Revealing our Roots: A Conversation with Ben Lough
Ben Lough is former director of assessment and executive committee member of the Collaborative. He is Professor and Dean of the School of Social Work, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ben continues to serve as Senior Research Associate, Center for Social Development in Africa. (Read more about Ben here.) He recently shared his Collaborative origin story with us. The following was edited lightly for our blog.
My involvement started before there was a Collaborative, globalsl, or a clear sense that this would become an ongoing enterprise. It grew out of early conversations and convenings focused on international service and higher education, especially following the inaugural 2011 symposium on global service learning convened at Washington University in St. Louis. This symposium is best understood as a field-mapping exercise that brought together people who were uneasy about how global service, service-learning, and study abroad were expanding without a shared ethical foundation or evidence base.
At this stage, there was no formal network or organization. The work started as a recognition that the field lacked shared infrastructure for ethical practice and evidence-based decision-making.
From the beginning, my interest in this area was on impact and reciprocity. I was drawn to the work because it treated global engagement as a serious educational and ethical ‘research’ problem, beyond its status as a programmatic opportunity.
The foundational question that animated the early work was simple and unresolved: Under what conditions does global engagement contribute to learning, reciprocity, and community wellbeing, ensuring that higher education is providing value rather than harm or mere symbolic benefit?
My origin story is essentially a small group of people realizing we were asking similar questions and deciding together to keep working on them. This early work emphasized that outcomes were shaped by:
The design of preparation and reflection
The role of community partners as co-educators
Attention to power, positionality, and knowledge production
Continuity before, during, and after engagement
This emphasis on method over modality was a defining intellectual throughline of the Collaborative.
During this formative phase, as discussed at the summit, several possibilities were explicitly or implicitly postponed including formal governance structures, membership models or dues, attempts to seek accreditation or certification, and a push against prescriptive definitions of “best practice” – focusing rather on effective practices for diverse models
I was involved in Collaborative scholarship, Global Engagement Survey (GES) tool development, and summit-based agenda setting in the areas of assessment and comparative learning about impact. The only defined role I held was director of assessment, which was somewhat informal. I also served on the board, and my contributions were primarily as a collaborator and co-creator.
I was centrally involved in the development and testing of the GES was also heavily involved in collaborative writing and analysis related to global learning outcomes, and in shaping the distinction between method and modality that later became foundational to CBGL. I also contributed to summit design, various working groups, and early conversations about evidence and ethics or reciprocal engagement.
Over time, my professional responsibilities at my home university increased. My primary research areas was the impact of international volunteering (i.e. the focus on community impact, vs. the “learning” impact on volunteers or students). As I moved into senior administrative roles, my capacity for sustained engagement with the Collaborative decreased.
I’ve mainly stayed connected through relationships formed during early Collaborative efforts and convenings. This included co-authorship, reviewing drafts, advising on research and assessment questions, participating in CBGL summits (mostly prior to 2018), and maintaining dialogue and intellectual discussions with others involved in the work.
I know how difficult it is to build ethical practice at an institutional level with something as complicated as community engagement. This work has reinforced the reality that meaningful change requires patience and a willingness to accept partial progress. Nothing happens quickly but I am happy to see that the Collaborative is still operational and engaging diverse stakeholder groups.
I carry a strong belief that outcomes are shaped by relationships, as much as by design and delivery models. That insight was reinforced through my work with the Collaborative and it has continued to inform how I think about evaluation and leadership well beyond my work with global learning.
One of the Collaborative’s strengths is that it has refused to oversimplify. The work involves real disagreement; gatherings emphasized the tensions and conflicts inherent in work that is grounded in ethical practice. We did not rush to resolve what was otherwise slow consensus-building.
Rather than trying to smooth away the ongoing tension between ideals and institutional realities, we confronted these tensions head on. That was the nature of the work, and I hope it continues to be. This effort actively resisted becoming a purely professionalized or market-facing enterprise, which not everyone agreed on during its early years; I believe that restraint has preserved the Collaborative’s credibility with community partners and critical scholars.
