Speakers

2014 Guest Speakers

Harry Boyte

 

Founder of Public Achievement, a theory-based practice of citizens organizing to do public work for the common good that is used in schools, universities, and communities across the United States and in more than a dozen countries. Boyte has been an architect of a “public work” approach to civic engagement and democracy promotion, a conceptual framework on citizenship that has gained world-wide recognition for its theoretical innovations and its practical effectiveness.

Boyte has worked with a variety of partners in Minnesota and is a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He has worked nationally, and internationally on community development, citizenship education, and civic renewal. Currently, Boyte is head of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College. He also serves on the board of Imagining America, a consortium of colleges and universities whose mission is to strengthen the public role and democratic purposes of the humanities, arts, and design. For several months each year, Boyte resides in South Africa, where he is working with colleagues to analyze models of citizen democracy across Africa. Working with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, he co-directed Lessons from the Field, an in-depth look at what has happened to South African democracy since the election of President Nelson Mandela in 1994 and he was a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa.

Boyte served as national coordinator of the New Citizenship (1993 to 1995), a broad nonpartisan effort to bridge the citizen-government gap. He presented New Citizenship findings to President Clinton, Vice President Gore and other administration leaders at a 1995 Camp David Seminar on the future of democracy; a presentation which helped to shape Clinton’s “New Covenant” State of the Union that year. Boyte has also served as a senior advisor to the National Commission on Civic Renewal, and as national associate of the Kettering Foundation. He has worked with a variety of foundations, nonprofit, educational, neighborhood and citizen organizations concerned with community development, citizenship education, and civic renewal. In the 1960s, Boyte worked for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a field secretary with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the southern civil rights movement.

Boyte is author or co-author of a number of books including: The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008), Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work, with Nan Kari (Temple University Press, 1996), Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, with Sara M. Evans (Harper Row, 1986; University of Chicago, 1992)

His writings have appeared in over 70 publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, Christian Science Monitor, Democracy, Policy Review, Dissent, and PS: Political Science and Politics. His political commentary has appeared on CBS Morning and Evening News and National Public Radio.

Boyte earned a doctorate degree in political and social thought from the Union Institute.

Lorraine McIlrath

Since 2004 Lorraine McIlrath has coordinated the Community Knowledge Initiative (CKI) at the National University of Ireland Galway. There she is responsible for developing and supporting civic engagement activities across the university, with the CKI team, including service learning and student volunteering.  She is Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-Founder of Campus Engage, a national Irish network to support civic engagement within higher education in Ireland (http://www.campusengage.ie).  Since 2010, she has been a member partner in a nine university EU Tempus Funded Project to support the introduction of service learning to five universities in Jordan and Lebanon entitled the Tawasol Project (http://www.tawasol.org)

She spent the previous ten years in Northern Ireland where she pursued postgraduate studies exploring the role of the media in contested societies.  After which she became a Lecturer at the University of Ulster’s UNESCO Centre.  Primarily she taught courses on the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process which underpinned service learning. In addition, she was worked on the development of the Northern Ireland curricula framework for ‘Local and Global Citizenship’ in partnership with the Citizenship Foundation, UNESCO Centre and CCEA and published a ‘Resource Directory’ (2002) for all schools in Northern Ireland.

She has consulted for the British Council in Russia – supporting the development of the College for Multicultural Education in Sochi on the Black Sea – and the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA) in the US – as Programme Director in Northern Ireland.   She has offered workshops, seminars and keynote addresses on the broad area of civic engagement and the role of higher education within society nationally in Ireland and beyond in Australia, the Middle East, US and UK.

Lorraine has published on the broad theme of civic engagement and higher education in books and journals and is coeditor of the recently published Mapping Civic Engagement within Higher Education in Ireland [All Ireland Society for Higher Education (AISHE) and Campus Engage 2009] and codirected and coauthored a national survey of civic engagement within higher education in Ireland (Campus Engage 2011). Her most recent book entitled Civic Engagement and Higher Education – Comparative Perspectives was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.  She is currently working on co-edited publication on community engaged research and scholarship also due t be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.  She is peer reviewer on a number of higher education journals and reviews a number of university civic engagement awards including the MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship.

Julie Hatcher

Dr. Julie A. Hatcher is the Executive Director of the Center for Service and Learning and Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She previously served as the first Director of Undergraduate Programs in IUPUI’s School of Philanthropy, the first degree program of its kind in the nation. Her research and scholarship focuses on civic learning outcomes in higher education, philanthropic motivations of professionals, the philosophy of John Dewey, and the role of higher education in civil society.

Dr. Hatcher has published significantly throughout her career. She collaborates on national projects such as the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement and the Association of American Colleges and Universities rubric-development team for civic engagement. Dr. Hatcher routinely consults with faculty and academic leaders on designing philanthropic studies curricula and integrating service into academic study, and she enjoys collaborating on local and international projects to advance the public purposes of higher education.