Community Service is Ishem's Passion: 2013 Community Engagement Award

In 1989, Linda Ishem had just moved to Washington State to take a job in a state agency doing community development. Attending Olympia budget hearings, she heard the testimony of visionaries who insisted the future of Tacoma depended on locating a university within the city's borders.

Today, as a faculty member in Urban Studies, she embodies precisely what they were talking about. When the community rallied in response to the shocking murder of 12-year-old Hilltop resident and McCarver Elementary student Zina Linnik, she began a years-long engagement — through the McCarver Educational Partnership (aka the Zina Linnik Project) — that builds lasting relationships between UW Tacoma students and McCarver students.

Linda got her Ph.D. from UW School of Social Work. She had in mind three goals: to become an academic at a local public urban university; to take what she learned in her earlier community development career and apply it to her teaching; and to have a positive impact on the community, her students and the institution.

"Despite my personal passion for community service, my first and foremost responsibility as a professor is to facilitate knowledge acquisition, build skills and ignite a passion for civic engagement," she says. She's infused "engaged learning" into the courses that she teaches: students spend time planning and hosting UW Tacoma campus visits for McCarver students, or mentoring McCarver students in "common good" learning exchanges.

The McCarver Educational Partnership has received numerous civic awards: the 2010 Red Cross Real Heroes - Good Neighbor Award, the 2011 Metro Parks Because Parks Matter Award and the 2013 City of Destiny Award.

"As a teacher at a public urban university, I build on the reality of our students' lives by using the city and local neighborhoods as learning 'laboratories'," says Linda. The community and UW Tacoma both are the beneficiaries.