UMBC students learn hopeful civics lessons from empowering experiences

The Peace Mobile, operated by the Baltimore Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. Photo by Bryan P. Sears.

The civics lessons implicit in news coverage and social media posts relating to the 2024 election, the conflict in Israel and Gaza, crime and safety, and other pressing issues are clear. They suggest that the role of a good citizen is to choose sides and speak out, knowing that an election might empower one’s enemies, and that silence might mean complicity. The civic environment driven by our feeds is full of fury and alarm.

Yet it is helpful to remember that there can be more to civic life than raised voices. If we are to build a thriving democratic society, it is especially important for young people to discover that in addition to voting and speaking out, they can work across differences in perspectives and roles to make meaningful changes in their communities.

One of the maxims that guide the work of the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Center for Democracy and Civic Life is, “We Build the World We Know,” meaning that if people are going to learn to change the world for the better, they need to experience a taste of that better world to spark their imagination and guide their choices. The center works with UMBC students to establish that experience: the authentic connections, mutual power, and individual and collective agency achieved in the process of promoting and enacting change on campus and beyond.

UMBC students vote in large numbers and advocate for justice through protest, but they also build the campus community together in myriad other ways, internalizing an empowering civic ethos cultivated over decades.

The legacies of student initiatives, pursued in partnership with university staff and faculty members, are evident both on UMBC’s campus and in the surrounding neighborhoods. They include programs, changes to physical spaces, including the establishment of UMBC’s community garden; resources, such as Retriever Essentials, the campus initiative addressing food insecurity among students, faculty, and staff; and the Stay Black and Gold emergency fund, established to support students facing short-term financial challenges.

In part because of these legacies and the culture they have nurtured, relations between student leaders and university administrators generally have been warm and respectful. Officers in the Student Government Association, which has been both a driver and beneficiary of UMBC’s civic ethos, know from direct experience that it is often possible to bring about changes simply by having conversations. Since arriving at UMBC in 2022, President Valerie Sheares Ashby has been especially attentive to students’ experiences. Both President Sheares Ashby and leaders in the Division of Student Affairs hold regular office hours open to all students and work collaboratively with student leaders to address emerging issues.

UMBC’s curricular and co-curricular learning spaces are seeded with opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue about community issues across all the usual dividing lines, including the ones that usually separate people with formal authority from other stakeholders. These dialogues, often guided by trained student facilitators, teach everyone involved important lessons about complexity, nuance and the humanity of every participant. They also help to solidify a sense of UMBC – and, by extension, every other community in which participants may spend time – as open to transformation by thoughtful people willing to work together.

Graduates who have participated in these conversations and initiatives often leave UMBC with a strong sense of civic agency, which they carry with them into their careers and other aspects of their lives. UMBC graduates now lead community engagement centers at Towson University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and Howard Community College, as well as countless organizations and initiatives in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors, guided by commitments to inclusion and collaboration, and by the recognition that real change is possible.

A generation of young Americans is coming into political awareness in a time of deep social divisions and looming threats. Without meaningful experiences of agency and connection, members of this generation are in danger of accepting a vision of a world perpetually in conflict, in which systemic injustices remain unaddressed and divisions only grow deeper. The hope manifesting at UMBC is that by having formative experiences in which students work across differences to contribute meaningfully to changes in the communities they inhabit, students will develop clarity and confidence that a better world is possible, along with crucial insights about how to build it.

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