Exploring Generative AI in Community Engagement: Examples and Possibilities
How to make sense of and use Generative AI applications in community-engaged learning? What are the risks and opportunities in building partnerships and seeking greater efficiencies? In this session, you will hear three use-case examples from a student, faculty member and community partner with ample time for discussion. We hope you will join us in this conversation as we begin to think through the role of AI in community-engaged learning.
Panelists:
Erik Lapidus ’27, president of Cornell Votes
Ben Sandberg, director, The History Center in Tompkins County
Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor in Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
Co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching Innovation
Lunch is provided for In-person session attendees
Zoom option available.
16 tips for a great elevator pitch
Professor Trent Preszler, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and 2025 Einhorn Center Faculty Fellow, will present a workshop on 16 tips for developing a great “elevator pitch” for your student-run organization, and storytelling to engage the audiences.
In All The Ways We Serve
In All The Ways We Serve” is a community event cosponsored by MGFC, Muslim Life, and Einhorn Center highlighting the many student-run, community-engaged service projects.
Lights, camera, Community: A February Break Movie Night!
Take a break from February break and join us for a cozy, conversation‑inspiring movie night! Reel Impact brings together students who care about community, connection and meaningful stories. Settle in with snacks, friends and the opportunity to unwind.
After the movie, stick around for a relaxed, optional discussion where we’ll unpack themes, share perspectives and explore how storytelling can spark change — on campus and beyond. Whether you’re deeply involved in community‑engaged learning or just curious about making a difference, this is a welcoming space to unwind, connect and reflect.
RSVPs highly encouraged. Food and seating will be first come first serve.
Four C’s (Community, Connection, Co-Creation & Conversation) with Cookies & Cocoa!
Join other student organization leaders, and student staff of the Einhorn Center at the hub, for a casual space to swap ideas, build collaborations, and spark new community connections… all over cookies & cocoa. Because the best ideas are even better with cookies & cocoa!
A Time for Critical Reflection & Engagement: Processes, Tools and Strategies for Challenging Conversations
Presenter: Katrina Nobles, director of conflict programs, Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution, School of Industrial Labor Relations, Cornell University
In today’s evolving academic and professional environments, the ability to engage in meaningful, inclusive dialogue is essential — within campus communities and in partnerships beyond the university. This interactive one-hour session invites participants to explore how personal reflection connects to conflict, communication and collaboration. Through experiential activities, small group discussions and real-world scenarios, attendees will learn how restorative practices and mediation techniques can strengthen dialogue in classrooms, student organizations, engaged learning and external partnerships. Participants will leave with practical strategies for critical reflection and engagement across diverse settings. This session offers a timely opportunity to build relational skills that support resilient, reflective engagement — on campus and in the wider world.
About Katrina Nobles
Katrina Nobles is the director of conflict programs for the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution at the Cornell University ILR School, designing curriculum, teaching on-campus credit-bearing courses, instructing professional and customized programs, and facilitating discussions for organizational workplace conflicts. On campus, Nobles leads the campus mediation program, which includes a partnership with the Office of the Judicial Administrator to mediate minor code of conduct violations by students. The program includes a 4-credit course and a 2-credit course to train students to be peer mediators. These students then mediate actual code violation cases. In the private and not-for-profit sectors, Nobles has worked with multiple clients to provide facilitation among conflicted teams and departments. In this area, she has also designed and provided training regarding employee relations, collaborative problem solving, cross-cultural communication, performance management, unconscious bias, mediation, facilitation, diagnosing conflict, and leading difficult and heated conversations.
Student Organization Town Hall Meeting
Join us for our Einhorn Center Student-run Organization Leadership first town hall of the fall semester on Monday, October 20th, from 5 PM to 6:30 PM in Biotech G10! Check-in and food begins at 4:45 PM. Please bring a water bottle, laptop, and pen or pencil to the session. Additionally, please make sure you have the required Canvas modules completed before the session.
Contact EinhornProgramSupport@cornell.edu as soon as possible with any questions, comments, or concerns.
This Event is open to Student-run Organization Leadership only
Cornell Votes – Voter Ambassador Training
Develop skills to assist the community with all voting-related tasks. Learn the fundamentals of civic engagement and practice non-partisanship while gaining an understanding of how to vote.
Why it matters: Voting is fundamental to democracy and ensures that community voices are heard.
Conversation with Basil Safi, Einhorn Center Executive Director
An invitation to connect with the Einhorn Center’s Executive Director
Looking to grow your leadership, strengthen your student org, or spark new ideas for community impact? Here’s your chance to chat with Basil Safi, Executive Director of the Einhorn Center. Basil provides senior leadership and strategy for the Einhorn Center, helping shape initiatives that connect students, faculty, and partners in powerful ways.
Basil is a first-generation American with over 20 years of experience leading public health, strategic communication, and community-engaged learning programs. He spent a decade with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and launched five grassroots organizations across the globe—partnering with universities to meet the needs of local communities.
Restorative Practice as a Framework for Critical Reflection
During this highly interactive session, participants will learn the fundamentals of Restorative Practices, including ways to engage WITH self and others through critical reflection and inclusive process and decision-making. Participants will gain skills in circle facilitation and planning that can be incorporated into academic, community, and work team settings.
About Jeff Godowski
Jeff Godowski is an Assistant Dean at Cornell University and instructor at the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) Graduate School. Jeff was introduced to restorative practices in 2013 at the University of Vermont through one of the earliest applications of restorative practices as a community building and response framework for residential life in higher education. Since then, Jeff has implemented restorative frameworks at numerous institutions of higher education. As an instructor, Jeff facilitates in spaces where teams and individuals can practice vulnerability to understand more about themselves and others, opening doors for communication across difference. They are also currently Ph.D. Candidate in Community Research and Action at Binghamton University’s College of Community and Public Affairs, where they are researching the impact of restorative practices among students, staff, faculty, and administrators in college and university settings.
Community Engagement Funding & Employment
Do you have an idea for a community project? Would you like to work with schools, nonprofits, or municipalities to impact public issues like education, sustainability, healthcare, food systems, and more?
Join us at the Engaged Hub to learn about how you can make a difference with community engagement grants and awards and the Community Work-Study Program.
Weeks of Welcome: New Student Welcome
Join us to learn how you can get involved with the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement! We support a university culture where students, faculty, staff and community partners work together to create a better world.
The Einhorn Center is home to student organizations, leadership opportunities, funding, employment and more. We can also connect you with community-engaged learning experiences across the university that create real-world impact, built on strong community partnerships and meaningful reflection—through courses, research and employment.
Stop by on Monday, September 15th from 5-6 p.m. on the 3rd floor of Kennedy Hall to meet staff and student leaders—and enjoy some light refreshments!
Einhorn Student Fall Kick-Off Event
Join us for an energizing evening that puts student leadership and community-engaged learning (CEL) at the center.
We’ll start with food and a mini club fest, your chance to showcase your organization’s mission, connect with peers, and spark new collaborations. Together, we’ll reflect on highlights from last year, revisit our community agreement, and continue to explore what community-engaged learning (CEL) means for all of us.
You’ll also meet the Einhorn Center’s student staff team, learn about upcoming programs like town halls and Monday meet-ups, and get key updates on resources and expectations for the semester. Most importantly, we’ll dive into how student learning outcomes (SLOs) help capture the impact and share tools to track hours, capture involvement, and highlight the change you’re making.
✨ Come for the food, connections, and updates—leave inspired and ready to lead another year of meaningful community work!
How Can Community Outreach Transform Medical Students Attitudes?
Since 2015, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) School of Medicine, in collaboration with Ecuador’s Ministry of Health, has implemented a Community Outreach Program in 16 communities across the valleys of Tumbaco and Los Chillos. The program has dual objectives: outward-facing social goals, such as strengthening health promotion efforts in the community and student-focused academic objectives, including the development of technical competencies in prevention and health promotion.
The USFQ Community Outreach Program places a strong emphasis on the humanistic aspects of medicine, fostering empathy, compassion and social responsibility through hands-on engagement with the communities it serves.
Iván Palacios a faculty member of the School of Medicine, leads this ambitious program and will share with us some valuable lessons learned from its implementation.
About the speaker:
Dr. Iván Palacios, M.D., Master in Public Administration
Dr. Palacios is a professor of health prevention and promotion at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Medicine at Hofstra Northwell Health. He leads the USFQ Med Community Outreach Program and serves as Global Health director.
Migrations, History, Storytelling, Teaching, Research in the Uptown Chicago Neighborhood
Speakers:
Anna Romina Guevarra, Professor and Founding Director
Co-PI, AANAPISI Initiative; Co-PI Social Justice and Human Rights Cluster
Global Asian Studies
Gayatri Reddy, Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies for Gender and Women’s Studies
Anthropology, Sociocultural and Medical
Gender and Women’s Studies
Are you curious about working with a community partner or thinking about innovative and authentic ways for students to represent and share their learning? Come learn from Drs. Anna Guevarra and Gayatri Reddy from the University of Illinois Chicago, who’ve led a unique and enduring community-engaged public history project with undergraduates, Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown Chicago, since 2017.
As an example, they “have been learning from members of the Winthrop Avenue Family” who have shared with them “stories of displacement, racism and segregation…but also of joy, community and collective care.” Drs. Guevarra and Gayatri’s students’ work highlights the power of narrative and visuality in many forms, from digital storytelling to XR/VR, community mapping, photography and more. How have they shepherded the relationships and the teaching of these successful and tricky assignments? Join us in community for lunch and a presentation.
Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need
Author and speaker: Michael Hoffman, Professor Emeritus, Department of Entomology
Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need explains the causes and impacts of climate change, how it’s affecting our food and who’s working to keep the menu stocked. A typical dinner menu is used — from appetizers to desserts — to explain how a warming world is changing everything we eat. The book also features brief interviews with farmers, ranchers, fishers, educators and company managers who are on the frontline of climate change. The reader will discover many more reasons to confront this grand challenge. The book is available from Cornell University Press and anyone can use this discount code 09SAVE.
About the author: Michael Hoffmann is dedicating his life to confronting the grand challenge of climate change by helping people understand and appreciate what is happening through the foods we all love and need. He has published climate change articles in the popular press – The Hill, Fortune, Medium, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Daily News and USA Today and is lead author of Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and nNeed (Cornell Press 2021). His TEDx Talk – Climate change: It’s time to raise our voices has been well received along with the >150 climate change-related talks he has given. Mike’s life’s experiences include growing up on a one-cow dairy farm, serving in the Marines during the Vietnam War and being a father and someone’s partner for 52 years.
He held multiple leadership roles in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) including executive director of the Cornell Institute for Climate Change Solutions, director of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, associate dean of CALS, associate director of Cornell Cooperative Extension and director of the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program. He received his BS degree from the University of Wisconsin, MS from the University of Arizona and PhD from the University of California, Davis. He now holds the title of professor emeritus. He will tell the climate change story, until he no longer can.
Transformative Co-Creation: Epistemologies and Strategies for Collaborative Writing with Community Partners
Speaker: Rachael Shah, Associate Professor of Writing Studies, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Our engagement partnerships often call for texts that incorporate community partner insights—from syllabi for community-based classes, to grants that secure funds, to social media posts that showcase our partnerships, to academic articles about engaged research. The way we write these texts is the way we write our partnerships themselves. What might change if we were to reimagine how these texts are produced to more deeply synthesize community and academic insights?
In this talk, Rachael Shah will draw on interviews with people who have co-created across university-community lines to explore not only the transformative potential of deep collaboration, but concrete techniques that have been used to infuse democratic ideals into the collaboration process.
Publication Talks
Engaged Publication Talks provide a showcase for and celebrate of the publication success of colleagues committed to community-engaged learning. Featuring faculty and staff authors, this series provides opportunities for learning about engaged publication processes and pathways for potential scholarly engagement in this work.
Speakers
The Engaged Speaker Series invites visiting scholars and Cornell faculty, staff, community partners, alumni and students to learn with and from one another to advance our shared understanding of community engagement, its potential and challenges.
The series is co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching Innovation.
Workshops
Engaged Faculty Workshops do a deep dive on integrating the tools from our Community-Engaged Learning Online Courses into your CEL class, project or program.
Einhorn Center staff are also available for individual and team consultations. Please contact us at einhornacademic@cornell.edu.