 Engaging
Communities
and Campuses
The Engaging Communities and Campuses program assists independent colleges
and universities to establish partnerships with community organizations
that can enhance experiential learning activities while addressing community
needs. The program is comprised of three separate but related activities—regional
teaching and learning workshops, an ongoing web-based effective practice
network, and a national grant program administered by the Consortium for
the Advancement of Private Higher Education (CAPHE), a grantmaking unit
of CIC. A total of 13 grants, ranging from $63,000 to $80,000, were awarded
to 13 colleges and their community partners in January 2001.
Effective Practice
Exchange. Independent colleges and universities have been
national leaders in working with community organizations to enhance student
learning, and CIC has created a web-based collection of successful practices
at its institutions that describe this work.
View a copy of Building Partnerships
With College Campuses: Community Perspectives,
a monograph that
provides the complete findings from a summit of community partners, along
with their recommendations for improving community/campus engagement activities.
Also available is a copy of the accompanying
brochure that summarizes
the key findings from the summit and outlines the major characteristics
of successful community/campus partnerships. The brochure's format and
content makes it an ideal resource for workshops, orientations, and board
retreats. (In order to view these PDF
files, the minimum software requirement is version 4.0. Adobe Acrobat,
available for free from the Adobe
Web site.)
Summer 2003 Independent newsletter special report: Engaging
Communities and Campuses Program
Funder: The Atlantic Philanthropies
Program Status: Building on nearly a decade
of CIC work on issues of college-community partnerships and service-learning,
this program's initial steps were the convening of an advisory
committee and the drafting of a conceptual Working Paper that outlined
the issues being addressed in this initiative. A revised version of the
Working Paper
was drafted in 2004.
The initiative's central activity was a competitive grants program, conducted
by CIC's CAPHE unit. Guidelines
were issued in winter 2000, five regional workshops on Active Learning
in the World were held in spring 2000, and 13
institutions were selected to receive grants over a two-and-a-half
year period. The institutions that applied but did not receive funding
were offered an opportunity to receive technical assistance from a corps
of national consultants.
The evaluation of the Engaging program began in August 2001 and was completed
in summer 2003. Two evaluators—one focusing on the impact of project
activities on higher education institutions and the other focusing on
the impact of project activities on community partners—worked on
the design and implementation of the evaluation. View a description
of the Evaluation Goals and Procedures.*(In
order to view the PDF file, the minimum
software requirement is version 4.0. Adobe Acrobat, available for free
from the Adobe
Web site.)
The final project phase included the development of a web-based Effective
Practice Exchange that enables large numbers of institutions (not just
those who received grants) to share information about their work in these
areas. This Effective Practice Exchange may be found on CIC's website
by clicking here.
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Engaging
Communities and Campuses
