Kwesi Craig Brookins Named 2018-19 ACE Fellow

The American Council on Education (ACE) announced that Kwesi Craig Brookins, associate professor in the Department of Psychology with an appointment in Africana Studies, has been named an ACE Fellow for the 2018-19 academic year.

Brookins will spend the next year at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) learning more about community engagement, the Scholarship of Engagement, and how anchor institutions in urban areas effectively collaborate with local communities. Brookins was nominated for the program by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Warwick Arden.

“Given the growing urban identity of Raleigh and Wake County, I am excited about the lessons on urban engagement that I can learn from VCU, which has a strong, longstanding identity as an urban-serving university,” said Brookins. “I will also have significant opportunities to shadow VCU president Michael Rao, the university’s provost, and others within VCU’s academic leadership.”

The ACE Fellows program allows participants to further develop leadership capabilities through engaging in the “culture, policies and decision-making processes of another institution.” For more than 50 years, the program has helped nearly 2,000 academic leaders further the mission and vision of their respective colleges and universities. More than 80 percent of these participants have served at the dean level and above.

“Kwesi’s contributions to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the university as a whole provides a solid example of leadership through teaching, research and service,” said Arden. “He sets a standard in higher education that will be of great benefit to both VCU and NC State.”

Brookins’ scholarship at NC State focuses in large part on community-university engagement. He has served as a co-PI on an interdisciplinary research project called the Southeast Equine Research and Education Partnership (SEREP), a collaboration between NC State and Isothermal Community College in Spindale, North Carolina. The goal of the project is to determine how an equine research, training and education facility can be established in the area to grow local industry and support local culture.

For the past 18 months, he has served as an Outreach and Engagement Faculty Fellow, working to understand how scholarship informs university operations and how NC State can positively impact the communities it serves.

“Leadership plays a key role in realizing these impacts,” said Brookins. “However, leadership at a university should be broadly defined to include not just those who administer the institution but the faculty and researchers who conduct the learning and discovery that feeds social change.”  

At VCU, Brookins will examine the intersection of leadership development and community psychology. This focus will help shed further light on how scholars and researchers collaboratively work with community members and institutions to build and maintain communities that meet the needs of all citizens.

“Communities within and outside the university require effective leadership to accomplish these goals, and community-university engagement is critical to NC State’s land-grant mission,” said Brookins. “This fellowship opportunity will help further my understanding and leadership skills related to how large and comprehensive universities can leverage their intellectual and economic resources to positively impact the health of our communities.”