight against disenfranchisement. That’s why I’m such a big advocate and supporter. I can’t say enough about it. If you want the Pitzer experience of activism and change that the College advertises as part of its brand identity, this is where you’re going to find it.”

Related story: A Deeply Personal Connection

Learn More

• The Recent History of CEC and CASA Pitzer [PDF]
• The Community Engagement Center
• CASA Pitzer
• Social Responsibility at Pitzer