Community-Based Learning will bring together a panel of community leaders and authors of Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices, to discuss the transformative potential of critical community collaboration.

Education is inherently political, but to support an anti-racist classroom requires careful cultivation. Inviting pathways to liberation is to recognize each individual's personal histories; it is to welcome diverse forms of knowledge, and ways of knowing. Yet, the white supremacy embedded in academia has hindered authentic community-based connection. Through its exploitative execution, traditional community service has left a legacy of distrust, and reproduced human hierarchy. How can we heal this wound, and reframe community-based work?

Panelists will reflect on how to compassionately build these relationships through a recollection of their experiences in community work.

This session will include a "real time" MHC capstone project alongside their community partner that cements the importance of community-based learning and research engagement in higher education. It has birthed a third space where academic research, lived experience, and community engagement produce a body of work thathonors academia and lived experience as co-producers of scholarly work.