About Us

Mission and Goals

The Downtown Education Collaborative is a partnership of Lewiston-Auburn’sacademic institutions and three other community partners.  The core partners are Andover College, Bates College, Central Maine Community College, the University of Southern Maine Lewiston-Auburn College, the Lewiston Public Library, Lewiston Adult Education, and Empower Lewiston, a non-profit community organization established to serve Lewiston’s downtown neighborhood.  DEC partners have pledged to work together to pursue community-based educational work in and with the underserved neighborhoods of Lewiston, Maine.

The primary purpose of the Collaborative is to create an innovative model of community-based education and enhance the role of education to empower communities and effect beneficial social change. To accomplish this, the Collaborative has developed three core goals: 
  •To bring the resources and skills of the Colleges of the Androscoggin into partnership with the downtown community through collaborative projects and programs.
•To foster inter-college collaboration, and develop usable models of inter-college collaboration.
•To create a common space for democratic dialogue, learning and action.

History

DEC is the fruit of several years of planning and discussion.  The collaborative members came together around a core set of shared values and the vision that as a collaborative DEC would enable its members to meet community needs more effectively than any could do on their own.  In addition, as a collaborative DEC would foster interchange among institutions with diverse student bodies, missions, and expertise, and catalyze new models of engaged teaching, research, and educational practice.  It was this dream, combined with the commitment and hard work of its members, which led to the formation of DEC and its official launch into the community in the spring of 2008.