Global Pomona Vision
We envision a Pomona College community that is engaged, curious, and prepared to act with courage and self-awareness in an ever-changing, interconnected world.
-2023 Global Pomona Strategic Plan
Global Pomona represents our campus-wide commitment to prepare every student to engage meaningfully with an interconnected world. It builds on decades of global learning and the collaborative planning of faculty, staff, and students that produced the 2023 Global Pomona Strategic Plan. Through Global Pomona, the College mobilizes a community that is “engaged, curious, and prepared to act with courage and self-awareness in an ever-changing, interconnected world.” Central to this work are our efforts to envision and build the new interdisciplinary Center for Global Engagement—Pomona’s liberal arts laboratory: a dedicated home for students, faculty, and staff to collaborate with local and global partners on complex societal issues of local and global consequence.
Content below reflects the finding and direction rooted in the 2023 Global Pomona Strategic Plan with additional updates forthcoming. We encourage questions and ideas from the community using the Feedback link on the right.
Global Learning at Pomona
At Pomona, global learning is rooted in our mission, woven throughout our curriculum and touches the entire student experience. At Pomona, global learning is immersive, experiential and transformative, bringing together diverse perspectives and disciplinary frameworks. Enacted in a residential context that, as our mission says, is “strongly rooted in Southern California yet global in its orientation,” a Pomona education amplifies hands-on learning that is interdisciplinary, thoughtful and engaged with challenges that transcend boundaries. It recognizes that by engaging in and reflecting on cross-cultural experiences that are local, regional, national, and international, we deepen our understanding of self and others, interrogate local and global dynamics of power and privilege and creatively address the world’s most pressing problems.
The Imperative of Global Learning
The world is becoming ever more interconnected, even as global pandemics, climate change, surging nationalism, political turmoil and war impose limitations on mobility and access to resources. The complexity of these challenges and their ability to transcend boundaries demand intellectual dexterity and intercultural agility.
The COVID-19 pandemic reminded us of our shared fate and the need to face urgent global challenges, both emergent and enduring. To live and act with purpose, we must work actively to understand the causes, consequences, and expressions of environmental degradation, poverty, inequity and injustice, social unrest, global trade, migration and diaspora, technology, food insecurity, and demographic and population shifts. Global learning brings Pomona’s liberal arts education to life in ways that reach beyond disciplinary and national borders and equip individuals to engage with people, organizations and the environment as they work toward understanding, equity and well-being.
Global Pomona and the Center for Global Engagement
“Global Pomona” invokes our campus-wide commitment to being a community that is “engaged, curious, and prepared to act with courage and self-awareness in an ever-changing, interconnected world” (2023 Global Pomona Vision). Fundamental to this work, the interdisciplinary Center for Global Engagement (CGE) will be Pomona’s liberal arts laboratory: a dedicated home for students, faculty, and staff to collaborate with local and global partners on complex societal issues of local and global consequence. Through the CGE, Global Pomona will help ensure that as the result of a Pomona education, all graduates will:
- Reflect on and come to understand one’s identities and actions in relation to complex cultural and natural systems.
- Acquire or demonstrate proficiency in a language other than English.
- Cultivate intercultural attitudes of respect, humility, empathy and curiosity.
- Gain deeper knowledge of international, national, and local issues and their interdependence.
- Analyze global phenomena through intersectional and multi-disciplinary lenses.
- Form meaningful connections across differences arising from (but not limited to): national origin, country of citizenship, linguistic background, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, political perspective, and physical ability.
- Develop strategies to foster human and environmental well-being locally and globally.
Global Pomona Council
The Global Pomona Council, is called together at an extraordinary moment in the life of the College. Building on more than six decades of Pomona’s global engagement, language study and cross-cultural learning, and guided by our Strategic Vision, this Council is entrusted to strengthen the College’s work stewarding one of our community’s highest priorities: preparing every student to engage meaningfully with—and lead in—an interconnected world.
Achieving this priority means carrying forward the 2023 Global Pomona Strategic Plan, which maps a timeline, tasks, and process launching the future of global and interdisciplinary learning at Pomona College—including the new Center for Global Engagement—with three key priorities:
- Provide transformative learning experiences that equip Pomona students to engage and address complex societal issues (grand challenges) in an interconnected and ever-changing world.
- Develop the Center for Global Engagement as a hub for interdisciplinary and experiential global and local learning at Pomona.
- Strengthen the coordination, connection, collaboration, and communication within and across local and global initiatives.