Enacting the Vision: Institutionalizing Civic and Community Engagement on Campus

A cohort of senior campus leaders committed to operationalizing and sustaining civic and community engagement across their institutions.

This cohort focuses on leaders enacting strategic and intentional planning about community engagement on campuses.

Since 2020, ADP and Collaboratory have invited AASCU members to join cohorts and participate in meetings to connect with others to form a community of practice; in 2020 and 2021, those cohorts focused on strategies for data collection. For the 2022-2023 academic year, the program focuses on bringing small teams from each campus together to organize and collaborate on implementing an institutional vision for community engagement. As an added benefit, all teams can connect to other institutional teams to share best practices, refine their strategies, and have professional development opportunities.

Who is participating?

  • ADP member campuses 
  • Campus leaders looking to operationalize civic and community engagement across their institutions and who are actively working to identify the most sustainable path forward to support this work
  • Senior leaders committed to prioritizing inclusive community engagement as a foundational aspect of their institutional mission, strategy, and infrastructure 

Benefits of this program

  • Define inclusive community engagement, sharing effective strategies and approaches 
  • Ensure institutions create more equitable and responsive relationships with community partners 
  • Build infrastructure to support and sustain deep, pervasive, and integrated partnerships 
  • Use data to deepen work with community partners and identify the most effective partnerships and models to address pressing issues in the community 
  • Better tell the institutional story of engagement qualitatively and quantitatively 
Cohort membership
+
Guam
Puerto Rico
U.S. Virgin Islands
Bahamas
Canada
Mexico

    impact

    Key data captured in Collaboratory from the 2021-2022 cohort

     

    2,681

    published activities

    3,300

    community partners

    894

    course sections

    57,586

    involved students

    8.1 M+

    hours contributed by those students

    $844 M+

    total funding for engagement and service

    Key data captured in Collaboratory from the 2020-2021 cohort

     

    2,324

    published activities

    2,834

    community partners

    637

    course sections

    74,903

    involved students

    10.3 M+

    hours contributed by those students

    $1.7 B+

    total funding for engagement and service

    Institutional civic engagement activity examples

    Several years of assessments indicate that the Town Hall Meeting improves students learning of course content, changes students’ self-perception from an identification with high school notions of schooling as too often boring and meaningless to a college appropriate identification of schooling as relevant and part of students’ development as adult participants in a democracy, improves students’ civic participation, and increases students’ self-esteem.

    Explore more on the institution's Collaboratory site.

    By considering the city’s rich history in civil rights and economic justice, as well as the even more powerful desire for civility that has impacted our ability to have deep, community-wide discussion of the area’s struggles, this program explores the different traditions of participation that drive public policy, governance, and citizen engagement.

    Explore more on the institution's Collaboratory site.

    Students in the Gender Institute for Teaching Advocacy program work to compile a digital library including information related to various organizations throughout the state.

    Explore more on the institution's Collaboratory site.

    Professional practice internship on voter registration, marketing, and increasing voter turnout among youth voters.

    Explore more on the institution's Collaboratory site.
    our stories

    How we’ve approached documenting institutional engagement via Collaboratory has actually shaped my current role and responsibilities. Up until [recently] this role didn’t exist on campus, and I like to think that the effort around Collaboratory was actually driving the creation of my role and its placement within the Office of President.  It is ultimately an acknowledgment that community partnerships are a campus-wide priority. 

    Jenn Perry

    Executive Director of Regional Education Partnerships
    California State University Channel Islands

    In addition to capturing engagement data for accreditation, we have also been using Collaboratory when talking to alumni and advancement about donors and how beneficial it would be to show our donors about what engagement our colleges are doing.  Additionally, for faculty, they are now leveraging digital dossiers and Collaboratory is an excellent way to link to their community engagement into their digital dossier; it gives so much more color, description, and complexity to their service work.

    Ann Schulte

    Director of Civic Engagement, Professor
    California State University, Chico

    Ten years ago we were surveying our faculty and hoping that people would respond.  Then, we had to chase them down for 6 months, all to write one report.  Very soon, we had to start the whole process over again.  At the time what we were collecting were numbers of students and numbers of hours.  And, now with Collaboratory that whole narrative has changed for the faculty members.  They now can connect their engagement activities to other pieces of their work, and our campus community engagement reporting that we now capture through Collaboratory.

    Ellen Szarleta

    Center for Urban and Regional Excellence and Professor
    Indiana University Northwest
    Cohort Webinar

    Advancing Campus-Community Partnerships Through Data: Trends and Reflections From an AASCU Cohort
    November 16, 2022

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