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        Civic Action Week

October 16 - October 21, 2023

University of Pittsburgh Civic Action Week is a campus-wide event for students, faculty, staff, and the broader community to educate, engage, and encourage collective responses to pressing social issues. This year's Civic Action Week theme is

Rewriting our Future: Activism Through Storytelling

Oral and written traditions allow us to look back and honor the past across cultures and identities as well as look forward to forge new trails. Those same traditions bring together communities to unite around today’s demands for social change and hopes for the future.  

Join us in a week of collaborative learning opportunities, volunteerism, and storytelling centered on those that have taken action to create a more equitable society. Together, Pitt students, faculty, staff, and community leaders will inspire and learn from the various generations of activists and cultural historians that hold our shared stories. 

 

Throughout this week, each opportunity that you participate in will aid in your civic development. Using the Pathways for Public Service and Civic Engagement, these opportunities will fall into one or more of the six areas:

 

Community Engaged Learning and ResearchConnecting coursework and academic research to community-identified concerns to enrich knowledge and inform action on social issues.
Community Organizing and Activism: Involving, educating, and mobilizing individual or collective action to influence or persuade others.
Direct Service: Working to address the immediate needs of individuals or a community, often involving contact with the people or places being served.
Philanthropy: Donating or using private funds or charitable contributions from individuals or institutions to contribute to the public good.

Policy and Governance: Participating in political processes, policymaking, and public governance.

Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility: Using ethical business or private sector approaches to create or expand market-oriented responses to social or environmental problems.

 


These six areas of engagement can be applicable in the following ways...

  • have local, national and international audiences and populations of interest.
  • are imbedded in all careers in the public, private and independent sectors, and not limited to any segment of the economy.
  • require different but interconnected actions: education through community dialogue, direct provision of goods or services, statements and actions that support social justice and address inequities, creation of new knowledge, and development of resources that support the work.
  • are problem based, not discipline bound.
  • result in measurable community impact.

 

    

 

For more information on this week, email serves@pitt.edu.

 

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