On April 21, 2026, the College of Liberal Arts’ (CLA) Office of Community Engagement held its Community Engagement Showcase in the Howard Gittis Student Center, giving students, faculty, staff and community members in attendance a taste of the various community outreach efforts happening in the program.

Among those presenting were this year’s community scholars. CLA’s Community Scholars Program is a paid 10-week immersion program allowing students to meet, volunteer and strategize with community organizations and leaders, culminating in a proposal for a collaborative community project. 

“In the spring of 2022, we launched our first cohort of six community scholars,” said CLA Community Engagement Director Heather Lewis-Weber. “This year, we have our largest cohort ever at 11 students.”

Michael Brooks, executive director of Tree House Books, serves as co-facilitator of the Community Scholars Program. He joked that when he began working with Lewis-Weber, he thought they would be taking CLA students headed for other professions and “converting them into nonprofit executives.” 

“What they’re doing is not necessarily transforming the nonprofit industry,” continued Brooks. “They’re becoming better doctors, better teachers, better psychologists. They’re going back into the fields they’re going to be working in, and they’re going to transform those fields. That’s the work CLA is doing through this program.” 

The experience has been eye-opening for students like neuroscience senior Lassya Ravipati, whose project "Bridging Perspectives: A Community-Centered Harm Reduction Education Module for First-Year Temple Students" proposes a path toward fostering more informed interactions between Temple students and the surrounding North Philadelphia community. 

“I have never done community-based research before,” said Ravipati, who took an interest in harm reduction upon coming to Temple from out of state. “The CLA Community Scholars program really nurtured my interest in the subject and further fueled my continued interest in conducting community outreach.” 

“What makes this program so special is that it gives students the agency to design projects they genuinely care about,” said psychology major Cassidy Paz, who will be continuing work on her community scholar project through the new Summer Scholars Program, “and then it supports us in bringing those ideas to life.”

Beyond the work of the community scholars, the event exhibited the widening portfolio of projects and initiatives housed in the Office of Community Engagement. The University Community Collaborative (UCC) recently came under the program’s umbrella, continuing its mission of engaging and supporting local youth and young adults as agents of social change in their community. 

“[UCC] introduced me to my love of education, being an educator and working in a classroom,” said Ethan Rodriguez, who participated in the UCC as a high school student and now serves as Assistant Program Coordinator. “Whether in high school or college or now as a graduate, I’ve always felt I had a place here at the UCC.”

Rodriguez introduced “Hands Off Our Communities: Resistance to Gentrification,” a short documentary made by students from the UCC about the resistance effort against proposals to build a new arena in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood.

The Cybersecurity in Application, Research and Education (CARE) Lab and the CLA Translation Institute were also on hand to speak with attendees.