Joe Brooks

Background

About Joe Brooks

Joe is the Director and Founder of Community Works Institute (CWI) and a veteran teacher. He is an international advocate, speaker, and workshop leader. Joe has worked with K-16 schools for three decades, focusing on embedding culturally responsive place based service-learning and sustainability in K-16 education. Joe brings his extensive experience and personal passion for experiential education to the schools he works with to create opportunities for all students to bring their communities together through purposeful local people-oriented projects. He travels widely in the U.S. and internationally working with K-16 schools and teachers through a process that emphasizes service-learning as a teaching strategy to develop understanding, empathy, compassion, and connection for young people. Over the past three decades Joe has worked across the U.S. and internationally with students, educators, and administrators, at every grade level, both in urban and rural contexts. As a public school teacher in Vermont he established a nationally recognized K-12 service-learning program that included a unique student run community newspaper that thrived for more than twenty years. In 1995 he established CWI's Summer EAST Institute in Vermont, and later Summer WEST in Los Angeles. These week long intensive Institutes function as a collaborative learning and design laboratory and have been attended by educators from nearly every U.S. state and many countries around the world. Participant demographics include K-16 and community educators from an incredibly diverse set of contexts and job descriptions. Joe's message to Institute participants is to always seek to develop learning experiences that possess a compelling sense of purpose and the broadest possible inclusion of community members. Joe is also the publisher of Community Works Journal, a digital magazine for educators.