Givology - give to learn, learn to give

Ira Harkavy is Associate Vice President and founding Director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships, University of Pennsylvania. An historian with extensive experience building university-community-school partnerships, Harkavy teaches in the departments of history, urban studies, Africana studies, and city and regional planning. As Director of the Netter Center since 1992, Harkavy has helped to develop service-learning courses as well as participatory action research projects that involve creating university-assisted community schools in Penn's local community of West Philadelphia.

Dr. Harkavy calls himself a ‘historian by training’ but brings a wide variety of perspectives to his teaching, his scholarship, and his service. Having taught his first ‘quasi’ service-learning course as early as 1985, his coursework strives to realize the full meaning of democratic education. In his own words, his current teaching ‘seeks to combine academically-based community service, collaborative, democratic learning and real-world problem solving on campus and in the community.’ Executive Editor of Universities and Community Schools, Harkavy has written and lectured widely on the history and current practice of urban university-community-school partnerships and strategies for integrating the university missions of teaching, research, and service.

Harkavy also served as consultant to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help create its Office of University Partnerships and is a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Harkavy is a member of numerous boards, including the Advisory Committee of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) at the National Science Foundation; Widener University Board of Trustees; the International Consortium on Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy (US chair); Anchor Institutions Task Force (chair); Coalition for Community Schools (chair); and Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (co-chair). He is the recipient of Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning (2002), the University of Pennsylvania’s Alumni Award of Merit (2004), a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant (2005), and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Heritage Award (2006); and, under his directorship, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships received the inaugural William T. Grant Foundation Youth Development Prize sponsored in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Children, Youth and Families (2003) and a Best Practices/Outstanding Achievement Award from HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (2000).

Please add your comments and thoughts below. Or better yet, submit a response video to Dr. Harkavy's 60 Second Lecture. Tag it on YouTube, and email us!