It has been acknowledged that college students played a significant role in the civil rights movement (Polletta, 1998). However, many marginalized students today share a sense of powerlessness and see equitable civic activism as difficult and costly to challenge; the dominant narrative leads to a perception that the existing order is inevitable (McCann, 2014). We will share how we have addressed this gap between theory and action at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York. Participants will learn to integrate general education and civic engagement outcomes through the use of threshold concepts (Meyer & Land, 2003), culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2014, 2017), and knowledge-in-pieces (Smith III, diSessa, & Roschelle, 1994) educational theory.