44-year Legacy of Woodson Center Will Be Available to Researchers
WASHINGTON, DC – The Woodson Center on Tuesday announced that the archives of more than four decades of work by Bob Woodson and the Woodson Center will be housed at Pepperdine University Libraries. The archives, featuring research, writing, and media engagement, will be made available to researchers and journalists to study the Center’s work in helping neighborhood leaders triumph over problems of poverty, crime, and substandard education.
“I am thrilled that our decades of work have found such an ideal home at Pepperdine University, and I am excited at the opportunities this affords for a new era of grass-roots informed research and public policy. Rather than viewing low-income residents through the lens of pathology, our work provides a blueprint for success in the face of adversity and tragedy by amplifying the stories of those who have found ways to overcome their circumstances,” said Bob Woodson, Founder of the Woodson Center.
“Conventional solutions to poverty—both liberal and conservative— parachute into these communities with interventions that are designed by professional outsiders. The Woodson Center has documented unique solutions, designed and successfully implemented by healing agents from within the community suffering the problems. But far too often the qualities and make these groups successful also render them invisible. Pepperdine housing our archives will help change that.”
“It’s time for our public policies to prioritize improving the lives of the most vulnerable among us by studying and replicating these success stories. It’s what we do at the Woodson Center every day, and we are proud to make this key contribution to this effort,” said Will Crossley, Executive Vice President of the Woodson Center.
“From our founding over 25 years ago, the School of Public Policy has taught, researched, and promoted the profound role civil society and moral citizen leadership must have in addressing our public policy challenges. Over an incredible career in public service, Bob Woodson has exemplified this uniquely American commitment to civic engagement and creative problem-solving,” said Pete Peterson, dean of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy. “We could not be more honored to host the archives of his Woodson Center at Pepperdine, making them easily accessible to future generations of policy researchers and anyone seeking to learn how to be better citizens.”
“We look forward to working with the staff at the Woodson Center to transfer, describe, and preserve this outstanding collection of historically significant material to the Pepperdine Libraries, where the rich array of talks, public appearances, and community-based content it contains will offer endless possibilities for student learning and scholarly inquiry,” said Pepperdine’s dean of Libraries Mark Roosa.
Under the leadership of Bob Woodson, the Woodson Center’s 44 years of work on upward mobility and neighborhood revitalization will be available for research, providing access to countless community-based successes that were previously invisible to the scholarly world. It includes both personal stories and data to help researchers tease out the causal variables of thriving while keeping the human person at the center of the conversation.
The archives will also fill gaps in the important and underfunded research being done on local civic groups across multiple disciplines, while also helping to close the considerable divide between those who do such research, those who talk professionally about such issues, and those who actually live out the principles of these “success stories” on a daily basis.
In particular, the archives reveal four decades of work that emphasize the importance of mediating structures or ‘voluntary associations,’ and the critical role they have played in American history in building up healthy societies and helping Americans – especially formerly enslaved African-Americans – survive and thrive amid hostility and discrimination.
“We see so many arguments today that the American polity is hopelessly racist, and that ‘victimized’ communities stand no chance of success unless revolutionary changes are pursued,” Woodson said. “No doctrine could be more antithetical to the promise of resilience, and the myriad anecdotes and evidence presented by our archives will help bear this out.”
About The Woodson Center:
Led by former civil rights activist Bob Woodson, the Woodson Center has worked for over four decades to empower indigenous leaders in troubled neighborhoods to address problems of their communities through innovative initiatives that increase public safety, spur upward mobility, and inspire racial unity in America. Learn more at www.WoodsonCenter.org