Keynote Speaker and Facilitator
We are pleased to have Verdis LaVar Robinson as our keynote speaker and facilitator this year.
As an advocate of civic education, Verdis currently serves as a consultant and an Associate of the Kettering Foundation as well as a consultant for Griffin Legacy and Associates. Verdis is a fellow of the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Seminar on Citizenship and the American and Global Polity, and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Faculty Seminar on Rethinking Black Freedom Studies: The Jim Crow North and West. He is a board member for National Issues Forum Institute, Reacting Consortium, Citizen’s Campaign, and Bringing Theory to Practice. He was also a Public Scholar of Humanities New York. He is currently the Lenora Montgomery Scholar at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago where he is studying for the Unitarian Universalist ministry. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Urban College of Boston.
He has served as the Director for Community College Engagement at Campus Compact where he led it’s Community Colleges for Democracy (CC4D) network after serving as the National Director of The Democracy Commitment.
Verdis is the author of “Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676′ (2014), a Reacting to the Past game in development, “A Charge to Keep, I Have: The Biography of Bishop Charles Campbell” (2001), and has co-authored “Beyond These Gates: Mountains of Hope in Rochester’s African-American History” (2018) as well as contributed to “Higher Education’s Role in Enacting a Thriving Democracy: Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Theory of Change” (2018). He was the co-editor of “Community Colleges for Democracy: Aligning Civic and Community Engagement with Institutional Priorities.”
Verdis holds a B.M. in Voice Performance from Boston University, a B.S. cum laude, and M.A. in History from SUNY College at Brockport, and an M.A. in African-American Studies from SUNY University at Buffalo. Prior to his national civic leadership service, Verdis was a tenured Assistant Professor of History and African-American Studies at Monroe Community College (MCC) in Rochester, NY, where he taught web-enhanced, writing-intensive, service-learning history courses.
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