ISU Community Engagement Collective
The ISU ‘Community Engagement Collective’ (CEC) is a campus collaboration committed to building and promoting mutually-beneficial partnerships with community organizations and agencies. The shared commitment by members of the ISU community reflects both the strong interest (and the clear need) for an infrastructure to facilitate and support community engagement efforts at ISU. A centralized and coordinated hub for community engagement efforts would synergize and harmonize an array of campus initiatives that would enhance student learning, support community-based research and strengthen outreach efforts. These efforts currently happen in isolation but centralized coordination would enhance the land-grant mission of ISU in novel and synergistic ways. A list of some tangible benefits from an enhanced structure to support community engagement efforts at ISU is provided below:
- Building partnerships and connections between the campus and the community
- Promoting student outreach and volunteerism efforts through the GivePulse tool
- Fostering transdisciplinary research partnerships to advance translational research
- Facilitating community-engaged research by faculty
- Enhancing the reach and impact of ISU Extension and Outreach programming
- Advancing goals of CELT to promote service learning by faculty on campus
- Promoting civic actions and volunteerism in students to enhance learning outcomes
- Supporting campus goals related to entrepreneurship
- Facilitating industry partnerships and job placement goals of ICORPS and Beyond Academia
- Supporting ‘Broader Impacts’ and NSF-related research
- Fostering the ARIS (Advancing Research Impact in Society) collaboration coordinated by NABI
- Promoting campus engagement efforts aimed at supporting Carnegie Classification efforts
Coordinated efforts to support community engagement will provide benefits to the campus and facilitate connections with community partners both locally and across the state. While many groups have developed methods and approaches to suit their own outreach needs, the contention of the Community Engagement Collective is that these efforts can be accomplished more effectively in a coordinated and connected way. Building this structure will take time and coordinated effort across the campus, but the outcomes will provide broad and sustained benefits over time.
The community engagement group within the ISU Translational Research Network (U-TuRN) has been facilitating the connections, but the CEC is a distributed (and open) network of campus leaders committed to fostering and supporting community engagement efforts at ISU. The CEC brings together an array of groups and leaders with diverse interests and experience related to community engagement. Monthly ‘Engaged Scholar’ sessions provide opportunities for sharing and connecting on issues related to community engagement.
ENGAGING FACULTY AND STAFF
Are you interested in learning more about how your work could be best translated to improve health?
COMMUNITIES
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.
Coordinated efforts to support community engagement will provide benefits to students and faculty and harmonize research, teaching and outreach efforts across campus – ultimately fulfilling the land grant goals of ISU. The ‘Community Engagement Collective’ is a distributed (and open) network of campus leaders committed to fostering and supporting community engagement efforts at ISU.
If you are interested in joining this group please email Greg Welk for additional information (gwelk@iastate.edu)