What links the children of Oakland's Emery Secondary School with the inmates of San Quentin? Answer: CCA students have worked with both in partner programs organized by CCA's Center for Art and Public Life. The Center, operating out of an unassuming office on Broadway opposite CCA's main Oakland campus, is a dynamic hub connecting the college with organizations across the Bay Area operating in the fields of art, education, business, design, community work, ecology, and beyond. Its ever-widening network is overseen by the Center's director, Sanjit Sethi, whose formidable leadership skills and affable manner have made him much admired and extraordinarily well connected.

In the last four years, Sethi and the Center have focused their activities into three well-defined programs, which immediately benefit hundreds of CCA students every year. ENGAGE at CCA organizes semester-long courses in collaboration with faculty members that occur across disciplines throughout the college and operate in partnership with outside organizations such as Bethany Senior Center Housing or the Temescal Mural Project to solve specific, well-defined issues. The IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Awards give up to $10,000 to interdisciplinary teams of CCA students to devise, plan, and execute social and humanitarian projects benefiting specific communities, anywhere in the world, over one summer. CCA CONNECTS are structured "externships" in which 40 students every year work at outside organizations such as the design firm Rebar or the architectural group Asian Neighborhood Design.

Engaged work with the communities around him comes naturally to Sethi. Growing up in Rochester, New York, in the 1970s, he watched his parents connect with their academic and work communities. "My mother was an English literature professor at the State University of New York at Geneseo, and my father was an engineer at Eastman Kodak. A strong thread that ran through both their personal and professional lives was that of community building. They celebrated, valued, and continue to this day to work hard to create and maintain their communities." It is that emphasis on community that set Sethi on a path toward caring for others. "Watching my great-aunt struggle with and eventually die from cancer, I was profoundly moved by what end-of-life care was like at that time. That, and the short trips to India I was taking every couple of years, started me down a path of thinking: What is the best platform to understand the human condition and to establish a relevant place from which to assist individuals and communities in need? During high school in the late 1980s I volunteered a lot, working extensively with the American Red Cross and becoming a trained hospice volunteer."

Convinced that the best way to change the world involved looking at systems of culture and systems of belief, he enrolled at Earlham, a small Quaker college in Indiana, majoring in anthropology and theology. That is until a ceramics course, taken almost by accident, altered his perspective. "I was bewitched by this incredible material. On the one hand it had this history, and on the other this haptic, sensory quality. It opened up a different world for me. I called my father, and said, 'This is what I need to be doing.' He promptly hung up on me. Only when he came to Earlham and met my ceramics professor, a steely, gruff guy named Michael Thiedeman, did he realize why I wanted to change majors. Thiedeman told him, 'I don't think just anyone should become a ceramicist. It's not something you want to do. It's something you need to do.' Later I transferred to the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University." Uprooting from Earlham, says Sethi, was very challenging despite his newfound passion for ceramics and prestigious new school. "When I moved to Alfred, this tiny speck of a town 90 miles south of Rochester, I left a community that I was in the process of building. It was an exciting and confusing time for me."

He soon regained his footing, however, and went on to complete not only a BFA in ceramics but also a master's degree in ceramics and sculpture at the University of Georgia, and a master of science in visual studies at MIT. And all along, to this day, ideas related to community have infused his work. The site-specific olfactory installation Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance (2008) is an artwork in Memphis that released the scents of a bakery, vividly evoking to passersby the business that used to stand on that spot: a Japanese family bakery that was forced out during World War II internments. During his Fulbright fellowship to India in 2004-5, Sethi executed his Building Nomads Project, which explored the community and communication difficulties faced by migrant construction workers in Bangalore, India.

Today, Sethi brings all of that multicultural experience to bear on the multidisciplinary sprawl of CCA. "When I started at the Center for Art and Public Life in 2008 as codirector, it had a reputation for doing great work with the community, but it was less effective at reaching out to the CCA community. I call it inreach versus outreach. I started by asking: How can we better utilize our most valuable resources -- our students and faculty? And how can creativity be used in a critical, skillful, generous manner to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as poverty, the inner city, elder care, the incarcerated?”

Today, the Center's inreach is increasingly successful. Every day, Sethi's team ambitiously and methodically extends its student and community connections, to everyone's mutual benefit. Sanjit is also Barclay Simpson Chair of the Community Arts Program, and he has taught in the Graduate Fine Arts and Industrial Design programs, which complements his work at the Center in all kinds of ways. Only a handful of CCA students may be enrolled in his courses at any given time, but hundreds are participating in programs, partnerships, and initiatives organized by the Center for Art and Public Life.

"We work with so many more students now than we ever have in the past. For the 40 CCA CONNECTS positions this year, we received more than 100 applications. This year, which is the second year of the IMPACT Awards, we received extremely strong applications thanks to numerous facilitation events we organized to help students from different programs meet and come up with ideas for projects. And ENGAGE at CCA, now in its second year, continues to expand in scope. We have created a mentorship structure that enables enthusiastic faculty who have participated in the past to reach out to their peers and encourage them to devise a new ENGAGE course."

The key to this relationship is active interaction between CCA students and passionate, diverse organizations. Students are intensively involved in what they are doing, every step of the way, from the moment they first show up through to the final presentation at the end of their undertaking. Those 40 CONNECTS students aren't just stuffing envelopes, they're playing meaningful roles and contributing unique and critical insights in organizations like Creative Growth Art Center or the Richmond Art Center. And through this, Sethi says, they realize: "'This is how my creativity can apply outside the classroom. This is how my spare 10 hours a week could translate into a job after graduation.' Germination occurs in all these different ways."

In many respects, Sethi's own path sets an excellent example for the students with whom he comes into contact. The theology/anthroplogy student who discovered ceramics, took a chance, and found his métier building communities offers an example of risk taking, confidence in exploration, and the idea that creativity has a place everywhere in our contemporary world.

Even at this moment, in the middle of the most hectic part of the semester, Sethi is looking to the future, plotting another project that will access a community yet untapped. "It's one of our goals to create a network of CCA alumni who have been affected by the Center. I call it the fourth, phantom program. Just wait."