Hope Found Here: Reflections on Compact26

By Jack Pawlowski and the NERLab Team

On March 17th, 2026, the NERLab team presented our research on neighborliness at Compact26, Campus Compact’s Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. This was NERLab’s second year in a row presenting at the conference. Campus Compact is a national coalition of colleges and universities, of which Providence College (PC) is a member institution, committed to the public purposes of higher education. And the conference has become one of the “largest and most inclusive national conference[s] focused on the role of higher education in building healthy communities and fostering a just and equitable democracy.” It is a unique blend of civic and community engagement scholars and practitioners who come together annually to share research, learn from one another’s experiences, and build best practices. 

Immediately before Compact26, Research Fellows Miranda and Chase, along with Carmine, were “in a NERLab state of mind,” representing the lab and PC at the fifth annual BIG EAST Undergraduate Research Symposium, held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Each BIG EAST school sends five research projects, and this year’s delegation from PC included students from Neuroscience, Chemistry, Biology, and Public and Community Service Studies (PSP). 

Our resilience as community-engaged scholars was tested against several rescheduled and cancelled flights leading up to both conferences. Thankfully, the team made it to both NYC and Chicago, as did over 900 community engagement professionals, engaged faculty, community partners, student civic leaders, and campus senior leaders from across the country attending Compact26, which was a record-breaking attendance for the conference!

Monday, March 16: Getting Acclimated — Beanies and Breakthroughs 

For us in NERLab, the opening conference session was a humbling experience, both to learn from and to connect with so many like-minded community-engaged scholars. It also reaffirmed the importance of our work in the lab in collaborating with our local neighbors to make an impact. Panelists Renaldo Hudson and Stanley Howard, both organizers and current College Unbound students who were formerly incarcerated, underscored the role of community-engaged scholars—as a megaphone to not only amplify underrepresented voices but also to ensure that engaged work moves toward meaningful action. 

Even before we walked into the conference, we were given Compact26 beanies embroidered with the conference theme: “Hope Found Here.” For us in NERLab, from time to time, we wrestle with a nagging feeling of cynicism that our work may fall short of bringing neighborliness to the front of our institution. But, from the moment we walked into the conference, hope was instilled in our work and all of us. Hudson and Howard, who spoke on the panel with College Unbound Co-Founder and President, Dr. Adam Bush, shared the work of College Unbound as a change-maker in higher education, working to make college more accessible for all students, not just those who can afford it and come from traditional backgrounds. In reflecting on their experiences surviving death row in Illinois and their journeys toward college graduation, they emphasized that “hope is a human right. It cannot be taken away, only surrendered.” To demonstrate hope as a practice of deep relationship-building, they engaged in a practice of Civic Love—a dialogue tool developed by the National Public Housing Museum and something we have practiced on campus through our Leadership through Community Organization course. Following the opening session, the NERLab team attended various breakout sessions and connected with fellow scholars as we prepared to present our own work the next day.

Tuesday, March 17: Getting Involved — The Presentation Gauntlet

St. Patrick’s Day began with our “Promising Practice” session, an elevator pitch for NERLab that gave all of us a chance to show what neighborliness can accomplish for community-campus relationships and what each of us brings to the table in this work. Here, we framed neighborliness not as a program or product, but as an ongoing practice—and as something we practice both within the lab structure as a learning community and through our collaborations with local community members. After we presented, session participants joined us in conversation to learn more about what we are striving to do and provide insights from their own institutional contexts and work, which was a humbling and powerful experience.

Before we reconvened for a roundtable discussion and a poster presentation later in the day, NERLab had some time to explore Millennium Park and appreciate the art and architecture of Chicago, as well as some great food! Part of community-engaged research is getting out there and being active locally. Putting this into practice gave us the opportunity to get to know Chicago but also to draw so many connections of “hope” both inside and outside of the conference. Walking in Chicago, we came across a bronze bust of Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable, the Haitian-born trader credited as the founder of Chicago, which none of us knew about. We found hope in this statue that illuminated efforts to challenge the historical exclusion of significant figures in Black American history in the city. The moment prompted NERLab to reflect on how practices of neighborliness might help center underrepresented figures within our own campus and community contexts in Providence.

Back at the conference, Zak and Daleth led a roundtable session that engaged fellow civic student leaders and other conference attendees looking to make change in their respective campuses and communities. They shared strategies they developed as Research Fellows and civically-engaged student leaders to navigate institutional barriers through coalition building and by developing relationships with other campus organizations, faculty, staff, and community-based organizations. They also learned about effective practices from other student leaders representing a range of institutional contexts at the conference. The rest of the group went to similar breakout sessions during the conference, showing us how curricula like ours in PSP have helped initiate positive institutional change on their own campuses.

Chase, Miranda, and Kat’s poster presentation synthesizing our research brought rich conversations to NERLab’s work. We shared our research findings—Principles and Practice for Neighborly Engagement, defined by neighbors themselves. We even connected with one of our own Elmhurst neighbors who works for Campus Compact! Sharing our work provided a strong learning environment for both listeners and presenters. The presentation drew in many new faces, allowing our lab to branch out and hear how our work connected to projects nationwide.

While they were presenting, Zak and I had the chance to connect with a colleague of Carmine’s who encouraged us to take risks, embrace failure in the field of community engagement, and make an effort to experience conferences like Compact whenever we can.

Wednesday, March 18: Getting Reflective — “Learning is a Mode of Care” 

On Wednesday, after celebrating completing our presentations, we ended Compact26 in the closing session. Dr. Byron White—whose work has been central to NERLab—delivered a speech about the role of higher education and moving beyond a traditional student-centric paradigm of learning to one that is community-centric. He calls for higher education to be more equitable, measuring success not in post-graduate income statistics but in the connections made in relationship to the college and local community that graduating students will be able to carry with them. The community-centric paradigm, he says, sets students up for sustained learning by addressing their needs as a collective of people, rather than focusing on addressing their needs for knowledge or a return on investment. White’s speech resonated with all of us in a way that encompassed our observations throughout the conference: We at NERLab have sought to foster a community-centric paradigm with our neighbors in Elmhurst, Smith Hill, and Wanscuck. For NERLab, we spent the last year learning from local residents and working to strengthen community-campus relationships within our own institutional and neighborhood context. While NERLab represents a modest effort within both our institution and the broader field of higher education community engagement, we remain committed to challenging these dynamics and advocating for equitable, sustained collaborations between our campus and the local community—even in small, everyday ways. Through this work—and by listening to the words of Byron White—we understand that “learning is a mode of care,” something that we value deeply as practice in NERLab.

Through a colleague of Carmine’s, we attended a tour of the National Public Housing Museum, a unique space dedicated to preserving the objects and memories of public housing residents past and present, housed within the last remaining original Jane Addams building. The Jane Addams building is a part of Chicago’s first public housing development. Household artifacts, the museum’s so-called “objects of our affection,” recreations, and audio recordings of public housing residents demonstrate the hope in preserving and celebrating the memories of public housing and its dignity. A diorama created by child visitors of what they’d like a public housing development to look like gave us hope for the future of public housing. Ending our conference experience with being immersed in the history of the neighborhood helped reinforce a consistent lesson we learned during our time: that community is inherent. No matter where you are, those around you seek a sense of belonging, a place in the neighborhood, and the first way of implementing this is caring enough to learn. As Gwendolyn Brooks says, “we are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” Reflecting on our time in Chicago, we hope to practice this active learning and remain engaged with our local community as well as our academic community in an equitable and continuously reflective way that truly represents those involved.

Jack Pawlowski is an undergraduate student in the Class of 2027 at Providence College, double-majoring in Finance and Public and Community Service Studies. He is a Research Fellow in the Neighborly Engagement Research Lab (NERLab) at Providence College.