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SIL’s teaching and programs focus on:

  • developing experiential teaching methods that equip students with the skills and attributes they need to engage in ethical and effective social change making.
  • complementing classroom-based learning with engagement in today’s most urgent social challenges.
  • promoting ethical community-engaged teaching, learning, and research.

Teaching Aspiring Social Change Leaders

SIL employs pedagogical approaches that emphasize systems thinking, ethical reasoning, and social justice to cultivate values, skills, and attributes essential to ethical and effective social change making. These include: Civic Mindedness, Comfort with Ambiguity, Problem-solving, Patience, Perspective Taking, Introspection, Empathy, Humility, Respect, Active Listening, Strategic Thinking, Planning, Time Management, Communication, Negotiation, Organization, Collaboration/Teamwork, and Decision-making.

These values, skills, and attributes are aligned with Northeastern’s Self Authored Integrated Learning program.

Addressing Urgent Social Challenges

Over the past 5 years alone, Northeastern Students4Giving has addressed:

  • Overcoming Barriers to Mental Health Care Among At-Risk Adolescents and Young Adults
  • Uplifting Community Voice and Public Participation in Civic Decision Making
  • Engaging the Community to Combat Chemical Dependencies
  • Social and Economic Justice Through Community Empowerment and Engagement
  • Empowering Families to Help Children Thrive

Additional SIL programming has prioritized:

  • Environmental justice
  • Climate change
  • Covid-19 and health disparities in communities of color
  • Women’s rights and well-being in Mumbai, India
  • White supremacy and racial injustice

Ethical Community-Engaged Teaching, Learning, and Research

SIL strives to model and promote values and practices that center community members as co-equals in all teaching, learning, research, and institutional engagement that happens off campus or is in any way related to the needs and lived experiences of our fellow human beings.