Best Practices and Infrastructures for Campus Centers of Community Engagement

On many campuses, community engagement centers emerged out of student affairs, further developed as units of academic affairs, and in both cases were focused on “service” as the organizing purpose, whether community service or service learning. Community “engagement” has recently been framed as reciprocal, two-way relationships (as articulated in the Carnegie Community Engagement classification, in the “Democratic Engagement White Paper” [Saltmarsh et al., 2009] as “publicly engaged scholarship” as articulated in the report Scholarship in Public [Ellison and Eatman, 2008], and in other recent framings). This is in contrast to what has historically been characterized as a one-way, charitable, noblese-oblige, expert-driven, service relationship. The reframing of community engagement has challenged those who are leading and staffing existing structures to think about their work, and their operations, differently. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.