This study pilots a survey tool for assessing participant experiences in the MLK Day of Service at a public university. Student, faculty, staff, community volunteer, and community partner participants (N=344) reflected upon service, learning, and university-community connections as part of a multi-method evaluation process. Quantitative analysis…

This paper focuses on how the University of Michigan-Flint's Innovation Incubator supports emerging for-profit businesses and nonprofit organizations through programming, business plan development, and ongoing mentorship. The Incubator is especially interested in supporting start-ups that address key social issues in the surrounding community,…

This article describes the evolution of the Charlotte Action Research Project (CHARP), a community-university partnership founded in 2008 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and focuses particularly on the program's unique organizational structure. Research findings of a project evaluation suggest that the CHARP model's unique…

The most pressing social problems facing humanity in the 21st century are what systems theorist Russell Ackoff referred to as "messes"--complex dynamic systems of problems that interact and reinforce each other over time. In this article, the authors argue that the lack of progress in managing messes is in part due to the predominance of…

This article provides the background and describes the processes involved in establishing a national approach to benchmarking the way universities engage with their local and regional communities in Australia. Local and regional community engagement is a rapidly expanding activity in Australian public universities and is increasingly being seen as…

Since its inception in 1985, and through 1992, Washington state's Distinguished Professorship Program has succeeded in establishing 32 prestigious professorships at its four-year institutions with 3 more in process. Also in 1985, the state legislature enacted the Distinguished Professorship Trust Fund Program to strengthen partnerships between…

A survey was conducted to explore the potential of weekly newspapers for information dissemination in rural Saskatchewan. Articles about engineering research of relevance to the community had been mailed to eighty weekly Canadian newspapers on a free-choice basis over a ten month period. A random sample of 1,020 subscribers selected from the…

Described are programs sponsored by the Atlanta, Georgia, community which has accepted the "community of believers" concept espoused by the Superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools. According to the concept, the community at large must believe that each student is capable of learning, our educational system can teach students, our…