The 2018 midterm elections precipitated the highest youth voter turnout in 25 years. Months earlier, hundreds of thousands protested gun violence on six continents in the youth-led March for Our Lives movement following last year’s mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school.

If those headlines are any indication, civic engagement isn’t merely an ivory-tower notion of what college students should be doing — it’s what they are doing.

Now a new strategy titled Engaged Bucknell promises to push civic engagement to the forefront of the Bucknell experience.

“Civic engagement takes different shapes depending on the type of institution,” says Georgina Dodge, associate provost for diversity, equity & inclusion and interim director of the Office for Civic Engagement (OCE). “At a small liberal arts college, it’s sometimes front and center; at other places, it’s negligible. At Bucknell, we fall in the middle of that now. But we see civic engagement becoming much more central to the mission of Bucknell. Our goal is to have the majority of students involved.”

Several years in the making, Engaged Bucknell details steps the University will take through 2025 to make that shift and establish Bucknell as an anchor institution leading Lewisburg in community affairs. So central is civic engagement to Bucknell today that the University’s new strategic plan, set for approval this spring, includes implementation of Engaged Bucknell as a key initiative.

Primarily, the plan calls for work in five areas: University-wide integration of engagement, coordination of effort, access for all students, mutuality to ensure both students and community organizations benefit from partnerships and communication — that is, improving visibility of civic-engagement efforts and connecting with alumni who support them.

Civic engagement has a long presence at Bucknell. The first office to coordinate engagement opened in 2002 and evolved into today’s Office of Civic Engagement. Lynn Pierson, assistant director for community service, says the nationally recognized Bucknell Brigade was one of the most successful early efforts. The annual service-learning trip to Nicaragua celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and continues to draw support from the campus, although a State Department travel ban this year prevented students from traveling to Nicaragua. (See more about the Bucknell Brigade on Page 23 and in the sidebar below.)

Pierson says many students also volunteer as required by their Greek organizations, athletics teams or clubs. But engagement has also been stoked over the years by current events.

“After there’s a big event — a hurricane, 9/11, a presidential election — folks tend to get involved,” Pierson says. “A lot of students are much more politically involved in voter registration and educating people about the issues after the recent election.”

Civic engagement also encompasses Bucknell’s 60 or so service-learning classes offered annually in 21 departments. About 750 students a year take the courses designed with an education component that addresses a community need.

“Service learning is beneficial for students to see that they can have an impact on the world,” Dodge says. “It’s one thing to sit in a room and design bridges. It’s another thing to see how that bridge gets goods to market or gets a child to a hospital. That’s what it means to me to have an experiential impact.”

Largely, civic engagement at Bucknell has kept pace with the national movement for higher education to take a role in creating socially responsible, engaged graduates with backgrounds in problem- solving. That movement took shape in the 1980s, particularly after the 1985 establishment of Campus Compact, a coalition of college and university presidents dedicated to advancing civic engagement.

In 2016, Campus Compact issued a Call to Action asking higher-education leaders to reassert the civic mission on campuses. President John Bravman and 450 other leaders signed on. Engaged Bucknell is the result of that commitment.

For recent Bucknell alumni, especially those moved by their own civic experience, Engaged Bucknell is a welcome strategy.

“Service learning is sometimes written off as soft stuff,” says Julia Bonnell ’14. “But I feel it’s very important at Bucknell. It’s part of why I am still an engaged alumna.”

Bonnell planned to be a doctor when she came to Bucknell. She enjoyed four service-learning courses, but it was a course titled Women in the Penal System, taught by Professor Coralynn Davis, women’s & gender studies, that rerouted her career.

“That class was a complete turning point for me,” she says. “It changed my entire life, my entire experience at Bucknell and my trajectory afterward.”

The class was held at the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, a local women’s prison, and comprised Bucknell students and inmates. Bonnell says no textbook could teach her what she learned by meeting inmates in a prison setting and hearing their stories.

“Service learning put me in places I wouldn’t have gone otherwise,” Bonnell says. “I was raised in a culture of doing good and giving back, but I don’t know that I would have pursued those opportunities on my own if my class hadn’t forced it upon me.”

Bonnell says her decision to earn a master’s in sociology at Columbia University was a direct result of her civic engagement at Bucknell.

Now in her first year at Fordham University School of Law, Bonnell has an eye toward working in social reform. And she’s a fervent proponent of service learning.

“I was so grateful for that opportunity, because it was never lost on me — I never took for granted what OCE and Coralynn Davis put on the line and the pushback they risk when they argue for that kind of class,” she says. “I can imagine there are plenty of parents who would challenge the idea and say, ‘You’re sending our kids to a maximum-security prison?’ ”

Dodge says today’s parents are more likely to expect experiential learning to be part of their student’s college education.

“Higher education is being asked by the public to step forward to show evidence of its impact on the learning and growth of its students,” Dodge says. “I can’t think of a better way to show that than for our students to be involved in a democratic community.”

Kyle Bray has worked in civic education for 18 years, the last four as Bucknell’s assistant director of service learning. During that time, he’s seen civic engagement transform from a trend to a proven means of preparing students to be citizens of their world.

“We’ve crossed that point where a trend is over and the programs fade away,” he says. “The intrinsic value of civic engagement has been very well established.”

And alumni like Bonnell are eager to see civic engagement expanded so more students are exposed to life-changing service. Bray says more alumni than ever are seeking ways to support projects and programs with a service element.

“Our donors understand the value of civic engagement to students, the community and the institution.”

Bray is eager for the upcoming transformation Engaged Bucknell promises. “I’m really proud that Bucknell is committed to civic engagement and has a great show of support from President Bravman,” Bray says. “Civic engagement is so logical. It makes so much sense to me. Life is so challenging as it is. Why can’t we collaborate to make it better for all of us? It’s a universal positive.”