We want to thank everyone who came out to the Midwest Campus Compact Conference to make it a great success! We were happy to have fantastic weather to make the always beautiful Loyola campus in Chicago all the more beautiful.

Doing Democracy

Throughout the two-day conference, we discussed new strategies and tools to increase the impact of asset-based community development programs in higher education. The Midwest Campus Compact Conference offered us the space to explore how to better serve our communities by reaching out and finding untapped assets. Innovative students, staff, faculty and other civic-minded leaders led conversations about their experiences as proponents of civic action through asset-based approaches.

Recounting these experiences brought fresh insights about community development to the fore and informed us all about new technologies available to achieve meaningful community dialogue and collaboration. The knowledge that we shared with one another at the Midwest Campus Compact Conference will help us empower the collective voices of our communities in order to build a better democracy.

If you would like to view the topics of our Breakout Sessions click here. 

A Platform to Share and Advance

Campus Compact organizations are all about sharing knowledge, and in that the Midwest Campus Compact Conference was a complete success. Bringing civic-minded individuals together that might not otherwise be in communication is important to us. We were excited to introduce the Chicago-based restorative justice organization, Circles and Ciphers, to conference attendees. Circles and Ciphers taps into art as a community asset and uses hip-hop to bring productive healing to the justice system.

We also hosted more than a dozen 2017 Newman Civic Fellows from all across the Midwest. Each of these students were nominated by their institution’s president as examples of the bright future of civic engagement in the United States. We were lucky enough to close out the conference with a meaningful story-telling session over lunch, in which each Newman Civic Fellow spoke to a small group of attendees and answered questions about their take on civic-action and their vision for civic engagement’s future in higher education.

A Reminder to Partake in Community

We were pleased to have Byron P. White as our keynote speaker. His background as a journalist turned community activist has given him unique insights about the way community leaders go about communicating the change they seek. His message emphasized the importance of reaching out into communities with meaningful interaction to discover what goals they have and how they want to achieve them.

Mr. White stressed that community organizations can’t expect to plan successful outreach programs from afar. Instead they have to do real community research and immerse themselves in their work.

Mr. White also took part in a live recording of the Campus Compact Podcast which will be available soon.

See You in 2018

We want to thank everyone once again for coming out to #MCCC2017. We hope to see you at our National Conference, which is set for March 25-28, 2018 in Indianapolis. The topic will be True Stories of Engagement: Higher Education for Democracy, and proposals are due by June 30th.