CTD and Civic Education: A Longstanding Marriage

By Ed Finkel

Although CTD is probably best known for its hands-on, learning-is-fun, academics-oriented Saturday courses and summer camps, civic education has been a major part of what the Center provides for the past 25 out of its 40 years of existence.

Founded in 1997, the Civic Education Project (CEP) offers service-learning and leadership education opportunities for young people, along with custom-designed programs and curricula for schools, and professional learning opportunities for educators.

Co-founder Rob Donahue, who’s now director of Northwestern’s Center for Civic Engagement—an effort aimed at college students that in many ways sprung forth from CEP—says the initial pitch to the leaders of CTD focused on civic engagement and leadership development as dimensions of talent.

“The CTD team saw some real potential to think more broadly about how to help people develop those particular dimensions of talent, and then also how we best serve gifted-and-talented kids who had other kinds of academic gifts but were, I would argue, in some ways, in need of opportunities that would help them put their talents into a broader context,” he says. “It wasn’t always, say, another accelerated math class that a student needed most as part of their next step in learning, growing and maturing.”

The motivation also stemmed from research that delved into young people’s sense of justice and curiosity about the world, says Katrina Weimholt, another co-founder who’s now assistant director at the Center for Civic Engagement. “We wanted to provide them with real-world experiences to dive into those kinds of questions and figure out answers for themselves,” she says.

During the heyday of the community service movement in the late 1990s, with AmeriCorps established and Teach for America coming of age, the CEP experiences began with immersive travel trips for older children—from working on a Native American reservation to focusing on homelessness in Washington, D.C. But they evolved over time to serve a wider age range—and became more Chicago-area-focused.

As time went on, CEP’s offerings also began intertwining at least somewhat with the core CTD courses, and the program ultimately found ways to integrate more fully with the other programs, including online and hybrid options that predated the pandemic, Weimholt says. “CTD and centers like it have been increasingly adding course content focused on exploration of issues in the world,” she says.

CEP indeed had a wider impact than just at Northwestern, from partnering with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation on programming, to being asked to present at national conferences about gifted-and-talented students, Donahue says. “I think it’s fair to say we had something of an impact on the topics of civic engagement and leadership in the gifted-and-talented field,” he says.

On Northwestern’s campus, CEP definitely helped to inspire the creation of the Center for Civic Engagement. “Because our work had been affiliated with Northwestern, that had us talking to students and faculty on campus, and there were many people who were supporters of what we were doing,” Donahue says. “Some of those folks were saying, ‘This work is terrific—why aren’t we doing more of it for our [college student] population?’ And so that really laid the groundwork and planted the seed.”

“A lot of the fundamentals of [Center for Civic Engagement] programs have roots in programs we did at CTD,” Weimholt says. “There’s also some parallels in that CTD developed a great concept for thinking about these pathways—that students can come in with different interests and skill levels, and follow a number of different trajectories to develop their interests and skills and talents. And I think that’s something we try to infuse here, as well, working with undergraduates and graduate students across the university.”

While it’s easy to be disillusioned and feel stymied by the challenges and frustrations and tragedies of the world, Weimholt holds out hope that programs like CEP and the Center for Civic Engagement will empower young people to make an impact. “The world needs the best and brightest kids to be paying attention, using their skills in socially responsible ways,” Donahue says. “We hope these programs have contributed to that effort.