The Leeds Anchor Network (or system) was established in 2017 with eight founder organizations. In 2024, membership was 14 and represented 1 in 7 of the Leeds city workforce. Leeds Beckett University is a founding member. This paper explains how the system originated and developed, the role Leeds Beckett University has played in that process, and…

Anchor movements rest on the premise that people- and place-based initiatives can be mutually reinforcing. The community development movement, however, has been haunted for years by the people-place dilemma -- the idea that efforts to help people harm efforts to uplift places and vice versa. Most of the literature on the anchor strategy has…

Increasingly, suburban universities find themselves in communities facing challenges that inner cities have had to deal with for decades, including concentrated poverty, housing vacancy, and underperforming school districts. While the problems are similar, the institutional context is different. Compared to central cities, suburban municipal…

The legacy of deindustrialization and associated underemployment continues to plague many former industrial communities. In these spaces, universities serve as anchors providing gateways for individual economic empowerment, and as "brain centers" charged with generating solutions for societal problems. This paper explores the development…

Urban universities have long faced a critical challenge to help K-12 schools, students, and families effectively access a college education. While colleges and universities have embraced strategies such as charter and partner schools, these interventions do not always result in a robust pipeline of students entering the higher education system.…

As universities institutionalize a public mission, they seek strategies and opportunities to more deeply involve external stakeholders in all aspects of their work: teaching, research, and service. These partnerships support universities in their efforts to generate new knowledge, educate the citizenry, and to improve the well-being of…

For most colleges and universities, community-engaged scholarship (CES) is a value that supports the public mission of academic institutions. However, shifting CES from a core value to a guiding principle requires demonstrable support and structural modifications to academic practices and policies. Through this reflective paper, I will propose…

This paper explores efforts of the Coppin Heights Community Development Corporation (CHCDC) to: (1) increase the commitment to community engagement at Coppin State University, an HBCU situated in the heart of one of Baltimore's most challenged communities; and, (2) increase the community's capacity to engage the university, and other institutions,…

Laurie A. Walker, the 2017 recipient of the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement, is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Montana. Together with her co-author, Dr. Jean F. East, Professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver, they have raised, in this piece, an…

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,…

As a descriptive case study from Western Carolina University (WCU), this article describes the development of a measuring, monitoring, and tracking system (the WCU Community-based Activities Survey) for faculty engagement in, adoption of, and impact through community engagement practices both internal and external to their courses. This paper will…

The essay briefly outlines the history of community engagement at DePaul University in order to explore how and why universities and colleges are increasingly adopting data collections systems for tracking community engagement. I explore the question of why there is a growing interest in tracking engagement within the academy and suggest that…

Building communities through creative community garden projects is increasingly common and seems to create beneficial effects for participants. This study recognizes the need to understand the impact of gardens on low socioeconomic neighborhoods. By conducting a needs assessment study and establishing a community garden, we were able to study its…

Respondents to our 2011 survey on the impact of Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) grants administered by HUD between 1994 and 2005 reported deep and lasting impacts on their respective institutions. These grants affected institutional structures, embedded community engagement within institutional cultures and academic curricula, and…

In this article we take a closer look at a developing university-community engagement project being undertaken between California State University, Fresno, and the City of Fresno. A history of the project is provided, along with a review of the relevant literature and a summary of what pieces of the puzzle we feel should be in place for a…