Beacon Colleges "A Climate Created: Community Building in the Beacon College Project"
-Written by Lynn Barnett for the Community College Times, 11/16/96  After six productive years, the American Association of Community Colleges brought its Beacon College Project to a close this fall. By 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.
The Commission on the Future of Community Colleges set the stage for the project: community colleges are about community building. In its 1988 landmark report, Building Communities: A Vision for a New Century, the Commission put forth the theme for the next decade: "The theme 'building communities' should become the rallying point for the community college in America." Most importantly, the commission set a tone. Building Communities emphasized the need for community building within and outside the college. It suggested nearly 100 ways to build community and to create a climate of community. With Kellogg support, AACC initiated the Beacon College Project in 1989 to implement the commission's recommendations.  The notion was to let good ideas "shine" and to create new community coalitions. In three national competitions, 26 community colleges were selected as "beacons," agreeing to collaborate with other colleges in specific community-building projects. Some projects targeted the college classroom community; others looked at the campus community or the community beyond the campus. Some adapted existing programs in new places, like the international student orientation program at Middlesex County College, NJ; other colleges collaborated with others to implement new ideas, such as the peer tutoring program led by American River College, CA.
The word "beacon" has come to refer to any number of local community-building programs, from student tutoring or school-to-work initiatives to service learning and civic responsibility. In all cases, projects reinforced the notion of collaboration and shared problem solving. As one project director emphatically noted, "Collaboration works."
NOTE: A Climate Created: Community Building in the Beacon College Project is available from AACC Publications, 800-250-6557, $10 members; $13 non-members.
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