Academic institutions engaged in partnerships with the Black Church, including small, independent, under-resourced churches as well as historically Black denominational churches, and other under-resourced faith-based organizations, are encouraged to consider collaborative educational opportunities around the issues of strategic financial sustainability and short and long-term stewardship. Four highly community-engaged academics offer a thought-experiment starting with their observations and experiences with respect to the need for such partnerships, and how these kinds of collaborations may be able to help strengthen the Black Church, in all its forms and faith-based communities and ground them for greater advocacy for demanding systemic and structural change.

Places of worship play important roles as anchor institutions that promote community engagement and motivate political activity. Universities, particularly in urban settings, can also serve as anchor institutions that connect communities. Yet, there is often a gulf between the two, to the detriment of the broader community. In this article, we present the Little Rock Congregations Study (LRCS) as an approach to community engagement with faith-based organizations in an urban setting. This research project, based at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, involves an interdisciplinary team focused on understanding and improving the community engagement of congregations in the city of Little Rock since 2012. We present qualitative and quantitative data to illustrate the benefits of our approach, including research results returned to community organizations, greater visibility of the university in the community, student involvement in research and with faith-based organizations, and substantive findings that inform the greater body of knowledge and our own community. Through more than eight years of community-based work on the LRCS we provide six key lessons learned for researchers and students building relationships with religious leaders that can help bridge the gulf between these two key community institutions.

Higher education institutions increasingly are required to provide a measured response to perceptions that challenge institutions’ value proposition as assets to their communities. This article will focus on best practices in the campus’ efforts to create a pathway to demonstrate community impact. Foundational is the ability of systematic tracking of partnerships and projects data. This article will discuss how institutions’ research agenda can expand from basic metrics to analyzing leading indicators of partnership success – and how a sophisticated dataset can be ultimately leveraged to measure impact. The article will conclude with a reflection of the challenges faced by other higher education institutions and the commonality in institutions’ desire to systematically track and visualize community engagement efforts.

As the calls for responsible investing grow, universities will be asked about their endowments’ investment policies regarding impact investing, wherein endowments seek opportunities that provide investment returns and social impact. A common concern for the investment committees, however, is how to incorporate impact investments without compromising the goal of maximizing asset values and the benefit to its university. This paper offers a way forward. Using standard portfolio optimization models and a broader way to consider return, this paper suggests that an endowment can still meet the goal of maximizing expected value while investing with a purpose. It also offers examples of how to incorporate impact investing opportunities throughout the traditional asset classes in an endowment’s portfolio. The paper also addresses some reasons why endowments have been hesitant to incorporate impact investments. While other papers have addressed aspects of impact investing, this paper seeks to offer an accessible and holistic approach to the topic.

Service-learning as a transformative pedagogy has been adopted within Hong Kong’s tertiary education sector for over a decade; however, the lack of a standardized and validated measurement instrument to assess its student learning outcomes has been an obstacle to its further development. The current research study, collaboratively conducted by Lingnan University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and The Education University of Hong Kong, therefore aims to develop such a measurement instrument named the “Service-Learning Outcomes Measurement Scale (S-LOMS),” taking consideration of the unique features of service-learning in Hong Kong. The scale development and validation work, with exploratory factor analysis and reliability test, has thus far demonstrated that the student-perceived learning outcomes after service-learning can be measured and assessed through 56 items. These items cover 11 domains under four major categories, namely: a) knowledge application; b) personal and professional skills, including relationship and team skills, creative problem solving skills, self-reflection skills, and critical thinking skills, c) civic orientation and engagement, including sense of social responsibility, community commitment and understanding, and caring and respect, and d) self-awareness, including self-efficacy, self-understanding, and commitment to self-improvement. Several additional insights arising from the validation results are discussed.

Since the opening of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s (UNO) Community Engagement Center in 2014, both university and community building partners have been guided by a set of core values. Established by a community/university task force after months of focus groups, community conversations, and other data gathering activities, these values have helped provide a foundation for the selection of university and community building partners, decision-making, and ongoing operations. This study explored the ways in which building partner alignment with the Weitz CEC values influenced their subsequent perceived organizational capacity. Results indicated that embracing the values was positively associated with increased perceptions of organizational capacity. Essentially, those who indicated they embraced the values experienced heightened feelings of belongingness, participated in more networking activities, and agreed that the culture was more cooperative, which contributed to their organization’s perceived capacity.

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 governments generally lack the resources necessary to sustain robust community economic development initiatives. Further, suburbs often lack the rich landscape of nonprofit organizations that were built up over many decades in central cities. This article reflects on the experience of the University of Missouri-St. Louis as a case study of a suburban anchor institution. This experience suggests that anchor institutions in suburban settings need to focus on asset-based community development, support collective action among fragmented institutions, and build the civic capacity of local governments, nonprofits, and businesses.

To further live our mission, Marquette has launched many new initiatives over the past five years that strategically connect our university to our community. In this paper, we will highlight three of these initiatives. The first relates to connecting the anchor institutions in our neighborhood through an effort called Near West Side Partners. The second discusses the creation of a centralized Office of Community Engagement that advances the development, support, and promotion of the research, teaching, and service partnerships between our campus and our community partners. The third initiative, our most recent enterprise, is our Office of Corporate Engagement and Partnerships. All three of these efforts follow through on Ignatius of Loyola’s vision to serve others and collectively make a difference.

To increase equitable postsecondary access and success outcomes it is critical to address the college preparedness gap. While Florida International University (FIU) continues to improve retention and graduation gaps for currently enrolled students, it became evident that the university could play a larger role in preparing high school students for college and university. In 2017, FIU developed a dual enrollment version of a currently offered course, SLS1510: Strategies for Success, to address this gap. The purpose of this article is to describe the context in which this decision occurred, the philosophy used to drive development of the course, and the steps taken to pilot the course. This article highlights the successes of the course, including enrollment of over 2,000 students over 4 semesters, along with areas of improvement for future iterations. The findings of the pilot can help to inform colleges and universities who are interested in addressing college preparedness in the k-12 pipeline.

Drawing on cultural studies and the practice of engaged learning and scholarship, this paper proposes a cultural approach to institutional transformation, which we argue necessarily follows anchor partnerships. The authors advance a model of cohesion and alignment among equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), community engagement, and social entrepreneurship commitments at colleges and universities. This centers on the notion of “joining” as an epistemology and a methodology in community and campus-based work to achieve the anchor mission. In addition to advancing a theoretical model, the authors draw upon theory in practice at the University of San Diego, where the Center for Inclusion and Diversity, Mulvaney Center for Community, Awareness, and Social Action, and the Changemaker HUB aligned their efforts to approach student learning, community empowerment, and economic development through a cohesive lens.