Center for Sustained Engagement with Lancaster

Note: The center was active between 2019 and 2024. F&M's newest initiative in collaboration with the city is the Reckoning With Lancaster project, made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

CSEwL strives to regenerate the intellectual and social capital essential for a thriving Lancaster that sustains justice, equity, and communal well-being. By closely collaborating with faculty, we distinctly integrate F&M’s liberal arts education with community development to support new avenues of inquiry, initiatives, and research collaborations between F&M and the city and county. 

Many CSEwL projects become integral components of the F&M curriculum. Our professors often weave their ongoing projects into — and out of — the classroom, offering students valuable opportunities for hands-on learning while witnessing the impact these initiatives have on a real community.

Poverty & Social Inequality

CSEwL research projects in poverty and social inequality acknowledge the problematic ways in which “poverty” is conceptualized, its functions in masking the operations of larger systems and structures that hold inequality and injustice in place, and the immediate stresses it places on individuals, households, and the social fabric more broadly.

Environmental Sustainability

Encompassing environmental, economic, and social interactions between humans and the environment, CSEwL research in environmental sustainability addresses environmental justice and relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. 

Recent projects and initiatives include: 

• Lancaster Compost Co-Op, an initiative enabling Lancaster residents to reduce household food waste by creating high-quality compost
• Research studying Lancaster City’s rain gardens to maximize the mitigation of storm-water runoff
• Surveys on the public’s response to government policies on issues such as tax-dollar investments in water quality and green infrastructure to address storm-water pollution management

Social Practice and Community-Based Art

Social practice and community-based art are two distinct but intersecting methods of working in and with a community. Rooted in empathetic collaboration, civic engagement, and critical discourse, both social practice and community-based art use art making as a vehicle for collaboration, communication, and problem solving. CSEwL’s mission is to collaborate with practitioners in the visual arts beyond traditionally understood “scholarship” and de-emphasize systemized forms of material production for social processes between and among people, and to advance social or political change. 

Recent projects and initiatives include: 

• Emerging artist residency program
• An on-campus art exhibit featuring works by local artists to reflect the struggle, promise and hope of migrants in Lancaster (Eric Hirsch, assistant professor of environmental studies, and his research partner, Amer Al-Fayadh, CEO of Communications Essentials)