Community Partner Convenings

Deepening community-based partnerships is a central component of conflict transformation-oriented work across Middlebury. As part of these efforts, colleagues and students regularly meet with community partners to reflect on and explore student engagement and broader impacts of their project-based experiential learning, courses, internships, and Practica. In October 2024, CoLab CT Graduate Assistant Fellow and CT Cohort Fellow (and Middlebury College alumnus) Angela Izi Nkusi co-organized and co-facilitated the CoLab community partner convening hosted at MIIS. Participants included faculty and staff Netta Avineri, Gabriel Guillen, Carolyn Meyer, Phil Murphy, and Scott Pulizzi as well as community partners Big Sur Land Trust and Gathering for Women. The session was a meaningful opportunity to strengthen these relationships through mutual learning, productive exploration of tensions, and creative ideas for future engagement in Monterey County.