POV shares insights from the Â鶹¾«Ñ¡ community on important topics. Craig Berger, associate director for Â鶹¾«Ñ¡'s Center for Student Involvement, recently shared how one student felt empowered to step out of her comfort zone to learn more about her future industry. Berger writes that her embrace of Civic Belonging not only provides evidence of how Golden Flashes gain confidence by taking risks, but also highlights the opportunity he and others have to inspire students to take charge of their lives and careers.
There's a message we try to build into Kent State's Community Action Fellows program from the start: there is nothing stopping you from making the call, booking the room, or reaching out to the person you want to learn from.
The worst that can happen is someone says no.
One student, working to bring natural dye practices into the fashion program, held onto that longer than most. She later described it as the moment she realized she didn't need anyone's permission to start; she'd had it the whole time. Not long after, she reached out to a textile artist a state away, and ended up touring his studio and his dye garden, gathering the kind of knowledge that shaped what she built when she came home.
That is worth being precise about. Belonging asks whether I have a place here. Civic belonging asks something harder: whether I have a role in shaping here. Those are not the same question.
Much of that impression comes from good instincts and real data. Belonging predicts persistence, and persistence is what keeps a student enrolled and a university stable, so the field has spent decades building programs to help students feel seen, welcomed, supported, included. All of that matters, deeply. Students need to be known, to have their identities honored, to find relationships possible in a place that could otherwise feel anonymous.
Answering the real question
But somewhere in that necessary pursuit, we may have folded a larger question into a smaller one. Too easily, belonging can become a box on a persistence dashboard instead of a developmental outcome worth understanding on its own terms. A student can feel entirely welcomed, retained, on track to graduate, and still wait for someone else to grant her the authority to act.
That is where civic belonging becomes more than a phrase. It is not enough to tell a student she matters. It is putting her in a position to discover that her judgment, her outreach, her willingness to ask for something she has no guarantee of getting, can actually move something.
That is what happened when a student decided a dye garden the next state over was worth a phone call. It is what happens when students learn how decisions actually get made around them, or sit with someone whose life looks nothing like theirs long enough for the conversation to become more than an exercise, or partner with a community organization instead of just serving it.
None of that is a single event. It isn't a slogan about democracy, and it isn't the comfort of feeling included. It is civic belonging: a student coming to believe that a place is partly hers to help build, and that authority is not always something she has to wait for someone else to hand her.
We keep telling students they belong here. I wonder, sometimes, if we have done enough to tell them the place is theirs to build.