art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

case authors
Julie F. Simpson,
Carmel Avegnon Sanders,
and Ann Wiens
highlights from teaching practicum,
a service-learning course offered in
columbia college chicago’s theater
department in partnership with
association house of chicago and
freestreet programs.
Reaping the Benefits of
Partnerships Built on Trust
Achieving Mutual Goals in a Three-Way
Collaborative Project in Chicago
Center for Community Arts Partnerships, Columbia College Chicago
i. cap overview
case study: columbia college chicago 31
The largest arts and media college in the country, Columbia College
Chicago is a distinctly urban institution. Its mission mandates active
involvement with its urban community, and students are expected to
leave the confines of the studio and actively explore how their artistic
practice might fit into society. The college considers civic engagement
an integral element of its approach to higher education: the city is the
classroom, and students not only contribute to their community, they
also derive essential elements of their education through connections
made outside institutional walls.
In 1998, Columbia College Chicago established the Center for
Community Arts Partnerships (ccap)— to formalize its commitment to
college/community partnership-building and provide a framework
through which this process might take place. With significant early
support from the Wallace Foundation, The Council of Independent
Colleges, and The Chicago Community Trust, ccap embarked on a
process designed to build effective, sustainable, arts-based partnerships
between the college and the communities of which it is a part.
This process began with ccap’s first major initiative, the Urban
Missions Program, which became the foundation on which ccap’s
partnership-building approach has been built. Traditionally, college/
community relationships have taken the form of outreach or community
service, rather than true partnership in which knowledge flows both ways.
Higher education institutions are often viewed suspiciously by communitybased
organizations as “800-pound gorillas,” vastly outweighing their
collaborators in terms of financial resources and, therefore, power.
ccap’s Urban Missions Program was deliberately structured to avoid
such inequities. Based on the recognition that the community has much
to offer the college in terms of knowledge and expertise, Urban Missions
was conceived as a partnership process for the creation of communitybased,
youth arts programming that is collaboratively conceived, mutually
beneficial, and responsive to its particular community setting.