Dr. Lakshman Yapa Awarded Northeast Region's 2008 McGrath/Kellog Engaged Scholarship Award

April 11, 2008

Dr. Yapa received the award for his work on poverty: "Rethinking Urban Poverty: The Philadelphia Field Project." The five regional winners will advance to the national competition and will compete for the McGrath / Kellogg Community Engagement Award at the national competition to be held in October. Dr. Yapa will represent the North East universities and Penn State at the national competition.

The course “Rethinking Urban Poverty: The Philadelphia Field Project” begun in 1998 is a service learning project offered by Pennsylvania State University, and implemented each year in a neighborhood of West Philadelphia. This initiative gave new meaning to the concept of “partnership” because the people in West Philadelphia helped us to rethink urban poverty in totally different ways. In West Philadelphia over 22% of the people are officially poor. The old solution of good jobs and higher incomes is not working in West Philadelphia. Over the years, with the help of local residents, we began to ask the question “Is it possible to improve the quality of life in the community when we know that new jobs and more money may not be there?” Ultimately, the West Philadelphians identified three critical concepts: health, dignity, and community. Instead of asking why households do not make more income, “The Rethinking Urban Poverty: the Philadelphia Field Project” asks direct questions about quality of life--why do poor households have problems with health, nutrition, housing, transport, etc.? What does it take to live in a health body, with dignity, and in a supportive community? Our main community partners are Parkside Community Development Corporation (CDC) and a faith-based organization, the Millennium Baptist Church. As part of a year-long Penn State course on service learning, students spend a part of the summer living in a house provided by the Church. Since 1998, in collaboration with our community partners, students have implemented over sixty academic and practical projects related to topics such as community credit cooperatives, urban gardening and nutrition, access to public transport, building safe streets, youth esteem and consumption, youth sex education, and internet marketing of inner city artifacts. See the website: http://www.philadelphiafieldproject.com. In each case the student was challenged to find agency within his or her academic major at a scale which was correlated to the power they have in the world. In many respects “Rethinking Urban Poverty” did not follow the typical “outreach” model of the university reaching out to the community. Instead the “partnership” became central to the production of new knowledge built on a new “epistemology” of how we know the poor. This, in turn, reached back and changed some existing courses and created new opportunities for new courses throughout the university. At Penn State there is a new learning unit called the Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy and a new interdisciplinary Minor in Civic Engagement. “Rethinking Urban Poverty: Philadelphia Field Project” has received a series of recognition awards including Dr. Yapa’s commendation with the Penn State’s Faculty Outreach Award in 2000, the Wilson Award for Service in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences 2003, and The President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration in 2006. In the national arena, the project has been honored with the National Multicultural Project Award in 2003.

Congratulations to Dr. Yapa on this prestigious award! Good luck on the National Competition.