Executive Director
| Shibli, Rabih |
| Administrative Assistant | Bou Fadel, Mireille |
Staff and Research Assistants
| Abou Farraj, Lina; Fleihan, Hala; Chahine, Karen; Bou Matar, Sarah; Massalkhi, Fatima; Ziadeh, Raghda; Gabriel, Alan; Khayata, Rim; Bzeih, Bachar
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Vision
To position AUB as a civic convener and frontline responder to societal conflicts and challenges, while realizing the potential of university students as changemakers in local and global contexts.
Mission
To leverage operational research, campus community, and socially responsive partnerships to address societal challenges, while equipping students with the professional skills necessary for ethical and effective crisis management. This mission is reflected in three cross-cutting tenets:
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Engaged Scholars Program (ESP)
Each year, CCE guides more than 700 undergraduate and graduate scholarship recipients from Lebanon, the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan through a four-track journey beginning with volunteering rotations, advancing to internships with community-based organizations, and culminating with the development of Community Engagement Projects (CEPs), which are grounded in both scholars’ expertise and local community needs. Throughout this process, scholars are provided with sequentially layered skills-building workshops enabling them to complete program milestones. -
Fundamentals in Community Engagement (FCE)
CCE offers three-credit Community Engaged Learning courses as part of AUB’s core General Education curriculum. Students first enroll in Phil 200A, a one credit self-paced online prerequisite that introduces the principles and values of community engagement and features field reports from AUB student-led community projects. The remaining two credits are completed through Phil 200B and Phil 200C, which combine in-person seminars with supervised field work and volunteering rotations with partners from the public sector and community-based organizations. This course sets the foundation for experiential learning to become an integral component of the academic journey for students across all disciplines. -
Strategic Community Initiatives (SCIs)
CCE plays a leading role in empowering the most vulnerable populations through high impact multi-year interventions by first identifying themes, setting a roadmap for project development, and establishing strategic partnerships with academia, stakeholders, and funding agencies. Each contextualized SCI begins as a meticulously designed prototype aimed at tackling local complexities; it must be flexible, resilient, and positioned in the most appropriate setting to thrive. Insights, common practices, and readily available resources within the targeted communities provide invaluable building blocks that increase local buy-in, ownership, and the sustainability of the prototype. By leveraging cutting-edge operational research, SCIs produce tangible solutions that can be expanded to cover a wider scope within the same targeted community and transferred to various locations enduring similar challenges.
AUB’s community engagement through CCE has earned international recognition. AUB has been designated as the “most civically engaged campus” in the Middle East and North Africa, and has won the MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship, the MIT Enterprise Forum ‘Innovate for Refugees’ Award, as well as the Fritz Redlich Human Rights Award from Harvard University.