Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative

Project Press Release
Project Description
Collaborative Members
Project Updates
How You Can Contribute to this Project
For More Information

Project Description

"Many untenured faculty find they must choose between 'doing the work that would contribute to career advancement' and doing the work of the institution in linking with communities and educating students."
~Ron Richards, Building Partnerships for Health Professions Education, 1996

"A university's values are most clearly described by its promotion and tenure policy and by the criteria used to evaluate faculty members."
~Conrad Weiser et. al., Oregon State University, Scholarship Unbound for the 21st Century, 2000

Members of the Collaborative gathered again for plenary sessions and small group work (pictured here) at the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health from February 22-24, 2006, for the Collaborative’s second annual meeting.

In October 2004, the US Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) awarded CCPH a 3-year grant for the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative. The Collaborative is a group of 8 health professional schools across the fields of allied health, dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health that aim to build capacity within their institutions, as well as their peers nationally, for community-based participatory research, service-learning, and other forms of community-engaged scholarship.

These schools have identified review, promotion and tenure issues as major impediments to sustaining and expanding community-engaged scholarship. Each school has formed a team of faculty, administrators, and community partners to lead the change process. The teams will be supported in their campus change efforts through ongoing opportunities for training, technical assistance and information-sharing. Strategic partnerships with national organizations will facilitate the dissemination of lessons learned to the broader health professions education community. By the conclusion of the three-year project, the schools participating in the Collaborative will have significantly changed their promotion & tenure systems to recognize and reward community-engaged scholarship and stimulated similar actions in schools across the country.

The Collaborative responds to recommendations of many prominent national groups that are calling upon health professional schools to be more engaged in their communities, including the Institute of Medicine, the Pew Health Professions Commission and the Commission on Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Health Professions. All of these groups advance community-academic partnerships as an essential strategy for improving health professional education, increasing health workforce diversity and eliminating health disparities. Unfortunately, community engagement often conflicts with how faculty are recognized and rewarded. A commonly cited barrier to sustaining faculty involvement in communities is the failure of university promotion and tenure systems to adequately recognize or reward faculty members for community-based research, teaching and service. By developing a more supportive academic environment for community-engaged scholarship, the ability of academic institutions and community partners to collaborate in educating future health professions, generating community-relevant knowledge and building healthier communities will be significantly advanced.

Click here for a PowerPoint presentation on the Collaborative. If you use these slides, please click here to let us know.

Collaborative Members

Auburn University Harrison School of Pharmacy
Auburn, Alabama

Case Western University School of Nursing
Cleveland, Ohio

Indiana University School of Dentistry
Indianapolis, Indiana

Loma Linda University School of Public Health
Loma Linda, California

University of Cincinnati College of Allied Health Sciences
Cincinnati, Ohio

University of Colorado at Denver Health Sciences Center, School of Pharmacy
Denver, Colorado

University of Minnesota Academic Health Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota

University of North Carolina School of Dentistry
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Project Updates

On February 21-22, 2007, the Collaborative held an invitational symposium at the Westin Embassy Row hotel in Washington, D.C., titled “Community-Engaged Scholarship in Higher Education: Have We Reached a Tipping Point?” The goals of the symposium were:

• To examine trends and issues facing higher education and what future scenarios for higher education look like
• To examine how community engagement (CE) and community-engaged scholarship (CES) fit into these scenarios
• To learn from the experiences of national conversations/initiatives about CE and CES that have been going on in parallel with the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative – and to form linkages among them
• To inform the national conversation about CE and CES in higher education and inspire collective action

Judith Ramaley, President of Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, was the keynote speaker. Click here for symposium presentations, handouts and select audiofiles. Over 100 leaders in community-engaged higher education from both the community and academy attended, which included members of the Collaborative.

On February 23, 2007, members of the Collaborative remained in Washington, D.C. for the 3rd annual Collaborative meeting. In addition to a panel presentation composed of two community-university partnership teams, members shared their progress with other schools, and had the chance to plan for the upcoming year. Lastly, the Collaborative’s Peer Review and Faculty Development Workgroups presented the work they had completed in the past year.

The Collaborative held its second annual meeting February 22-24, 2006, at the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health in Nashville, TN. For a brief synopsis of the meeting, click here. The first annual meeting was held on February 16-18, 2005, in the same location. For a brief synopsis of the meeting, click here.

In the spring of 2005, representatives from each of the Collaborative teams had discussions with CCPH staff to review the team’s work to date. Click here for an interim report on the progress made by the Collaborative teams and challenges that have arisen.

The Collaborative has developed 3 tools for assessing institutional capacity for community engagement and community-engaged scholarship. Click on the title to open and view the tool in PDF format:

(1) Building Capacity for Community Engagement: Institutional Self-Assessment, designed to assess the capacity of a given higher educational institution (or unit therein) for community engagement and community-engaged scholarship, and to identify opportunities for action.

(2) Website Analysis Protocol, designed to determine the strategies by which institutions represent their community engagement and community-engaged scholarship on their websites.

(3) Review, Promotion and Tenure Analysis Protocol, designed to assess an institution's RPT guidelines against the set of criteria established by the Commission on Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Health Professions

The Collaborative's Peer Review Workgroup has prepared a background document, "Developing Criteria for Review of Community-Engaged Scholars for Promotion or Tenure" that provides edited or distilled information from the websites of several institutions and entities that have recognized and seek to reward community-engaged scholarship.

To view slides, handouts and others materials from presentations about the Collaborative, click here. These presentations include:

(1) "Community-Engaged Scholarship: A Model for Institutional Self-Assessment" at the Western Region Campus Compact Consortium Continuums of Service Conference on April 11-13, 2005.
(2) "Community Engagement and Community-Engaged Scholarship: Clarifying Our Meanings When Using These Terms," a Collaborative-sponsored teleconference on May 18, 2005.
(3) "Linking Scholarship and Communities at the National Outreach Scholarship Conference on October 2-4, 2005.
(4) "Institutional Change to Support Community-Engaged Scholarship: Testing New Methods" at the Fifth Annual International Advances in Service-Learning Research Conference on November 13-15, 2005.

How You Can Contribute to this Project

We welcome your suggestions of key articles, reports, people and programs that should be considered for this project. You may send questions, comments, citations or full-text materials by e-mail or by mail: UW Box 354809, Seattle, WA 98195-4809.

For More Information

To receive announcements and updates related to the Collaborative, please join the Community-Engaged Scholarship listserv. This electronic discussion group provides a venue for sharing information and resources concerning the academic review and reward system for health professional faculty involved in community-based participatory research, service-learning and other forms of community-engaged scholarship.

For additional information about the Collaborative, please contact Program Director Kristine Wong at Kristine@u.washington.edu or 206-543-7954.

For more information on community-engaged scholarship, please click here.

For Project Partners Only: Click Here.

Project Partners Page

“The contents of this website were developed under a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.”