What We Do

Through active listening, knowledge sharing and collaborative education, we cultivate inclusive, engaged, community engagement opportunities that result in shared purpose among our partners, students, faculty, staff and alumni to creating a more equitable and sustainable world.

We seek to make what RISD has to offer—the assets, opportunities, skills and knowledge we generate here—accessible to a diverse range of communities. It is through this process that we also deepen how RISD understands what it means to responsibly do civically and academically engaged work.

Working in the field of community engagement calls for high standards. To effectively develop at RISD a community of people ready to make a strategic social impact, we hold ourselves accountable to the following values:

• We listen deeply and participate actively in equitable, inclusive activities that support and amplify RISD’s reciprocal and sustained engagement with diverse communities.
• We acknowledge the weight of responsibility that comes with doing community-oriented work—the potential of it to either positively or negatively impact community realities.
• We foreground the needs of the communities that RISD engages with.
• We are transparent in how we guide our work and how we communicate about it, in our role as responsible supporters, contributors, participants and collaborators.

Supported by both a Community Engagement Advisory Committee and a K-12 Committee, and with input from across the institution, our team develops near- and long-term strategies to increase awareness of RISD’s mission, goals and agendas. We also steward new and existing community partnerships to help steer civic engagement efforts across the institution, in collaboration with stakeholders at RISD and elsewhere.

Our monthly newsletter is one of the ways we keep our partners informed of the latest news and upcoming events in and around RISD. To subscribe, simply fill out the form below. You can also read past issues to see our work in action.