The August 2026 Periclean
Periclean scholarship, fall events, Harvard Social Impact Review publication, and more!
Advancing Civic Learning Scholarship
Community-engaged teaching and rigorous scholarship are too often treated as separate pursuits. Two scholars in the Periclean network are demonstrating how powerfully they pair together: Elon University’s Director of Design Thinking and Associate Professor of Human Service Studies Danielle Lake (and two-time Periclean Faculty Leader) and Metropolitan State University Professor (and Former Carleton College Periclean Program Director) Adrienne Falcón.
For twenty-five years, Project Pericles has worked to strengthen the relationship between community-engaged civic teaching and scholarship. Faculty in our network connect students with their communities and critically study what happens, producing research that holds up in its own right.
Project Pericles has a track record of advancing this research. Beginning with Civic Engagement in the Classroom (2009) and The Periclean Diamond (2012), we distilled lessons from our faculty programs to a broader audience. Our white paper Creating Cohesive Paths to Civic Engagement (2017), alongside articles in three academic journals, documented how campuses institutionalize the work.
Lake and Falcón have helped establish community-engaged civic learning as serious scholarship, and we’re proud to support it.
Help Project Pericles keep work like this thriving. Donate today to support the next wave of civic learning and action.
In this edition, we’ll be covering:
Join Us for Upcoming Virtual Periclean Events
Advancing Periclean Thought Leadership
Partner Spotlight: HEDEX
Recap: Sanda’s Visit to the Civic Collaboratory
What Staff Are Reading
Join Us for Upcoming Virtual Periclean Events!
As the school year approaches, we’re hosting a slate of virtual events this fall. Fill out our simple RSVP form to receive a calendar invitation for any events you’d like to attend.
Fall Opening Conversation | Friday, August 14, 2026 | 2–3 pm ET
Build community through group activities and peer conversations in breakout rooms, and learn about new tools and resources to support your work.
Project Pericles Resources Design Session | Monday, August 24, 2026 | 3–4 pm ET
Share your perspective in an interactive, human-centered design session as we reimagine our civic engagement resources, moving from static to relevant, dynamic, and scalable.
Faculty Strategies for Student Voter Engagement Workshop (with the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition) | Friday, September 18, 2026 | 2–3 pm ET
Explore strategies for integrating nonpartisan voter registration and education into the academic experience, through resource-sharing and group brainstorming. You’ll leave with practical resources, actionable ideas, and new connections.
Facilitating Dialogue Across Difference Skillbuilding Workshop | Friday, October 16, 2026 | 2–3 pm ET
Build strategies for facilitating dialogue across differences in class and on campus, including a grantee presentation on using the AI-driven dialogue platform Sway, followed by breakout discussions on implementation.
Fall Wrap-Up Community Conversation | Friday, December 11, 2026 | 2–3 pm ET
Reconnect with the community, reflect on the semester, and look ahead to the new year through peer breakout conversations.
Advancing Periclean Thought Leadership: Civic Prosperity at 250
We’d love this piece to start a conversation. How does the concept of “civic prosperity” land with you? What thoughts and questions do you have? As you read, please tell us what resonates, and reach out to Sanda at sanda@projectpericles.org to share your reflections.
Project Pericles’ Executive Director Sanda Balaban recently published a piece in the Harvard Social Impact Review, titled “Civic Prosperity at 250: From Sacred Honor to Shared Flourishing.” The article builds on an essay Sanda previously wrote for Braver Angels’ Civic Scholars Council, part of its anthology on courageous citizenship at America’s 250th.
In this piece, Sanda argues that our shared future depends on cultivating civic prosperity: “the conditions through which people develop the identity, trust, and capacity to shape democratic futures together.” Democracy flourishes less through extraordinary acts of leadership than through ordinary individuals developing strong civic identities and trusting one another across differences. Strengthening these foundational elements is essential to creating communities where people can work together toward shared flourishing.
This work also demands certain obligations of higher education—and opportunities for it. Colleges and universities must prepare students with civic knowledge and skills as well as a sense of responsibility for democratic life and wellbeing. Drawing on examples from across Project Pericles’ program portfolio, Sanda illustrates how civic learning can be embedded across disciplines through dialogue, community partnerships, and public-facing projects.
The initiatives that Project Pericles supports shape how young people understand themselves in relation to the world they share. By cultivating students’ civic identity, trust, and capacity, we are collectively building a civically prosperous future.
Partner Spotlight: HEDEX
Last week, we were excited to celebrate the launch of a new platform for convening resources and practitioners in higher education committed to advancing democracy: the Higher Education Democracy Exchange.
Over the past year, a cross-partisan coalition led by Campus Compact and AAC&U has been designing and building this platform. On July 29th, HEDEX went live with its first public release, featuring resources and a directory of civic engagement practitioners.
We’re pleased to share that our Civic Engagement Resources Database is featured on the site, accessible through HEDEX’s Resource Finder.
Sanda Balaban served as an advisor throughout the development process, alongside other key higher education and democracy sector leaders. Harry Hou shared brief reflections at the launch event, for which over 1,300 higher education professionals registered.
Congratulations to Campus Compact, AAC&U, and all of the partners who have made the launch of HEDEX possible. We encourage you to check out hedexchange.com and share your thoughts and resources.
Recap: Sanda at the Civic Collaboratory
During Citizen University’s quarterly Civic Collaboratory, Sanda joined an energizing gathering of civic leaders to learn about one another’s latest work. At the event, participants made commitments to support presenters’ projects. This format fortifies what Citizen University CEO Eric Liu calls the “bonds of trust and affection.”
The presentations discussed paths toward democratic renewal, centered around the key theme that democracy works best when it’s local and rooted in trusted relationships. As Sanda wrote in her LinkedIn synthesis, “all three [presentations] echoed something we know but can never emphasize enough: the need to shrink democracy to something local enough that each of us, and all of us, can act on it.”
Doing hyperlocal democracy work in your own community? We’d love to hear about it. Reach out to us at hello@projectpericles.org and tell us.
Periclean Thought Leadership
The Nation: How Corporate Recruiters Took Over Campus—and What It’s Costing Democracy
Jason Vadnos, Civic Impact Assistant (Project Pericles)
Project Pericles Civic Impact Assistant Jason Vadnos published an article in The Nation about how colleges can counter the expectation of students to follow corporate career pipelines by investing in civic learning. He highlighted Project Pericles and partner campuses as leading models for preparing students for public-interest careers and democratic engagement.
Minnesota Star-Tribune: How do we fix our park equity gap? Here’s one low-budget way.
Daniel Trudeau, Periclean Faculty Leader (Macalester College)
Macalester College Periclean Faculty Leader and Civic Story Lab Workshop Facilitator Dan Trudeau highlights new research showing that low-cost culturally inclusive park design can increase visitors’ sense of belonging.
Locating Innovation in Higher Education: Breaking the Disciplinary Mold: Structural Support for Learning Collaboratives as a Vision for Transdisciplinary Praxis
Javiera Benavente, Program Director (Hampshire College) and Jina Fast, Periclean Faculty Leader (Hampshire College)
In a newly published article, Hampshire College faculty members Jina Fast, Laura Wenk, and Javiera Benavente examine how Hampshire’s innovative Learning Collaboratives model fostered transdisciplinary, community-engaged learning.
What Staff Are Reading
Sanda (Executive Director) is reading Elias Wachtel's "The Ancient Texts That Teach You to Be Human" from The Atlantic, which traces the age-old and ever evolving argument over “usefulness” l in education. With AI reopening such questions for nearly every field, Wachtel underscores the value of study as more about becoming than doing.
Arielle (Associate Director) is reading Hitendra Wadhwa’s Inner Mastery, Outer Impact: How Your Five Core Energies Hold the Key to Success, which combines biographies of well-known leaders with powerful stories of the everyday person. Wadhwa shows how energies like wisdom and love are precursors to fully achieving our higher purpose and external success.
Harry (Program Manager) is reading Rose Horowitch’s “The End of Reading is Here” from The Atlantic, which examines the decline of literacy in the United States.
Maddie (Programs and Design Specialist) is reading The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer, a collection of 4th-century Gnostic and Christian texts discovered in an Egyptian jar in 1945.
Jason (Civic Impact Assistant) is reading John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, which explores the plight of tenant farm workers who migrated from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
Terry (Civic Impact Intern) is watching No Other Choice, a black comedy thriller film directed by Park Chan-wook that addresses issues such as unemployment crises, toxic masculinity, and capitalism.
Reyhan (Civic Impact Intern) is reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, written from the perspective of a man trapped by his own bitterness and self-loathing rants against reason, progress, and society from the isolation of his basement room.