Customer Service is important for a myriad of reasons, such as retaining customers, building customer loyalty, getting customer referrals, improving employee happiness, and remaining competitive. However, as a company grows, the focus may be on sales and production, with customer service efficiency and effectiveness being seen as an overhead…

This Practice to Policy brief, based on insights from UnidosUS's Affiliate Network of community-based organizations and public charter schools in Illinois, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California, highlights the critical role of Out-of-School Time (OST) programs in supporting the Latino community, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19…

Created during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Shelter Project brought together a denominational seminary, a leading state research university, a community arts organization, and a housing non-profit serving unhoused and vulnerable neighbors. As the pandemic revealed and intensified the ongoing crisis of houselessness in central New…

The COVID-19 pandemic set higher education institutions on an unprecedented path requiring of them to identify alternative strategies and implement various initiatives to sustain their academic projects. With the widespread devastation of the pandemic, the purpose of universities within their communities were again in the spotlight. A sensibility…

Tina M. Ellsworth and Toni Gates center their article around stories of Black joy, agency, and resistance of Black Kansas Citians. Ellsworth and Gates' collaboration demonstrates how educators can effectively construct partnerships between schools and grassroots organizations. The authors of this piece will guide educators in ways to find local…

The purpose of this study was to describe community partners' (CPs) perceptions of an out-of-school swimming program (OSSP) for under­served children and youth. Participants were four CPs associated with the OSSP during three consecutive summers and parents of the children and youth who participated in the program. We employed a theoretical…

As community-based global learning (CBGL) programs become more common on college/university campuses and utilize the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to guide programmatic outcomes, open-access evaluation instruments that both benchmark and effectively measure programmatic enhancements over time are needed. The 147-item Community Engagement and…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is inherently relational, shaped by the interactions children have within their homes, schools, and communities. Grounded in ecological systems theory, this chapter explores how family-school-community partnerships can serve as a powerful mechanism for promoting SEL and fostering positive developmental outcomes.…

Governments and private funders are placing increasing demands on postsecondary institutions and community-based organizations to account for the impacts from their collaborative research and learning efforts. In this article, we explore how best to account for impacts arising from the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement project…

This paper describes a unique collaborative action research project that brings together members of the [q virgule suscrite] [i-acute] [c-acute] [schwa][y-acute] (Katzie) First Nation, post-secondary and K-12 communities, as well as foresters and environmentalists, to restore creeks that have been compromised by land use impacts, forest removal,…

In this article, the authors chart ongoing efforts in the University of Louisville Writing Center to develop a partnership model grounded in "writing center values." A full description of what might constitute writing center values could include in-depth attention to the individual writer and all the varied intersectional contexts with…

This is a practical guide to designing, teaching, and coordinating service-learning courses, and for developing reciprocal community partnerships and community-based research through a lens of equity that addresses the endemic racial, social, economic, and environmental disparities across society. The text provides a comprehensive framework for…

This article focuses on three applied theatre projects, framed within the Theatre of the Oppressed: "Neighbourhood Herstories" (2018), "West Majorca Story" (2019), and "My Life in the Borough" (2019). We explore how theatre students from the University of the Balearic Islands and neighbours in the marginal district of…

An extensive faculty partnership at the University of Connecticut (UConn) that reaches across college and departmental lines is engaged in a project that seeks to enhance, expand, institutionalize, and study a new model for community engagement. The model, called the Environment Corps (E-Corps), combines the familiar elements of classroom…

In this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during students' travel to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.78 percentage point reduction in the school-level…