KCC Ovations
Michelle Billies Awarded the Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award
Dr. Michelle Billies, associate professor and director of the Mental Health and Human Services Program at Kingsborough Community College, has been awarded the Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award. Presented in partnership with Brown University’s Swearer Center, the award recognizes senior faculty who practice exemplary engaged scholarship through teaching and research.
A national nonprofit organization, Campus Compact is the largest and oldest higher education association dedicated to higher education civic and community engagement. Its members include thousands of presidents, faculty, researchers, students and civic and community engagement experts at colleges and universities.
Community and civic engagement have always been major components of Billies’ classes. “Civic engagement offers a context for understanding and working with people in their actual lives. Human services professions are inherently civically engaged because they work with community members and structures,” Billies shared. “When they begin working in the field, KCC students are almost always on the front lines, working with homeless people, youth in care, recipients of public assistance, children in need—the list is endless. The skills students gain in civic engagement classes help them understand the power dynamics deeply ingrained in society that work for and against the creation of healthier communities and lives."
Two of Billies’ most prominent community partnerships include one from 2006 to 2010 with Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ) in New York City and an ongoing project that began in 2018 with the Flatbush Tenant Coalition in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2006, prior to starting at KCC, Billies had been volunteering with QEJ and offered to use a second-year doctoral research project to support QEJ’s work. “What I anticipated to be a small, nine-month project blossomed into four years, with over 20 low-income, racially and ethnically diverse LGBTGNC (gender nonconforming) co-researchers. We sought to answer how low-income LGBTGNC people supported each other’s resilience, defined and fought for justice, and built community with each other.”
Their wide ranging discoveries include housing, health, and income demographics that are rarely documented, the frequency of police and institutional violence, intersectional discrimination, and the advocacy and community building efforts of low-income LGBTGNC people.
Once on faculty at KCC, Billies designed and taught a field internship class with the Brooklyn-based Flatbush Tenant Coalition (FTC), a grassroots organization of Black and brown tenants. “Field internships are a core, practice-based learning requirement for Mental Health majors,” they explained. “Between 2018 and 2022, KCC students actively participated in outreach and educational activities aimed at informing tenants about their rights, while studying the historical context of community organizing within the field of social work. They assessed repair neglect, harassment, and eviction pressures among rent-stabilized tenants. While advocating with and for tenants, they examined how social policies impact neighborhoods, expanding their understanding of the housing conditions that influence not only their own lives but also those of future clients.”
Billies’s own research with the FTC tenants resulted in a mini-documentary. They are currently collaborating with KCC faculty to explore using the film in their 2023–24 classes to teach about tenants’ issues.
The Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award is presented as part of Campus Compact's Impact Awards, which recognize the outstanding work of individuals and institutions in pursuit of the public purposes of higher education. Read more about the other awards and this year's recipients here.
The recipients of these awards will be recognized at Compact24, Campus Compact’s annual conference, which will be held in Denver, Colorado, from April 8–10, 2024.