Community Partners

Community Partners

Are you looking for ways to amplify your voice and expand your impact? U-TuRN values the voices and needs of community partners and believes that community-engaged scholarship requires input, support, and leadership from community stakeholders and organizations. Contact us at uturn@iastate.edu to tell us more about how our network can best serve you!

Our community engagement efforts are coordinated through an integrated community engagement hub (Community Connections for Public Health). A focus of work by this group is to establish Academic Health Partnerships with county health departments to enable mutually beneficial partnerships that can be sustained over time. We also work to support and facilitate service learning and volunteerism efforts for agencies and organizations on campus and in the community through the coordinated use of a software tool called GivePulse. The platform and associated app helps community partners post local needs that can then be filled by students and other community volunteers. Click the associated link to learn more about GivePulse. A handout about Give Pulse can also be downloaded here.

Interested community partners will be connected to U-TuRN through our newsletter / communication list. We will send updates through our newsletter and share information about upcoming “Engaged Scholar’ presentations that enable researchers and partners to come together to share ideas, strategies and needs. We will also follow up to facilitate connections to help address your needs and interests. This can include finding faculty or students to support your work assistance on grant writing, help with program evaluation or other needs.


GivePulse

The distributed GivePulse model employed within U-TuRN allows partners to post, support, and facilitate connections within their county while also allowing our U-TuRN administrative team to facilitate and manage these links and opportunities across the entire state. The site allows researchers to post project and program opportunities that may be of interest to community organizations and has built in systems for data collection and analysis (e.g., user information, survey tools). Thus, the beauty of the GivePulse system is that it enables researchers AND community partners to be both “buyers” or “sellers” in the system.