For 40 years the Center for Transformative Action (CTA) has been an incubator of social change, spinning off several of the nonprofits that dot Ithaca's community landscape.

Now CTA is poised to do the same thing across New York state, said Anke Wessels, CTA executive director. "There's an opportunity here to help more people across the state develop their social change projects and learn more about transformative action," she said.

A nonprofit university affiliate that focuses on social change, CTA was unique when it was founded in 1971; today, there's still nothing else quite like it in the United States, Wessels said. "It has always been a place where innovative, creative ideas about how we could solve and resolve social problems could be not just discussed but actually concretely created."

CTA grew out of the tumultuous era when many Cornell chaplains affiliated with Cornell United Religious Work were active in movements against racial discrimination and other controversial issues. For example, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan's anti-Vietnam War resistance activities -- including burning draft registration records -- resulted in a three-year prison sentence, which he went underground to avoid. "There were folks at Cornell who didn't want this kind of social activism linked to the university directly," Wessels said.

So the university created the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy (the former name of CTA until 2006) and made it an independent entity, providing it with seed money for its first few years. "Cornell did quite a bit to make sure that this organization would get off the ground and flourish," Wessels said.

Several Ithaca organizations started out under the CTA umbrella, from the Women's Opportunity Center and the Community Dispute Resolution Center to The Learning Web and the Multicultural Resource Center. Cornell students also have created CTA projects. For example, Engineers for a Sustainable World was started by a graduate student in engineering; now housed at the University of California-Merced, it has more than 24 college chapters that work on sustainability efforts worldwide.

CTA acts as a fiscal sponsor to social entrepreneurs, providing them with its tax exempt, nonprofit status and such business services as accounting, liability insurance, payroll and grants administration. As for its own finances, CTA is funded by the income from various university endowments and rents office space in Cornell's Anabel Taylor Hall at a discount.

In return, CTA contributes to Cornell's educational mission and commitment to public engagement in many ways. Among them, CTA advises several student organizations and provides a mentoring program that matches students with alumni who have experience in social change. It also offers an undergraduate class on social entrepreneurship, taught by Wessels.

"We're fostering a generation of social entrepreneurs on campus," Wessels said.

CTA projects must demonstrate a commitment to transformative action, a paradigm for social action that moves beyond complaint, competition and "us versus them" thinking. It includes speaking out about injustice, finding common ground with adversaries and coming up with an inspiring, proactive vision of the future.

The result? Long-term solutions that work, Wessels said. "When we engage in dialogue from that basis of common ground, there's a richness of possibilities that we couldn't see before."

That could also describe one of CTA's newest projects and its first based in New York City: The Relationship Foundation provides high school students with a curriculum that helps them develop communication skills for healthy relationships.

"The Relationship Foundation helps young people understand the powerful synergy that exists between personal and social transformation. It also exemplifies the type of projects we hope to attract statewide because it combines the pragmatism of social entrepreneurship with the compassionate, collaborate engagement of transformative action," Wessels said.

Information about the 40th anniversary events, which take place Oct. 23-25, can be found at http://www.centerfortransformativeaction.org/40th-anniversary.html.

Center for Transformative Action:

The Center for Transformative Action serves as a home for:

Alternatives Library, offering materials on alternative thought and socially responsible activities;

Committee on U.S.-Latin American Relations, working for peace, justice and greater mutual understanding in U.S.-Latin American relations;

Dorothy Cotton Institute, training leaders and creating networks in the human rights movement;

EcoVillage at Ithaca's Center for Sustainability Education, promoting experiential learning about healthy lifestyles that minimize ecological impacts;

Ithaca City of Asylum, providing sanctuary to writers whose works are suppressed, whose lives are threatened or whose cultures are vanishing;

Life Writing Project, reconnecting us to our original selves and each other through life writing workshops and by training life-writing coaches;

An Open Window, teaching art to incarcerated individuals in maximum-security prisons;

Relationship Foundation, teaching high school students the communication skills that lay the foundation for healthy relationships;

Tompkins County Workers' Center, standing up with people treated unfairly at work or faced with other critical social and economic issues;

Veterans' Sanctuary, providing a residential program to support Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as they transition from combat to civilian life; and

Vitamin L, encouraging character development through music and inspiring young people with messages that are meaningful in their daily lives.