Denys Candy

Under Denys’ leadership, the Jandon Center has evolved and grown as Smith’s hub for off-campus experiential learning and community engagement. In any given year, the Jandon Center team supports up to 500 Smithies who participate in 15 community engagement cohorts and fellowships (2026). Jandon works with partners toward realizing community-driven goals in K-12 education, healthcare and public health, human services, advocacy and public policy, and community-based arts. Jandon also supports faculty to integrate ethical approaches to community-based learning into research and teaching and collaborates with faculty on externally funded research involving community partnerships.

Denys is co-director of the community engagement and social change concentration and lecturer of the practice. In that capacity, he works closely with faculty colleagues to support students as they apply theory and classroom learning in community settings across the Connecticut River Valley, nationally and internationally.

Before coming to Smith in 2016, Denys had a decades long career as a community organizer focused on Creative Regeneration, the process of collaboratively designing and deploying resident-driven initiatives in communities impacted by disinvestment, demolition, and displacement. This work emerged as a laboratory of sorts for addressing capital flight in post-industrial places.

Selected publications

Partnerships and Processes of Engagement, Working as Consultants in the US and UK, with Jeremy Kearney (2004) in University-Community Partnerships: Universities in Civic Engagement (ed: Tracy M. Soska, and Alice K. Johnson Butterfield) The Haworth Social Work Practice Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2004, pp. 181-201

Beyond Planning, with Reiko Goto (2011) Public Art Scotland, available from Smith College Jandon Center for Community Engagement jcce@smith.edu

Reframing Power (2012) in Emejulu, A. Community Development in the Steel City: Democracy, Justice and Power in Pittsburgh, Community Development Journal Inc., Edinburgh, UK