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Appalachian Center for Community Service
Our Mission

The Appalachian Center for Community Service is committed to initiating sustainable community-college partnerships in which developmental, transformative educational relationships are defined by ongoing and honest relationships between the people of a particular place and Emory & Henry's Appalachian Center for Community Service. Because ours is a developmental approach, we start with small-scale community-defined initiatives and develop our partnership from that foundation. We seek to allow the College's presence in a community to be defined by that community.

Trust and Respect
Foundations for this relational model of education are established by sustained conversations, allowing the community to come to trust our presence and our students. We seek to teach our students and discipline ourselves to care for the past of a place as surely as we respect its present and establish a care and respect for all the people and places of Washington County and Southwest Virginia. Through these partnerships we are working to build a place-based model of rural community development and education.

Citizenship
Through our work we seek to offer our students the kind of citizen education that will benefit and equip them for citizenship in the places and communities in which they choose to settle, whether in Southwest Virginia or not. We envision an educational culture that takes seriously the importance of place and community both for personal identity and collective politics.

Choices
We want our students to graduate with the understanding that education, citizenship, justice, democracy, and community development must all be defined within the historic materiality of a place, in the context of a whole attachment to the social networks that comprise a community. The education we want to provide our students is one that enables them to make choices that confront the forces opposed to that kind of attachment.

Significant social change
Our students must have the skills and the courage to discern that we all have been complicitous in forces that have proved destructive of community. We want to provide our students with the intellectual, civic, and moral tools to work with their neighbors for significant social change and a democratic future for the places in which they settle.

Partnerships
The Appalachian Center for Community Service refuses to see citizenship as an isolated or self-centered enterprise. We seek to use these partnerships not only to equip our students for a participatory and democratic citizenship, but also to empower ourselves and the citizens of these rural places to build a democratic future. This quest to undertake a new kind of place-based education is connected inextricably with all we hope to accomplish with our students, on the Emory & Henry campus, in the places themselves, and in higher education in general.