Like many small towns in the Eastern Cape, South Africa and the world, Grahamstown faces an array of socio-economic challenges like poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, providing adequate health care, and the desperate need for universal access to the kind of skills transfer and quality education that gives young people real choices when finishing school.
Like many small towns in the Eastern Cape, South Africa and the world, Grahamstown faces an array of socio-economic challenges like poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, providing adequate health care, and the desperate need for universal access to the kind of skills transfer and quality education that gives young people real choices when finishing school.
At the same time, within this difficult context for many, there is an indomitable spirit that will not give up – a will to grow, evolve, learn, experience and accomplish. It’s a spirit that provides very fertile ground for those who want to sow the seeds of positive change and watch them bloom. Indeed, for those sowing the seeds, Grahamstown is a particularly perfect context, because of its size – a manageable environment where the difference being made can be both immediate and direct. Couple this with the inner drive of many in the community to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”, and you have a place where notions of community engagement are rapidly moving away from an outdated ‘rescue culture’, into a mindset where community structures can meaningfully participate as equals with those working with them to bring about brilliant change.
For a university like Rhodes, which forms a dynamic part of the Grahamstown community, this evolved community engagement mindset allows for the university and community structures to meaningfully work together to practically rework academic theory, implement relevant research findings, and to generate and disseminate knowledge that reaps tangible, mutually beneficial results.
At Rhodes, community engagement now stands alongside the other core pillars of the university of teaching and learning; and as Diana Hornby, the director of community engagement at Rhodes will tell you, community engagement “occupies a more strategic role of enhancing scholarship, development, social cohesion and social transformation.”
This is certainly not about a university reaching out to do good deeds, but about a community recognising that its university has skills and knowledge to offer, while for the university, as Hornby described it, “community engagement creates a space where students can apply what they learn – growing holistically and being prepared for life, beyond just a job, so they can play a crucial role in creating a gentler future”. To achieve this, community engagement as part of student life is split into two key initiatives – service learning and volunteer programmes.
Service learning pragmatically integrates community engagement into the curriculum – with current credit-bearing initiatives ranging from Pharmacy students working with local clinics to provide support to patients taking chronic medication – visiting and coaching them in their homes, while conducting vital chronic medication usage research – to Economics students teaching financial literacy at schools, Journalism and Media Studies students creating learner education and youth-related programming for Radio Grahamstown; and many, many others.
At the same time, the university’s volunteer programmes involve hundreds of students and university societies, providing professional services based on needs identified by the community itself – from early childhood education, to water resource management, animal care and social upliftment – often driven and financially resourced by the students themselves, who are offered dynamic support, monitoring and supervision by the university.
Ultimately, what is fundamental to all these initiatives is that both the students and the community learn, grow and benefit as equal co-participants – giving the community access to the knowledge and skills needed to rise up and claim its destiny, while providing students with the practical experience that gives them a personal advantage when eventually seek employment.
