From its inception, the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative has reimagined international education and partnerships.
Historically, global learning was shaped by North–South exchanges that often reinforced colonial hierarchies, with Southern communities treated as sites of experience rather than as co-educators. Critical scholarship has challenged these dynamics, but decolonization remains incomplete.
Geopolitical transitions create new opportunities. The erosion of U.S. dominance and the rise of a multipolar world open space for alternative leadership. Emerging leaders—women, people of color, indigenous voices, and collective movements—are challenging the dominant white male leadership persona. This moment allows Global South universities to model inclusive, community-anchored, and collaborative academic leadership.
Global South universities face their own internal colonialities. Extension programs often reproduce top- down approaches that marginalize community knowledge. Universities perpetuate elite privilege within their societies, creating a “colonial class” disconnected from grassroots realities. Internationally, Southern institutions frequently privilege North-linked partnerships over South–South collaboration, sustaining epistemic dependence and prestige hierarchies.
In this presentation and conversation Drs. Soriano and Welch will position the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative as both a mirror and a practice of the multipolar world—an ecosystem where diverse voices shape the agenda, and where universities and communities co- create pathways for decolonized, sustainable, and transformative global learning.
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Dr. Elmer Soriano, MD, MPA is an instructor a the National College of Public Administration at the University of the Philippines. He has been involved in leadership development in Southeast Asia, working with non-profits, government, and leaders of faith-based organizations. By setting up co-creation labs in universities, he has introduced new approaches to teaching and learning among students and faculty. He was recently Impact Fellow at the Asian Institute of Management and Innovator-in-Residence at Lehigh University’s program on Creative Inquiry. He received his Masters in Public Administration at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and Masters in Development Management from the Asian Institute of Management.
Dr. Sharon Welch is an academic, activist, and social ethicist. She has served as a professor at Harvard Divinity School, the University of Missouri Columbia, and the Unitarian Universalist theological school in Chicago, Meadville Lombard. Dr. Welch is retired as Provost at Meadville Lombard Theological School and has continued to work in the field of community-based engagement as a scholar and as the co-facilitator of the Social Transformation School and the Climate Action Lab, support groups for faculty and university leaders reshaping educational systems to meet the needs of social justice and environmental regeneration. She has published a book, After the Protests Are Heard: Enacting Civic Engagement and Social Transformation (NYU Press, 2019) and eight articles on this issue, and is currently incorporating it in the revision of her 2004 book, After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace (Bloomsbury Press, Forthcoming).