Building Communities: A Vision for a New Century
A decade ago, the Commission on the Future of Community Colleges released a report, Building Communities: A Vision for a New Century. The 19-member Commission was led by co-chairs Senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas and Ernest Boyer, then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Building Communities was the result of 18 months of study, public hearings, campus visits, and much debate, the Commission developed recommendations for the future of community, technical, and junior colleges.
That 1988 report proposed that the theme "Building Communities" become the new rallying point for the community college in America. It defined the term community "not only as a region to be served, but also as a climate to be created." In that context, the report organized its 77 recommendations in seven categories:
Partnerships for Learning
Curriculum: From Literacy to Lifelong Education
The Classroom as Community
The College as Community
Connections Beyond the College
Leadership for a New Century
Support from the following organizations made the Commission's work possible: Colgate Palmolive Corporation; Com Products Corporation International, Inc.; Ford Motor Company Fund; General Foods Corporation; General Motors Corporation; IBM; Shell Oil Companies Foundation; and The New York Times Company Foundation, Inc.
The report also spawned the Beacon College Project in 1989 to implement the report's recommendations. When the project was ended in 1995, 26 Beacon colleges had engaged nearly 600 institutions including 250 community colleges and some 130,000 individuals in 36 states in the Beacon College Project. The $1.7 million grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation had leveraged more than $7 million in local communities.
In 1998, it is time to look again at the future of community colleges. The Kellogg Foundation has funded a new initiative called New Expeditions: Charting the Second Century of Community Colleges, co-sponsored by the American Association of Community Colleges and the Association of Community College Trustees.
Copies of Building Communities are available through Community College Press®, 1-800-250-6557, Order #1111 ($19 AACC members, $24 nonmembers).
