American Univesity of Beirut

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Staff and Research Assistants: AUB’s Center for Civic Engagement and Community Service (CCECS) actively works towards instilling an ethos of transformative leadership across campus, developing high impact multi-year interventions to empower local communities, and bridging theory to practice for experiential learning. This approach is embedded within the overall mission statement of the university emphasizing the leading role of students as change-agents equipped with skills needed to navigate the context of uncertainty and humanitarian crisis. Accordingly, the Center’s operational framework is rooted in solid university-community partnerships and built on two cross- cutting tenets:

1. Transformative Education: Through extra-curricular activities and course offerings, CCECS guides students along structured programs aimed at developing the skills, mindsets, and values for active civic participation. Accordingly, students are provided with extensive opportunities that equip them with the tools needed to assess, analyze, and respond to the most pressing challenges facing Lebanon, MENA, and beyond:
1. Leadership Development (extra-curricular):  CCECS  engages  students  in  a 4-pillar sequenced journey beginning with workshops, volunteering rotations, community-based internships, gradually building up to the implementation of Community Service Projects (CSP).
2. Community Engaged Learning (course offerings): CCECS liaisons with faculty members and community partners to develop courses addressing challenges faced by marginalized communities, ensuring balanced exchange of knowledge, and designating academically relevant field work.
2. Developmental Planning: Through contextualized programs aimed at empowering the poor and marginalized, CCECS plays an instrumental role in identifying themes, setting schemes for impactful multi-year interventions, and establishing partnerships with credible and like-minded universities, donor agencies, local organizations, and stakeholders. Concurrently, these programs serve as platforms for AUB students, faculty, and staff to engage in the transformative process:
1. Community Development Projects: primarily includes marginalized local groups and focuses on enhancing livelihoods and upgrading dilapidated infrastructure. Every intervention incorporates local knowledge and resources throughout the design process, implementations, and operations.
2. Refugees’ Track: aims at reinforcing the resilience of refugees and vulnerable groups enduring a protracted stay by adopting an integrative approach that conflates quality education, livelihoods and transferable-skills development, and trauma-informed medical and mental health care programs.

AUB’s civic engagement through CCECS has earned international recognition. AUB has been designated as the “most civically engaged campus” in the Middle East and North Africa, won the MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship, the MIT Enterprise Forum ‘Innovate for Refugees’ Award, as well as the Fritz Redlich Human Rights Award from Harvard University.