Two talks will be held Friday, Nov. 6, focusing on international community partnerships and collaboration.

The first, a lunch talk with panelists Shorna Broussard Allred, James Lassoie and N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba on “The Local and the Global: Dialogues on Community Engagement,” will take place in 226 Weill Hall from noon to 1:30 p.m.

Allred, associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources, directs the Global Citizenship and Sustainability: Environmental Community Based Research Project, which seeks to foster engaged research, global learning, student leadership and social responsibility. She will draw on her research program to discuss the importance of blending human factors and natural sciences to improve resource management.

Lassoie, the International Professor of Conservation in the Department of Natural Resources, specializes in community-based management and has collaborated on engaged learning and research projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He will discuss the service-learning course sequence he recently developed in Ecuador.

Assie-Lumumba is professor of African and diaspora education, comparative and international education, social institutions, African social history and the study of gender in the Africana Studies and Research Center and president of the Comparative and International Education Society. She will discuss her work with Big Red Relief, a humanitarian group that promotes global issues on campus, and her work with Voices of African Mothers, an organization that focuses on women’s education and empowerment as a route to African nation development.

The second event, a panel discussion from 3 to 4:15 p.m. in G08 Uris Hall on “Working in Partnership: Narratives from the Nilgris Field Learning Center (NFLC), a collaboration between Cornell and the Keystone Foundation, India” will explore the dimensions, challenges and promise of various forms of partnership in participatory and engaged learning in the NFLC model.

Featured speakers are: 

• Anita Varghese and Archana Sivaramakrishan, Keystone Foundation, India;
• Neema Kudva, associate professor of city and regional planning;
• Steven Wolf, associate professor of natural resources;
• Rebecca Stoltzfus, professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences;
• Andrew Willford, associate professor of anthropology; and
• students from the spring 2015 NFLC semester.

The speaker series is a collaboration among the Public Service Center, Engaged Learning + Research, the Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives, Cornell Abroad and the Program for International Nutrition.