Campus Compact 2025 Excellence in Community-Engaged Partnerships Award: Chester-Swarthmore Fellows Council

Posted by Campus Compact on February 11, 2025

Campus Compact is pleased to announce that Chester-Swarthmore Fellows Council (Swarthmore College), has been awarded Campus Compact’s new Excellence in Community-Engaged Partnerships Award . The award recognizes outstanding higher education programs and initiatives that make a meaningful impact by partnering with communities to address complex social issues.

Programs recognized exemplify the core principles of effective civic and community engagement—reciprocity, collaboration, transdisciplinarity, and sustainability—and address specific social issues affecting communities, such as public health, violence prevention, economic development, K-12 education, climate change, or houselessness.

The Chester-Swarthmore Fellows Council, a group of Chester resident-leaders with wide and deep local roots in the city, comprises an advisory body that informs and contextualizes Swarthmore College’s place-based engagements in Chester, PA. The Fellows convene several times per year, sometimes as a whole and more frequently in smaller subgroups, alongside faculty, staff, and students from Swarthmore’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. The goals are to shape student training programs; to consult on place-based initiatives such as the Chester Community Fellowship and ChesterSemester; to explore the feasibility of potential projects and related, collaborative activities; and to implement long-term, transformational strategies. Chester partners also participate as compensated co-educators and guest speakers in Swarthmore classes.

Learn more.