The Project on Civic Reflection conducted a facilitation training workshop on January 5-6 at the offices of Campus Compact for New Hampshire in Concord, NH. The training was co-led by Elizabeth Lynn and Georgina Dodge, assistant vice provost of the Office of Minority Affairs at the Ohio State University. It was attended by 24 faculty and staff from a wide array of colleges and universities that belong to Campus Compact in New England and Pennsylvania.

Participants attended presentations, engaged in civic reflection discussions and debriefs, practiced facilitating, and shared their plans for using civic reflection at their member institutions. Among the readings used to spark discussion were Ursula K. LeGuin's story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Adam Davis's essay What We Don't Talk About When We Don't Talk About Service, and "The Boy without a Flag" by Abraham Rodriguez Jr.

"Working as both participant and facilitator gave me a sense of being on both sides of the process," one participant said. "I think that the experience will help me identify or address the challenges of getting to know [my] group." Participants exchanged many different ideas for applying what they had learned. Among the plans they shared were using civic reflection in courses on service and citizenship, with AmeriCorps and VISTA alumni, with a women's reading group in a prison, with Campus Compact boards of trustees, with faculty and staff members in service-learning programs, and with the general public.

This training constituted the first phase in a pilot initiative, developed by the Project on Civic Reflection in partnership with the New England and Pennsylvania Campus Compacts and supported by the Kettering Foundation, to test out the practice of civic reflection with students, faculty, staff and other constituencies in higher education. The initiative is designed to explore the various uses of civic reflection in post-secondary education, to gain insight into student understandings of citizenship, service and democracy, and ultimately to inform the larger national conversation about civic engagement.

Campus Compact, a national coalition of college and university presidents, was founded in 1985 with four member institutions. Since then, Campus Compact has grown to nearly 1,200 members, comprising almost a quarter of all public institutions and reaching over 6 million students.