Higher ed as an engine for community resilience
Haneen Jarrad sometimes struggled to hold back her tears while the young students talked about their fears as violence between Israel and Hezbollah flared around them in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
The primary-school students were part of an art-therapy program organized by Jarrad, a sophomore studying English and psychology at the American University of Beirut. In a part of the world where people sometimes bottle up their emotions, Jarrad said she hopes to give children in conflict areas a chance to tell the stories of their own trauma.
“I saw a need,” said Jarrad, who also ran the program at home, in the Palestinian West Bank. “I want to give them a sense of being heard.”
This fall, as Israeli airstrikes against the Iranian-backed militant group pounded Lebanon, Jarrad was among more than 150 students from the American-accredited university, known as AUB, working daily as crisis responders, delivering aid, providing emotional support, and conducting needs assessments. (A ceasefire to end the fighting, which displaced more than 1 million people, was agreed to in late November.)
Many colleges have sought to deepen ties with their communities, to harness the expertise and enthusiasm on campus to tackle real-world problems and needs. AUB sees the university, and students like Jarrad, as “frontliners” in response to crises and societal challenges.
Academic institutions can be engines for community resilience, said Rabih Shibli, director of AUB’s Center for Civic Engagement and Community Service. “How can you be a problem solver in the highly complex, complicated world we’re living in?”
The answer, he said, is that students can be “changemakers.”
The center connects students with volunteer activities, service learning, and community-based internships. Students also work in groups on their own efforts, known as community-support projects, identifying and researching a problem, and then creating and carrying out a solution. Each student receives a $1,000 grant to undertake their projects, which have included refugee and women’s education, mental-health support for migrants, and environmental reclamation.
The approach got its start nearly 20 years ago, following an earlier conflict that left many buildings in the Lebanese capital damaged or destroyed. Shibli, then a young professor of architecture and design, was teaching a course that examined the rebuilding of European cities after World War II. Couldn’t students take some of the concepts they were learning and apply them to the devastation in Beirut?
What began as an experiment became a regular part of Shibli’s teaching, and then spread to other courses and instructors. In 2008, AUB created the civic-engagement center, which holds workshops, runs collegewide community-engagement efforts, and helps professors craft service-learning curricula. Now, Shibli said, it’s part of the university’s “educational DNA.”
Through the center, Mansour Saliba, who is from a small Lebanese village, helped rehab neighborhoods decimated by a 2020 chemical explosion at a warehouse in Beirut’s port. For his own project, he and his classmates worked to combat gender-based violence in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. They organized a two-day workshop to provide 100 women in the camp with information about legal, medical, and social resources, and gave them hands-on self-defense training.
The only criticism: The participants wanted their daughters to get the same coaching. Saliba said the project, and the emotional thanks he and the other students received, “is going to stay with me my whole life.”
The experience also enriched his education, giving him skills like leadership, problem solving, and teamwork that he might not have otherwise picked up in the classroom. The university is “investing in us not only to be proficient in our own subject matter and fields, but as whole students,” said Saliba, who graduated last year and received a Fulbright scholarship to Arizona State University.
Both Saliba and Jarrad had to do community-engagement work as a condition of scholarships they received, but Shibli hopes it will become a requirement for all AUB students.
And while Lebanon’s near-constant state of crisis is unique, Shibli believes the university’s model — one that is multidisciplinary and rooted in analysis and research — can be used by colleges that do not have to deal with what he calls his home country’s “horrorscape.” He has given presentations at international conferences about AUB’s work, and its approach has been adopted by global networks like the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities and the Open Society University Network.
Colleges, and their students and faculty members, should “step out from the confinement of academia,” he said. “We should ask what is the active, tangible role we can play for the community?”
