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Abstract

This article tells the story of a long-term (12-year-old) and ongoing participatory community action research in homeless shelters – the Behavioral Activation Research Project in Homeless Shelters (the project), which represents a long-term collaboration between Roger N. Reeb, PhD (Professor of Psychology) and St. Vincent de Paul (Dayton, Ohio). The first section of this article provides a grand overall description of the project, summarizes past research, and explains how we sustained the project during the COVID-19 pandemic. To demonstrate the project’s ongoing nature, the second section reports an honors thesis completed within the context of the project, accompanied by a self-reflection by the student (Kathryn E. Hurley).

This project aligns with topics of the University of Dayton (UD) 2024 Learning Teaching Forum. Over 12 years, students from various majors collaborated (often across multiple semesters) on the project. Across academic boundaries, students learned from one another, and through a multidisciplinary lens, they came to realize how students with different backgrounds, skills, interests, and career goals can complement one another in working to address complex problems faced by disenfranchised, vulnerable community members. Students also learned reciprocity – a feature that permeates principles of collaborative community research, preparing them for authentic relationship-building and collaborative work in the future. The project involves both community-engaged learning and experiential learning, with students, faculty, and staff working on the project becoming increasingly community informed about homelessness; community involved (hands-on learning activities); and community engaged (immersed in collaboration with community partners). The project provides a model for diversifying UD’s pedagogical practices and illustrates a commitment to student-centeredness, as revealed in our evidence of civic-related development in students. The project yields a collective impact and greater equity in the community, as illustrated in our evidence of benefits in psychological functioning of shelter residents. As the faculty member (Reeb) became increasingly committed to this community-engaged/experiential-learning project, he developed an innovative course, Engaged Scholarship for Homelessness: A Service-Learning Course, which illustrates the impact of a transformative educational initiative on learning/teaching practices. We show that an experiential learning initiative can be a critical tool in sustaining a long-term community-based project which, in turn, provides for increasingly more professional-related opportunities for learning and leadership development. For academic advisors and their students, this ongoing project provides opportunities for community-engaged experiential learning for academic and career planning. Overall, the project aligns with commitments of the Marianist tradition, including holistic education, community-oriented mission, and building bridges and crossing boundaries for the common good.

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