Team Member Introduction: Jack Neumeier

I've always been too stubborn or impatient to follow the dreams and orders of others;I sucked so badly at following that I had to learn to lead.

My time at UMBC has been defined by that struggle: finding the way to bring all of the talents and passions of our campus together to create beauty, help others, and move.

The Garden began over a year ago. As originally conceived, through a community food garden we would bring together the disparate forces that define our University's unique nature of higher education: our diversity, our focus on undergraduate research, and our burgeoning emphasis on civic agency.

Today, with over 12,000 sq ft, The Garden is most obviously a physical space aimed at addressing food issues. It's also about "enabling people to discover how their special talents and passions could be blended with others' to build community and shape our world" as written by UMBC's David Hoffman.

This mission bears itself out in an incredibly broad assortment of projects, indelible embellishments for our campus, that are detailed here: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/thegarden/news/46683

All of this--all of it--comes to KSR with me.

I am here first as someone with a deep academic interest in Democracy and Higher Education. I am working to describe the qualities of applied learning experiences and justify them in relation to learning outcomes we traditionally expect. It is my belief that learning should always engage all manners of people and all ways of the mind--clearly KSR is an example of that ambition made real.

My goal is to link this work back to our University as an institution, and that institution to our Democracy--how are we ensuring the most vibrant democracy made up of the most participatory, engaged citizens?

Make them build shit.

Then race it.