How Community Plays a Critical Role in Fostering Lifelong Learning

This column frequently discusses the importance of lifelong learning: how the COVID-19 world we’re living in now necessitates that learning doesn’t stop after a traditional college education. Technology, skills and industries change so quickly that we need to be learning while we’re working, and vice versa. It also goes without saying that the pandemic has only accelerated these trends. 

Bendable, a community-based learning marketplace created by the Drucker Institute, a social enterprise at Claremont Graduate University, holds lifelong learning as a core value. The Bendable initiative, currently focused in South Bend, Indiana, is dedicated to creating and fostering lifelong learning opportunities to the communities in which it operates. Bendable offers edX courses among the resources available to local residents.

The Drucker Institute’s Rick Wartzman sat down with me to discuss the importance of lifelong learning and how initiatives like Bendable can help create these types of opportunities for communities.

You’ve been quoted as saying, “Bendable isn’t going to solve poverty. It isn’t going to solve structural racism. It isn’t going to solve anything in one fell swoop, but it can be a part of a powerful set of solutions that communities need to try, and provide easy and almost radical access to resources.” Can you expand a bit on this statement, specifically how you see companies playing a role in this “powerful” solutions set?

The fundamental idea behind Bendable is to give all residents of a community—no matter their background or age or level of formal education—the ability to more easily acquire new knowledge and skills through online courses as well as in-person learning opportunities. Over time, if enough people tap into Bendable and take advantage of what it offers, we believe that we can forge a “city of lifelong learning,” making the community more resilient in the face of a fast-changing economy or a pandemic. Embedded in all of this, of course, is a fundamental belief in the power of learning to help improve people’s lives—to put them on a pathway to better jobs and higher wages, to make them more informed and engaged as citizens, to enhance their overall well-being.

But we have no illusions, either. As crucial as learning is, especially in a knowledge age, it’s not a magic bullet. We see Bendable specifically, and learning and education more generally, as just one piece of a much larger set of resources that are required for a community to flourish. People also need high-quality jobs that pay a living wage and provide strong benefits. They need access to reliable transportation and high-quality, affordable childcare. They need safe neighborhoods where they have options to buy healthy food and green spaces for their kids to play. All of these things need to be integrated, holistically and harmoniously, for a city to truly thrive. And all sectors—public, private and nonprofit—need to pull together to ensure that these foundations are in place.

Embedded in all of this, of course, is a fundamental belief in the power of learning to help improve people’s lives—to put them on a pathway to better jobs and higher wages, to make them more informed and engaged as citizens, to enhance their overall well-being.

Bendable is all about creating lifelong learning systems. Lifelong learning is something that is at the heart of edX’s vision for the future of education and work, too. What is your advice for companies or communities looking to establish a culture of lifelong learning and adoption of lifelong learning systems?

What we’re starting to see play out in our first Bendable city of South Bend, Indiana—and we suspect this is true in most other places, as well—are a couple of things. First, there is a great interest in learning among all segments of the community and a broad understanding that access to high-quality learning resources is highly beneficial to residents, to organizations and to the community as a whole. But people don’t always know how to plug in to the right opportunities. There is a ton of great national learning content out there, including edX. And there is a ton of great local learning content, as well. And yet figuring out where to turn and whom to trust can be bewildering for people. A place like South Bend isn’t under-resourced from a learning standpoint; it’s under-organized.

Which leads me to the second thing we see. When you invest the time and cultivate real and trusting relationships in a community, you can begin to help organize those opportunities for learning and begin to build the habit of continuous learning across the community. Let me be specific. The Bendable team—that is, the Drucker Institute and our partners at the St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend—collaborated this summer with the city parks department to be their learning partner on a jobs program for 89 young people. The program participants accessed six courses through Bendable on soft skills and career preparation, and our follow-up surveying found that 87% indicated that the learning was “relevant to my future.” 

Employers are now turning to us to help them shape course lists for their staff; they’re using the Bendable platform to deliver training. Public school teachers are integrating Bendable into their classrooms as part of their curriculum. Goodwill case workers are assigning learning activities on Bendable to their clients. In other words, after just a few months, Bendable is being integrated into the programming and activities of organizations throughout South Bend. But it takes a lot of effort to curate the right learning for each partner, to make sure that we’re helping them better meet their needs and the needs of those they serve. It’s not one-size-fits-all. One final note on that: We are currently working with several businesses and the Forever Learning Institute, which serves seniors in South Bend, to tap into edX content in particular. They are really excited about what edX has available.

The pandemic has changed everything about the way learning and teaching take place. How has COVID-19 impacted Bendable’s initial mission and focus? What will change as you think about the new normal? 

We’ve always thought of Bendable as a blended learning system—part digital and part place-based. The second part of the equation has obviously gotten more difficult, and in some cases impossible, because of the pandemic. We and our partners at the library have done what we can, holding Bendable training and learning events online. But we have no doubt that when things up open again, it will really give us a lift. People love the ease of accessing great content with a few clicks on their computer or their phone. For example, edX courses on coding in Python and the history of Hollywood are quite popular. But we also know that people want to learn with each other and from each other, face to face. Learning is social. And when library branches and other community centers around South Bend can begin to hold Bendable learning meetups, study sessions, in-person classes, lectures and job-shadowing opportunities, it will allow Bendable to fully flower in a way that it just can’t right now. That day will come. We just need to be patient.

If anything has changed forever because of the pandemic—and because of all of the issues related to economic inequality and structural racism that COVID has helped to lay bare—I think it’s a much-heightened awareness about how fragile society is and how much we need to reinvest in our communities. Diversity and inclusion are a huge part of Bendable. We carefully track zip code data to make sure that we’re reaching the entire city of South Bend. We are mindful that our Community Collections—individual learning playlists on a particular topic put together by local residents—are authored by people from every neighborhood. Just click on bendable.com and take a look at all of those beautiful photographs of all of those beautiful people who’ve created a Community Collection. It’s a reminder that every person, from every walk of life, has something to teach others. And we all have much to learn.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.