Moments to Inspire Movement: Three Seminal Moments in Community Engagement

This article comprises edited remarks delivered on November 17, 2015, during the keynote luncheon panel at the 2015 IARSLCE Conference in Boston, MA. In these remarks, the author identifies three “seminal” moments in the field of community engagement: critical literature, the monetization of service hours, and two prominent “calls to action” in 2012, one from the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (2012) and the other from the U.S. Department of Education. Reflecting on these three seminal moments, the author advocates for a community engagement practice that leverages the resources and capacity of institutions, their stakeholders, and communities in actual work that contests power to change the situations and circumstances that perpetuate inequality