The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has renewed the University of Vermont’s Community Engagement Classification. The classification certifies that UVM has a significant and institutionalized local, national and global commitment to community engagement through reciprocal partnerships that benefit both community partners and faculty, students and staff at the university.

UVM first won the Carnegie community engagement classification in 2006, the year it was launched, for both academic engagement and community participation, one of only 76 schools in the country to receive both designations. Since then Carnegie has combined the two categories, and more than 350 schools have received the classification.   

“We’re very pleased to have received this important and prestigious designation,” said UVM president Tom Sullivan. “As a land-grant research institution, we are committed to our mission of public service. It’s gratifying and affirming that the Carnegie Foundation has recognized the many ways our faculty, students and staff are engaged deeply with a broad array of community partners.”  

Unlike other Carnegie classifications that categorize institutions based on publicly available national data, the Community Engagement designation is elective; schools participate voluntarily by submitting materials describing the nature and extent of their engagement with their communities.

To compile its 80-page proposal, UVM engaged in extensive research to document the many ways it partners with community members. Susan Munkres, director of UVM’s Community-University Partnerships and Service Learning office, spearheaded the process. 

Several aspects of UVM’s community engagement program stood out for her and likely led to the successful award, she said. At the heart of the application were 15 examples of community partnerships that were truly reciprocal. Reciprocity is a key attribute the Carnegie Foundation seeks in an institution’s community engagement program, Munkres said. 

“Reciprocal partnerships build an appreciation in the community of the university and its resources but also build awareness of the assets and resources of the community among faculty, staff and students,” she said. “Ideally, people become collaborators in the creation of knowledge, bringing perspectives from different vantage points.”

Partnerships cited in the proposal ranged from UVM’s Behavior Therapy and Psychotherapy Center’s Connecting Cultures program, which provides culturally attuned counseling to refugees who have survived trauma and torture in their home countries, to the Cabot Marketing Challenge, which offers area businesses student-led communications and marketing support, while students learn about the businesses and the challenges they face. 

Munkres said the application also successfully demonstrated that community engagement is foundational at UVM, a baseline criterion for Carnegie, part of the university’s vision and mission statements and a recurring theme in statements from its leadership. 

A key element of that foundational commitment, Munkres said, is a facet of UVM’s collective bargaining agreement with faculty first introduced in 2011 and reaffirmed in the 2014 contract: Community-engaged research is recognized as a form of scholarship, as community-engaged teaching and service are recognized as forms of teaching and service.

“The scholarship of engagement fulfills the land-grant mission of UVM,” she said. “To have it explicitly valued in the review-tenure-promotion process is an important and distinguishing element of how we reward faculty here that, hopefully, this classification will help publicize." 

Munkres also cited two other factors that were instrumental: the integration of strong service-learning courses into a wide range of departments and UVM students’ commitment to service.

The application process also highlighted areas where UVM could improve, Munkres said. One was in the lack of a clear definition of community engagement at the university. Over the coming months, Munkres plans to meet with colleagues across the university to formulate a definition.

“As an institution, we have never defined what community engagement is or means,” she said. “If we did that, it might allow us to more clearly track research and programs that are engaging in community partnerships. With a clear definition, and support for tracking these activities, we could more easily gather the data needed for outside agencies like Carnegie. That, in turn, could lead to greater collaboration, greater intentionality and a greater ability for us to tell our story as a community-engaged institution.” 

PUBLISHED

01-14-2015