By Samuel X. Cicci '15
Every so often there’s a lull on campus, with noisy chatter and the rush between classes replaced with the chirps of birdsong and a natural quietude between the Collegiate Gothic buildings. But the reason for that isn’t exams, a holiday break, or even a lazy Sunday afternoon. Chances are that students have ventured beyond the gates to further their academic work in the field or help a community member in need. And thanks to the revamped Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center for Community Engagement, students are continuing to have a huge impact on their city.
The Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center for Community Engagement has existed at Rhodes in several iterations over the last decade and acts as a hub for the college’s many community outreach programs. Initially conceived in 2012, what was then known as The Memphis Center aimed to connect students with different partner organizations around Memphis. And the Center also caught the eye of two people who had already made an outsized impact on Memphis.
Anyone who has lived or worked in Memphis likely recognizes the names Lynne and Henry Turley. Their fingerprints can be found all over the city, from efforts to improve education to championing neighborhood revitalization. The late Lynne Turley spent more than two decades in the public Memphis-Shelby County Schools system, helped create a template for music education in Memphis with her part in launching the Orff Music Program in 1968, hosted children’s programming on WKNO, and was an early champion for social justice in Memphis. Henry Turley founded the Henry Turley Company in 1977, and spent the next several decades revitalizing Downtown Memphis, masterminding a new community in Mud Island’s Harbor Town, and creating a slew of affordable housing units and a thriving neighborhood in Uptown Memphis. Those are just a few examples that only scratch the surface of their commitment to bettering Memphis.
Keen boosters of the city, the Turleys held conversations with then Rhodes president Dr. William E. (Bill) Troutt to discuss how they could align their goals. “We’ve always been focused on making Memphis a better city,” says Henry Turley. “Bill had approached me about continuing to get the students engaged in the city, and I thought it was a great idea. There’s so much that can be done to improve Memphis, and the people I saw coming to Rhodes had the youth and energy and ability to engage with it. Investing in this partnership looked like a great opportunity to further our goals.”
With the Turleys’ new involvement, the Center officially became the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center in 2018. While COVID-19 put a hold on immediate plans to rethink the Turley Memphis Center, late in fall 2022 President Jennifer Collins coordinated a task force to focus on the college’s community engagement structure. One of the main priorities was for Rhodes to rethink the structure of community engagement across the entire campus.
“One of the recommendations that we gave was that we should centralize our community engagement activity,” says Natalie Person, dean for community engagement and executive director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center for Community Engagement. “We had so many students doing academic and volunteer work off campus, we had so many great partner organizations extending a hand to us, and we had even more students looking to find the right off-campus experience for them. So it was about pulling together all of the programs that we had and making sure we were all moving in the same direction.”
--Dr. Natalie Person, Executive Director of The Lynne and Henry Turley Center for Community Engagement
Students and alumni will be familiar with the Bonner Scholars Program and the Laurence F. Kinney Program, which focus on scholarship and social service, respectively. But the Turley Memphis Center will promote some of the newer initiatives such as the Research 4 Action Lab. “Faculty and students lend their support to local projects through service contracts,” she says. “We’ve worked with organizations like Innovate Memphis to contribute to Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s Civic Data Hub, a platform that measures public data assets from public health to arts and culture.”
Gathering all of the college’s programs under one umbrella has two immediate benefits. First, it allows students to catalogue all their service hours through the Rhodes Engage platform. Students, faculty, and staff can sign in, log their own hours, and check the Engage dashboard for a rundown of service hours, and where the work took place. “We’re working to get all of our students on the platform,” says Person.
The new center brings together 12 different programs and organizations under one umbrella. Person views it as a hub for education, research, and action, acting as an inventory for all the Turley Memphis Center-related work being done on and off campus. “I would say 80 percent of our community engagement is grounded in our academic program,” adds Person, “meaning students doing research, or faculty doing research, tied to our F11 credit.”
“But it allows us to easily measure hours per month, the total service hours since we launched, and other useful information. Our Bonner and Kinney programs have been using it, but we’re working on getting every organization under the Turley Memphis Center on board, which will let us track all of our engagement data. And one of our end goals is to create—separate from an academic transcript—a co-curricular transcript that students can reference.”
Second, Rhodes faculty and students will have a better grasp of the 260 organizations that have partnered with the college. They encompass a diverse variety of fields, from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to legal nonprofit Just City to the Memphis Zoo. Last year, 150 of said organizations were actively hosting and supervising hundreds of students. While the Turley Memphis Center does not handle academic internships, the partnerships it fosters provide further work opportunities. “If faculty want to craft a course that involves community engagement, we can use our large network to pick the right partner.”
Person’s immediate goal for the Turley Memphis Center is to build on the community work that Rhodes has always excelled at. Continuing to build intentional, high-quality partnerships will improve the college’s offerings both regionally and around the globe. The clearly defined partnership structure will also be a factor in retaining the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, awarded by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, when it is reevaluated in 2026. Rhodes was one of the first institutions to earn the rare designation in 2006, which signifies an elevated commitment to mutually beneficial community partnerships. “It’s a hard designation to get and a hard designation to keep,” says Person. “But service is one of our core values, and it would be another feather in our cap. We’re required to have an institutional definition for service in order to apply, and the Turley Memphis Center has become an excellent way that we can organize our mission.”
Community partners also seek to make an impression on campus. For example, in November 2024, Memphis Mayor Paul Young held a town hall for community members to ask questions about the city’s future. He was accompanied by Memphis Police Chief CJ Davis, both of whom had an open dialogue with students. Beyond that, the Turley Memphis Center brings in plenty of guest lecturers and hosts events of its own. In the runup to the 2024 Presidential Election, the Turley Memphis Center hosted a series of Food, Faith, and Free Election events, helping with voter registration and answering other questions around voting and civic responsibility. Other invitees have included local filmmakers and writers, and there’s plenty more on the horizon.
“I think it shows that Rhodes students want to engage with the city, and the city wants to engage with Rhodes,” says Turley. “And with the Center’s new direction and Natalie’s vision for it, it’s our hope that students will continue to be able to play a role in this city’s future.”
