CUMU Conference 2019

Partnerships are integral to the ability of higher education institutions to fulfill their urban and metropolitan missions. Yet, a clear understanding about these community partnerships is often lacking.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) is a decentralized institution in which community engagement is conceptualized differently in each unit. Yet, it is an institution where partnerships are ingrained in its identity.

Through two graduate-level service-learning capstones, the UNO Community Engagement Measurement and Assessment committee has created the Community Partnership Initiative - an infrastructure that allows for a sophisticated understanding, analytics, and display of community partnerships, projects, issues addressed, complexity levels, geographic locations, legislative districts, types of engagement, and more.

On the micro-level, this tool allows UNO to answer questions and provide complete transparency regarding community partnerships and projects - including responses to the ‘who, why, when, how, and where’ questions.

On the macro-level, the analytical structure has allowed UNO to address strategic questions, including the ability to identify strategic alliances, discuss equity in resources and issues addressed, and provide an innovative framework for measuring impact.

The measurement of impact is the next phase for the committee. We will be implementing an evaluation protocol to measure the partnership outcomes. The categorization of the data allows the committee to quantify the results by issue area (e.g. economic sufficiency, social justice, health and wellness, international service, educational support, and environmental sustainability), geographic location, legislative district, engagement type, and organization types among others.

Many universities want to develop a comprehensive, publicly accessible listing of their community engagement activities. Efforts vary from utilizing vended products to designing home-grown systems. This presentation will share the University of Pittsburgh’s efforts to develop an open-source engagement and outreach database and mapping tool using in-house staff, user-centered design techniques, and stakeholder engagement processes.

At Pitt, the intent of the tool is to aid in storytelling, find university or community partners, document benefits of university collaboration, and foster collaboration across campus. Based upon a prototype developed by graduate students in 2017-18, the tool is being developed by staff at the University’s Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR). In the presentation, attendees will learn more about how UCSUR employed user-centered design processes in the project redesign. Semi-structured stakeholder interviews and hands-on activities were conducted to learn more about the needs of users in the Chancellor’s office, academic departments, and community organizations. These interviews and activities also helped inform efforts to create a common definition of community engagement at the University. Our presenters will also discuss how agile product development methods were used to collect and incorporate feedback from users throughout the development process. They will also discuss how UCSUR is approaching maintenance of the database and tool.

Arts and culture organizations continue to expand access to a broader audience through community engagement, to prioritize diversity and inclusion, and to embrace Creative Placemaking. However, the formal anchor framework that was developed to guide community development efforts of other types of organizations (e.g., hospitals, universities and corporations), has not been brought forward to arts and culture organizations. The intentionality and defined strategies of the anchor framework to community revitalization is new to the arts world. The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) and Kresge Foundation's Arts & Culture team, have recently completed a deep dive into the current state of anchor activity among arts and culture organizations. Kresge and ICIC have identified a number of large arts and culture organizations leaning into the anchor framework that indicates engagement pathways for different types of arts and culture organizations, including colleges of art and design. Together with the Kresge Foundation, ICIC will share insights from the report, the paths that colleges of art and design are taking towards anchor engagement, and examples of how existing anchor collaboratives, spearheaded by colleges and universities, have incorporated arts and culture organizations as anchor partners.

Penn’s recent Economic Impact Report is a studied internationally by higher education for its successful synthesis of complex statistics into a compelling presentation at the core of Penn’s advocacy and public relations strategy presentation of a complex narrative that has become a significant aspects of Penn’s anchor institution advocacy and communications plan.

The Database details Georgetown University’s community engagements and partnerships in Washington, DC. It includes service and volunteer projects, research targeted to our local communities, direct support to organizations, and public programming. Our goal is to create a coherent and transparent picture for both internal and external partners. We aim to facilitate strong reciprocal partnerships with organizations focused on community development and social change in the following areas: health (access and equity), environment, economic justice, arts and education. The Community Engagement Database reflects Georgetown’s unique integration of teaching, research, and service as “contemplatives in action” pursuing social justice.

Our hope is for faculty and staff to use the database to identify existing community engagements and partners to leverage (or avoid duplication) in order to advance community-based learning, other projects, and research, enhancing overall community impact. To that end, it will be used to identify Georgetown faculty and staff for potential collaboration on community-based learning and other projects. The database will help faculty and staff identify trends (and gaps) in existing engagements by issue area, geography, population served, project funder, Georgetown division, and other dimensions that can be leveraged to obtain additional funding by current or new funders. Lastly, the database (and ideally the map) will enable us to present a comprehensive picture of Georgetown’s extensive community engagement work that can be shared with many audiences including students and prospective students, faculty, staff, community members, city leaders, funders, and others in the higher education community.

Click the button above to view our Tool for Finding Potential Anchor Districts!

When universities and hospitals share a common geography, they can transform their neighborhood into a unique urban typology – an Anchor District. Anchor Districts are somewhat like hybrids of neighborhood improvement and business improvement districts, in which proximate institutions leverage their collective demand to deliver economic, cultural, and equitable benefit to their surrounding communities. The positive impacts of several existing Anchor Districts are well documented -- University City (Philadelphia), Midtown (Detroit), University Circle (Cleveland). However, the raw ingredients necessary to forge new Anchor Districts are present in many more cities throughout the country, from Tampa Bay to Seattle.

More and more universities are integrating the goal of engagement into their strategic plans and into their work with the broader community to address the complex challenges being created by the rapidly changing social, economic and environmental issues facing our world today. This session will explore recent experiences in creating conditions within an institutional environment and within the broader community that support community engagement. We will discuss the distribution of resources, patterns of collaboration across different parts of the institution and across disciplines and changes in institutional policies and infrastructure. We will reflect on practices that support new forms of engaged scholarship and engaged learning, as well as new patterns of interaction with different sectors of the broader community. Our experience offers lessons about (a) which aspects of the structure and practices of a university are most essential for the support of community engagement in its various forms; (b) ways to create conditions to support more sustainable and meaningful community engagement; (c) adaptations that capture the value and impact of engagement. We will also explore how community engagement in its many forms can impact scholarly activities, the design of the curriculum, and the engagement and involvement of students, faculty and staff in advancing the goal of community engagement. We will offer suggestions about questions that a campus community can ask itself as it seeks to create a supportive environment for engagement and the assessment of the outcomes and value of engagement in its various forms.

Institutionalizing community engagement efforts requires the alignment and focus of three key groups of stakeholders: university leadership, members of the campus community (faculty/staff/students), and the external community. Creating a unified coalition among these parties is a challenging task but, only in doing so, can a university create, scale and sustain the integration of the urban mission. This best practices presentation will explore how Marquette University – a mid-sized, liberal arts, urban, Catholic, Jesuit university – is integrating community engagement, leveraging its inclusion as one of the six articulated themes within the institutional strategic plan. The presenters will open the presentation with a brief historical overview of Marquette University, its relationship with the Near West Side community, and the broader city of Milwaukee, and the recent creation of its Office of Community Engagement. Then, the presenters will discuss the successes and challenges of a recent 9-month process utilized to align and focus over 80 key stakeholders, on- and off-campus, in defining the current state, imagining a future state and creating recommendations for institutionalizing community engagement through six identified dimensions: student engagement, faculty/staff engagement, impact, mission, membership and profile, and partnership cultivation and management. Each presenter will provide a unique perspective of the process touching on a variety of topics such as: data collection, campus perspectives, community perceptions, process assessment, strategy and project management. Presenters will take 20 minutes to share context and then use the remaining 10 minutes for dialogue and questions.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) established the Learning Exchange (LE) in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) in 1999. Since its beginning, the LE has offered free community programming for DTES residents. It was also responsible for community service-learning at UBC until a structural separation in 2011 prompted re-evaluation of the LE’s role. Although well established as a tangible manifestation of UBC’s commitment to community engagement, connection to the academic mission was weak. The LE, situated in the Vice-President External Relations portfolio, was supported by the Provost and Vice-President Academic to create the position of academic director to serve as the academic champion. Since this role began in 2013 significant changes have occurred in the contribution of the LE to student learning and research, while community programming and links to the DTES have also diversified.

In 2013 there were fewer than 20 students at the LE each year, mainly undergraduate volunteers. In 2018, over 200 students took part in in-depth experiential learning placements, mostly on-site, some in community partner organizations. Over 1000 students engaged in one-time activities including workshops and orientations to the DTES. The LE’s role in supporting community-based research (CBR) and knowledge exchange (KE) emerged from community consultations in 2014. The LE leads a multi-faceted KE initiative, Making Research Accessible in the DTES, and meets increasing requests from researchers for support for CBR and KE. The LE’s recognized expertise in experiential learning, CBR and KE, has resulted in opportunities to contribute to new initiatives at UBC.