Bennington College

Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont is committed to the advancement of public action and will match Segal Education Awards 100% for Bennington student recipients. At its core, advancing public action means addressing three fundamental questions: What kind of world are we making? What kind of world should we be making? What kind of world can we be making? Bennington’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) invites students to put the world’s most pressing problems at the center of their education, or to incorporate these issues into their work in other disciplines. Poverty, war, the environment, public health crises, the struggle for democracy, even the state of education itself—imagine an education where the problems of the world are your subject matter and doing something about them is your aim.

Part of Americorps mission is to "do more than move communities forward; they serve their members by creating jobs and providing pathways to opportunity for young people entering the workforce. AmeriCorps places thousands of young adults into intensive service positions where they learn valuable work skills, earn money for education, and develop an appreciation for citizenship."

Americorp and Bennington College have parallel missions. Bennington provides the unique opportunity to draw on the full breadth of the Bennington curriculum as well as a range of profoundly interdisciplinary public action courses to examine the complex variables that define critical social issues, unpack key concepts, and hone the capacities needed to effect positive and lasting change. In the short term, the aim is to develop frameworks that can generate the most effective solutions to consequential problems; in the long term, it is to become capable of designing and implementing systemic change. During Field Work Term, students bring their work to the world, confronting the challenges of implementation firsthand and refining the questions to further shape their on-campus experience; parallel to the mission of Americorps.

Bennington College will match the Americorp Segal Education Award dollar for dollar (100%) with institutional support.