Netter Center for Community Partnerships

Person sits on corner of conference table with wall of books behind them, smiling at the camera.

Walter Licht’s legacy of civic engagement

For more than 40 years at Penn, Walter Licht has crafted a career of equal parts renowned historian, teacher, and community activist, including creating the Penn Civic Scholars Program. Licht recently announced he is stepping down from his positions at Civic House.

Kristen de Groot ・

Four adults and three high school students posed with social media frames

Closing the wealth gap in West Philadelphia

The City of Philadelphia and Actions Not Words have selected Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships to develop and implement a new entrepreneurial program, Project Elevate, offering financial literacy education at public high schools.

Kristina García ・

a person sitting at a microscope looking at a computer screen surrounded by pipet boxes, chemicals, and cabinetry

From the classroom to the lab and back again

Senior Adithya Sriram is busy earning two degrees, researching new applications for graphene, and preparing physics courses for students in West Philadelphia.

Erica K. Brockmeier ・

A volunteer with Penn Leads the Vote talks with a student outside on College Green

Get out the student vote

Penn Leads the Vote, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and the Office of Government and Community Affairs work in tandem to make Penn a civic-minded population of voters in all elections.

Tina Rodia ・



Media Contact


Kristina García

Kristina García News Officer
klg@upenn.edu

In the News


Philadelphia Inquirer

Here’s what these youth advocates have to say about Philly’s truancy problem, and how they would fix it

The Netter Center for Community Partnerships has more than 30 years of investment in connecting resources that address truancy, such as establishing after-school programming.

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Billy Penn

A real art project at Quinta Brunson’s former school in West Philly mirrors the ‘Abbott Elementary’ Mural Arts episode

Thanks to the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, Shira Walinsky of the Weitzman School of Design designed and created a mural at West Philly’s Andrew Hamilton Elementary with help from volunteers and Penn students.

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Chronicle of Higher Education

Cities and the urban university

Penn is lauded for organizing a University-Assisted Community Schools Network and for offering roughly 80 academically-based community service courses through the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, with a quote from the Center’s founding director Ira Harkavy.

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The New York Times

Community schools offer more than just teaching

The Netter Center University-Assisted Community Schools Network, founded in 2015, is noted as a valuable partnership between community schools and about 70 universities.

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Philadelphia Inquirer

News Penn partners with West Philly High to give it a new ‘front porch’ and teach students about careers

Daniel Flinchbaugh of the Weitzman School of Design manages Design to Thrive, a Weitzman summer program in collaboration with the Netter Center for Community Partnerships. The project teamed Weitzman grad students with West Philadelphia High School students to build a new outdoor rec area for their high school.

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Inside Higher Ed

The fight for diverse, inclusive, antiracist, and just democracies

Ira Harkavy and Rita Hodges of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships and others co-wrote an op-ed about higher education and systemic oppression. “Just as many colleges and universities are reckoning with their own institutional histories of exclusion, higher education as a field must recognize where it has failed and come up short. Only then can it come honestly to tables with communities, governments, and citizens to build inclusive, antiracist democracies together,” they wrote.

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