Emory Fellow Focuses on Community Building

When Anna Shapiro decided to attend she had no inkling that her Emory experience would land her in Chicago’s notorious Englewood neighborhood.

But there she was, visiting a community garden in the impoverished urban enclave as part of Emory’s Community Building and Social Change Fellowship earlier this summer. 

“Here we were standing with a ton of vegetables,” she said.  “Then you look across the street and there’s a vacant lot and a highway.” 

The fellowship is run by Emory’s Office of University-Community Partnerships.  It couples two semesters of intensive community building coursework with 12 weeks of related field experience over the summer. 

The program was recently recognized as one of 51 “bold ideas and brilliant urbanites who are helping to build the cities of America’s future” by the business magazine Fast Company.  And when Emory was named to the 2010 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, a university press release touted the initiative as a primary example of the school’s award-winning commitment to service.  

Shapiro said that the Community Building Fellowship is unique for its combination of traditional learning and action. 

“This program has a nice trajectory from theory to actual practice in the course of a year,” she said.  “It’s really rewarding to do a project that someone is actually going to use.” 

Shapiro is working with Refugee Family Services and Global Growers to develop urban agriculture programming for Clarkston refugees this summer to fulfill the field component of the program. 

By the end of the summer she and the other three fellows working in Clarkston hope to develop a comprehensive map of Dekalb County green space available to be farmed for Refugee Family Services.  They are also working to build support for a Clarkston Farmers Market, and have planned a public event in July at the Clarkston Community Center to promote the effort. 

Shapiro indicated that many refugees in Clarkston, whose homelands range from Bhutan to Afghanistan, lack marketable skills aside from farming.  Providing them with the ability to start farms in their own neighborhoods could therefore have a measurable impact on their lives, she said. 

“To get them to practice urban farming would really improve their quality of life,” Shapiro said.

Such efforts to address the unique needs of area communities are what make the fellowship so effective, said the program’s founder, Dr. Michael Rich, in a recent edition of the Emory Report. 

“(The Community Building Fellowship) provides a tremendous capacity-building opportunity for neighborhoods, and is a phenomenal educational experience for our students,” he said. 

Shapiro and her peers will complete this year’s program on August 5th, and the next class of fellows will begin their coursework at the start of Emory’s fall semester.