This article presents a profile of the community writing and performance project Write Your Roots, organized by the author, which was disrupted by the impact of COVID-19 in early 2020. The project narrative is framed by the theoretical basis for the project, rooted in the concept of "making space," which borrows from Michel de Certeau's…

This profile features the authors' shared work to co-create both a community literacy project, Stories from the Flood, and the undergraduate community-based learning courses that supported the effort. Stories from the Flood works to assist community members in southwestern Wisconsin to share their flood experiences, aiming to support community…

In this article, Paula Mathieu shares a few lessons about what she now sees as the contemplative call of community writing, which is at once personal, political, historical, and pedagogical. If people are going to do community-based work ethically and, mindful of past and present racial and other political wounds, they need to do their work…

The Drake Community Press is a collaborative publishing project involving students and faculty from a variety of disciplines along with a non-profit community partner with a compelling story to share. Over two years and eight production phases, campus and community participants create the content, format, design, promotion, and distribution plan…

In this article, the authors chart ongoing efforts in the University of Louisville Writing Center to develop a partnership model grounded in "writing center values." A full description of what might constitute writing center values could include in-depth attention to the individual writer and all the varied intersectional contexts with…

During a sabbatical semester in Fall 2018, "Community Literacy Journal (CLJ)" co-editor Paul Feigenbaum volunteered as a "Scholar-in-Residence" at Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a nonprofit established in 1994 that is based in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Guided by its mission "to create hope out of…

Influenced by ecological theories of writing, the author proposes a new model for writing curriculum design and community-based projects. The article provides a project of the Writing Initiative for Service and Engagement at the University of Colorado Boulder as an example of programmatic engagement with a community issue using an ecological…

This paper considers the practical and theoretical methodologies of the community literacy project, "The Recipe of Me," conducted with homeless youth in Orlando, Florida. In this project, youth created personal, mediatized narratives in a storytelling residency aimed at examining the role of digital storytelling in fostering confidence,…

Sustainability in community engagement projects depends on careful attention to the ways we navigate complex, often challenging relationships with our partners, our students, agencies, and the institutions in which we occupy multiple, sometimes competing roles. This article considers the difficulty inherent in developing and maintaining…

This is a snapshot of a service learning course founded on narrative medicine, a clinical practice designed to replace impersonal care with empathic listening. By utilizing poetry therapy techniques among nursing home populations, a program called "HPU LifeLines" promotes a community literacy of illness and provides psychological and…

This article highlights Education/Connection/Action (ECA), a locally developed community pedagogy deployed at a youth activism summer camp that served as a site for a community/academic teaching and research collaboration. Youth considered connections between a set of issues, including a local ban on Ethnic Studies, the School-to-Prison Pipeline,…

This essay presents perspectives on the range of potential reciprocity in literacy research and service learning, focusing attention on opportunities for individualized and institutional reciprocation, as observed by Takayoshi and Powell (2003). Researchers and students involved in community-based research or service programs have several…

As the author does his job, trying to sponsor and support reading and writing practices that will ideally enrich lives and communities throughout Arkansas, he is always tempted to rewrite the American Declaration of Independence so that its second paragraph begins this way: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created…

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and…

Youth perspectives are routinely absent from research and policy initiatives. This article presents a project that infuses youth participation, training and mentorship into the research process and teaches youth how to become policy advocates. Empower Latino Youth (ELAYO) studies the individual and systemic factors impacting sexuality and…