Carnegie Community Engaged University Reclassification – Meeting the Standards We Set for Ourselves
VCU defines community engagement as “The collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in the context of partnership and reciprocity. It can involve partnerships and coalitions that help mobilize resources and influence systems and serve as catalysts for initiating and/or changing policies, programs, and practices.”
Carnegie asks us to evaluate ourselves on the degree to which we are living up to our own standards. It asks us specifically how we support faculty, staff, students and community partners to work together as co-educators and co-learners to deliver on this promise. Professional development is a critical component of this work, which is why one of the success metrics in Quest 2028 Thriving Communities theme is training in standards of excellence.
Professional Development
Our self study is revealing just how we are doing that. At the campus level, we have much going on. The Division of Community Engagement annually holds the Connect Conference, which is scheduled for November 1 this year, which brings together faculty, staff, students and community partners. Faculty Affairs and our Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence provide webinars, conferences and workshops.
Our convergence labs will advance transdisciplinary research and community engaged scholarship and create learning communities which help new skills, competences, knowledge and partnerships.
The self-study also reveals that our schools and colleges also provide a range of diverse professional development opportunities to support community engagement in their units. Carnegie identified the following options, and we can find all of them on our campus:
Success Metrics
A second standard we set for ourselves in Quest 2028 is to increase coordinated programs and interventions in our priority partner communities. For the Carnegie Community Engaged University Classification we are collecting case studies across campus of how we do that, what we are accomplishing, and what and where the impact will be. This data will support reclassification and our evaluation of Quest 2028.
But it will not be enough to evaluate our goals and impact only for a large Reclassification process. We need to do it on a regular basis. So the case study collection will form the foundation of a new Campus wide database we will be launching soon – Collaboratory, which is a database developed by universities to support universities to understand the landscape of their community engagement activities and their impact.
Our partnerships and our research are an essential component of our relationship with the community, but it is not the whole picture. Our Carnegie work also reveals the additional support we provide to community partners:
Recognition
In addition to training faculty, staff and students, and capturing the impact of our work, it is also important to recognize excellence when we see it. As we saw, five of our schools and colleges do this. We just launched our newly revised Community Engagement Awards of Excellence. We would like to recognize the following 16 faculty and staff for their exceptional work in the community.
Kimberly Battle, Ph.D.,
Alisa Brewer
Christine Cynn, Ph.D.
Torey Edmonds
Veronica Hicks, Ph.D.
John Jones, Ph.D,
Kimberly McKnight, Ph.D.
Bernard Means, Ph.D.
Maureen Moslow-Benway
Anita Nadal
David Naff, Ph.D.
Michael, Paarlberg, Ph.D.
Seb, Prohn, Angela West and Sarah Lineberry (nominated together)
Lana Sargent, Ph.D.