National Advisory Board

Dr. Sylvia Gale is the executive director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at the University of Richmond. She joined the CCE in August 2009. She previously served on the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life from 2005-11, was the founding director of Imagining America’s Publicly Active Graduate Education Initiative (PAGE), and a founding co-chair of Imagining America’s initiative on “Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship,” which explores and advances assessment practices aligned with the values that drive community-engaged work.  

Sylvia received a PhD in English (concentration in Rhetoric and Composition) from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Reed College. In Austin, together with the UT Humanities Institute, she launched the Free Minds Project (now known as Free Minds Austin), which offers Austin-area adults who have faced barriers to education and who live on limited incomes with a chance to explore their intellectual potential via a free year-long college course in the humanities. Sylvia has published on innovative assessment, engaged graduate education, and the power of institutional intermediaries to effect change. In 2022-23, she studied civic action and community building in Helsinki as a Fulbright Finland Mid-Career Professional Development Grantee, documenting key findings on the SpidersEngage podcast.