Cornell offers undergraduate students a wide variety of opportunities to become involved in positive change through community-engaged learning.

Seven projects are receiving a boost from the latest round of Engaged Opportunity Grants, awarded two times a year by the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement to teams of faculty or staff and their community partners.

Take the Coddington Road Community Center in Ithaca for example, where a cross-college collaboration is bringing together expertise and ideas from students in courses in landscape architecture, architecture and civil engineering. Under the leadership of Jennifer Birkeland, assistant professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Qi Li, associate professor in the College of Engineering; and Emma Silverblatt, visiting critic in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, participants will help shape the center’s outdoor spaces for all-season childcare and youth programming.

An Engaged Opportunity Grant awarded to Sharifa Wip, associate dean of students and director of black student empowerment in Student and Campus Life, supports the community-engaged work of Black Students United (BSU). Mentors from the student-run group are sharing their enthusiasm for Afro-centric values, academic excellence, activism and leadership with Black Ithaca high schoolers through the Southside Community Center. The Einhorn Center has previously nurtured BSU’s partnership with the historic center through a Community Partnership Funding Board grant and a Group Certificate in Community-Engaged Leadership.

A third project, BIRDSONG, is a repeat recipient, thanks to a Sustaining Engaged Opportunity Grant, launched this year. Applicants who have successfully completed an EOG Planning grant are eligible. Led by Nora Prior, assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and Susanne Bruyère, professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the outreach program pairs Cornell STEM students with high school students with disabilities or communication challenges in the BOCES Career Program. With assistance from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, they explore their interest in birds and how to communicate about science.

Additional projects that received winter 2025 Engaged Opportunity Grants are:

• Community Health Assessment: enhancing Tompkins County’s community health assessment with ethnographic insights into health disparities
• Compassionate Release Project: student volunteers advocate for the compassionate release of prisoners serving extreme sentences in federal prison
• Lenape Cultural Connections to the Hudson River: members of the Delaware/Lenape and Mohican-Munsee peoples reconnect to each other and their homeland with support from the NYS Water Resources Institute