With funding and partnership from the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, the Brooks School has kickstarted its Cornell Engaged College initiative with the addition of Public Policy Engagement Coordinator Becky Warner, who joins postdoctoral fellow Megan Dias as part of the team overseen by Jamila Michener, Brooks School’s Senior Associate Dean of Public Engagement and associate professor of government in the College of Arts & Sciences and public policy in the Brooks School. 

“I’m grateful to the Einhorn Center for their willingness to invest in our public engagement capacity at Brooks. This will help to deepen our work with community partners, and I’m excited to work alongside Becky, Megan and our amazing students,” said Michener. “Engagement work is fundamental to how Brooks views a public policy education and also to our commitment to improving lives through public policy.”

The Brooks School became an Engaged College earlier this year under Michener’s direction. Partnering with the Einhorn Center through the Engaged College Initiative will institutionalize, strengthen, and expand Brooks’ ongoing engagement efforts by connecting the work being done in the policy school with the larger infrastructure of support that the Einhorn Center facilitates and amplifies through the Engaged College network.

“With the Brooks School joining the Einhorn Center’s Engaged College Initiative, we’re welcoming a team with deep experience in the influential power of community-engaged learning in one of society’s most critical realms: policy and government,” said Vice Provost for Engagement and Land-Grant Affairs Katherine McComas. “And with Jamila's role as Brook’s senior associate dean for engagement and the school’s lead on this initiative, we’re confident that this partnership is going to do great things for scholarship, for students, and for a range of partnerships globally.”

As a newly formed school of public policy, the Brooks School included public engagement as one of three pillars in its strategic plan and appointed Michener to create a new framework for the school’s approach to community and policy engagement. Building on the Master of Public Administration (MPA) program’s long track record of providing engaged learning opportunities for its policy students, Michener is focused on expanding global engagement, creating a long-term engaged partner network, and growing the school’s catalogue of community-engaged learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. 

“Many people don’t really know what goes on in a public policy school. They don’t know why it matters or what value we provide beyond our own spheres or careers. Public engagement makes the case for the value of the university and of the policy school by showing how our work extends beyond campus out into the world,” said Michener. “It also gives our students a real sense of what it takes to change and implement policy at the grassroots level.”

Laurie Miller, Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of Public Engagement, Brooks Senior Lecturer Julie Ficarra, and Professor of the Practice Alexandra Dufresne are part of Michener’s inaugural Brooks Public Engagement Committee.

Miller recently received a Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Award from the Einhorn Center for her work annually supervising between 40 and 60 MPA capstone projects with community partners all over the world. Her ongoing research project with Enfield Food Distribution brings Cornell faculty, undergraduate and graduate students together to help the food pantry manage growing demand.

Ficarra recently received an Engaged Opportunity Grant from Einhorn for her course Refugee Pathways: From Conflict to Resettlement in Upstate NY, a community-engaged learning experience that centers on learning with and from refugee and immigrant supporting organizations across Upstate NY. She is also a founding co-director of the Cornell & Universidad San Francisco de Quito Spring Break Exchange, which brings students from both universities together to explore comparative approaches to addressing global social policy challenges through the work of community-based organizations in Ithaca and Quito.

Dufresne serves as Director of the Brooks School’s State Policy Advocacy Clinic, an engaged learning experience in which students draft, submit, and support new legislation in the NY State Assembly.

Megan Dias, Brooks public engagement postdoctoral fellow, studies immigration policy, and works extensively with immigration legal and advocacy organizations. Dias engaged closely with such organizations while she was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, and her PhD dissertation was shaped by her deep connections to community-based organizations. At Brooks, she has been helping forge new community and policy partnerships, guide student researchers, and develop public engagement resources for Brooks faculty and students.

Becky Warner, Brooks’ new public policy engagement coordinator, spent decades in leadership at the Vermont Department of Health before coming to Cornell to support the Cornell Center for Health Equity. As part of the public engagement team at Brooks, she will facilitate and coordinate policy and community partnerships, support engaged teaching and learning, and help to systematically track the public impact that stems from the engagement efforts at Brooks.

Michener said Warner and Dias will collaborate with her to help more Brooks faculty conduct engaged learning work and continue the ongoing goal of building out long-term community partnerships.

“As someone who previously directed an organization that relied heavily on state and federal policy outcomes, I’m eager to join the Brooks Engagement team and help to push this incredibly important work forward,” Warner said.

Giles Morris is assistant dean for communications in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.