Vision & Mission
LCSL envisions a world in which UMD students are empowered learners in community together, taking action through leadership processes to advance just causes. In pursuit of this vision, LCSL engages students in experiential and community-based learning to foster socially responsible leadership.
- Experiential Learning is a process in which knowledge is created through experience, reflection, and application.
- Community-Based Learning is an approach that prioritizes community as an essential source of knowledge and context for learning.
- Socially Responsible Leadership is a collaborative and inclusive process that positively contributes to communities while advancing a group’s goals. Socially Responsible Leadership includes (1) Collaborative effort for positive, collective impact (2) Sustained engagement in a social change process (3) Commitment to critically conscious action, and (4) Living and leading with integrity.
Values
Learning
Engaging in a continuous process of learning that happens across multiple contexts and settings. We value honoring multiple truths and recognize that learning is mutually created through openness and curiosity.
Community
Recognizing the need for every person in their entirety to be valued, embraced, and included in meaningful ways. We believe in fostering collaboration across diverse identities and perspectives to enhance outcomes and consider the effect of decisions and choices in the community.
Justice
Valuing equity and recognizing the role of systems and structures in society that perpetuate inequity. Those seeking justice shed light on injustice, disrupt oppression and privilege, and foster a sustainably just world.
Action
Possessing the efficacy to work with others and employing the appropriate skills needed to make progress towards shared outcomes/goals and towards a more just world.
Land Acknowledgment
Every community owes its existence and strength to the generations before them, around the world, who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy into making the history that led to this moment. Truth and acknowledgment are critical in building mutual respect and connections across all barriers of heritage and difference.
So, we acknowledge the truth that is often buried: We are on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway People, who are the ancestral stewards of this sacred land. It is their historical responsibility to advocate for the four-legged, the winged, those that crawl and those that swim. They remind us that clean air and pristine waterways are essential to all life.
This Land Acknowledgement is a vocal reminder for each of us as two-leggeds to ensure our physical environment is in better condition than what we inherited, for the health and prosperity of future generations.