Anti-racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices centers anti-racist community-engaged traditions that BIPOC academics and community members have created through more than a century of collaboration across university and community. It demonstrates both the progress and the work that still needs to be done.

The book is organized around a set of Anti-racist Community Engagement Principles developed by the editors as part of their shared work and dialogue with colleagues regionally and across the country. The significant number of diverse voices that have informed the creation of the principles reveal the groundswell of work underway to center anti-racist values and to pivot away from the traditional, higher education-centric, and “white savior” ways of doing community engagement teaching, research, and practice.

The chapters in this book are organized into four sections, each focused on one of the four Anti-racist Community Engagement Principles. The first section explores the various ways in which reframing our institutional and pedagogical practices can help counteract the persistence and impact of racism on our campuses and in our community engagement work. In the second section, authors share practices that promote critical reflection on individual and systemic/structural racism through examinations of positionality, bias, and historical roots of systemic racism. The third section examines intentional learning and course design through anti-racist learning goals, course content, policies, and assessment. Finally, the fourth section shows how authors have developed compassionate and reflective classrooms by creating a sense of belonging that acknowledges student cultural assets and contributions and meets students where they are to co-create a supportive anti-racist learning environment.

Each chapter in the book introduces a specific example of anti-racist community engagement, with authors providing unique, situated insights into the nature and complexity of the factors at play. This is followed by a “Practice” section where authors reflect on their engagement, and the lessons learned through it, thus leaving readers with detailed insights and roadmaps for adapting or replicating the work. Finally, a “Connections” section places the case and its practices into broader contexts of pedagogical, curricular, institutional, and community change.

There is an open access digital companion to the volume, where authors have shared materials that will help shed further light on their compelling practices, including syllabi, agendas, handouts, worksheets, and additional resources.

Community colleges, as local institutions, are an essential part of the American landscape of higher education, playing key roles to democratize it and to provide more people access to upward mobility. At the same time, community colleges are especially well positioned to provide benefits for the larger communities in which they are located in ways that actively engage students and deepen their educational experiences. Yet with decreasing budgets and in some cases decreasing enrollments, we are seeing institutional priorities being scaled back to only those that would appear most obvious in their ability to advance institutional effectiveness and student success. In this context, support for civic engagement programs has languished and, in some instances, disappeared altogether.

This book presents a set of contemporary case studies examining how civic engagement and learning strategies at community colleges can be leveraged to advance institutional effectiveness, college completion, and student success. The chapters provide evidence of strategies and innovative ways that community colleges have extended their efforts to institutionalize civic learning and democratic engagement and the impact of those efforts. Collectively, the case studies suggest that to ensure civic engagement and democratic learning for all community college students, community college leaders should intentionally align and infuse civic engagement and democratic learning with their institutional priorities, making their connections apparent and measurable. This book provides evidence that there are a variety of effective strategies to educate community college students for democracy while advancing student and institutional success.

This book offers a much-needed appraisal of two key social change movements within higher education: civic engagement and social innovation. The authors critically explore the historical and contemporary contexts as well as democratic foundations (or absence thereof) of both approaches, concluding with a discussion of possible future directions that may make the approaches more effective in fulfilling the broader democratic mission of U.S. higher education. This is an essential resource for those in higher education who wish to promote and advance social change, as it provides an opportunity to critically examine where we are with our civic engagement and social innovation approaches and what we might do to best realize their promise through changes in our educational processes, pedagogical strategies, evaluation metrics, and outcomes.

Using a conversational voice, the authors provide a foundation as well as a blueprint and tools to craft a community-engaged course. Based on extensive research, the book provides a scope and sequence of information and skills ranging from an introduction to community engagement, to designing, implementing, and assessing a course, to advancing the craft to prepare for promotion and tenure as well as how to become a citizen-scholar and reflective practitioner. An interactive workbook that can be downloaded from Campus Compact accompanies this tool kit with interactive activities that are interspersed throughout the chapters. The book and workbook can be used by individual readers or with a learning community.

This book is a companion guide to Campus Compact’s successful publication The Community Engagement Professional in Higher Education. In the first text, Campus Compact Research Fellows - led by award-winning scholar-practitioner Lina D. Dostilio - identified a core of set of competencies needed by professionals charged with leading community engaged work on college campuses. In this companion guide, Dostilio teams up with Marshall Welch to build on the initial framework by offering guidance for how a community engagement professional (CEP) should conceptualize, understand, and develop their practice in each of the original competency areas.

Over 10 chapters the authors address questions for those “brand new to the role” and interested in how to start a community engagement unit or center, or from people who are considering jobs doing the work on a campus, or from individuals “are trying to navigate the political environment on their campuses to expand and deepen their unit’s reach.”

The Guidebook offers a rich and deep dive, breaking down the essential components of a professional’s work. From mentoring faculty research, leading campaigns to build civic engagement curriculum on campus, to managing the staff who support community engagement units, Dostilio and Welch tackle the breadth of the CEP’s work by drawing on key resources and their own decades of experience in the field. Throughout the book, readers will encounter “Compass Points” that call for personal reflection and engagement with the text. These interactive moments combine with end-of-chapter questions to prompt thinking about a CEP’s critical commitments, to create a powerful and engaging toolkit that will be essential for any person doing community and civic engagement work on campus.

This book offers a broad overview of many issues related to assessment in higher education, with specific application for understanding the impact of service-learning and civic engagement initiatives. This revised edition includes an additional chapter that explores recent changes in the assessment landscape and offers examples and resources for designing assessment strategies for community engagement in higher education. The original text includes narrative addressing assessment issues and strategies; a detailed discussion of learning from multiple research projects performed over the past two decades about impact on multiple constituencies –students, faculty, communities, and institutions; and a discussion of strategies for data collection, analysis, synthesis, and reporting. Specific assessment instruments for use with each constituency are provided, including suggestions for administration, preparation, and data analysis. This volume will be helpful for individuals seeking a comprehensive resource on assessment issues in higher education.

The Carnegie Engagement Classification is designed to be a form of evidence-based documentation that a campus meets the criteria to be recognized as a community engaged institution. Editors John Saltmarsh and Mathew B. Johnson use their extensive experience working with the Carnegie Engagement Classification to offer a collection of resources for institutions that are interested in making a first-time or reclassification application for this recognition. Contributors offer insight on approaches to collecting the materials needed for an application and strategies for creating a complete and successful application. Chapters include detailed descriptions of what happened on campuses that succeeded in their application attempts and even reflection from a campus that failed on their first application. Readers can make use of worksheets at the end of each chapter to organize their own classification efforts.

This book, offered by “practitioner-scholars,” is an exploration and identification of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are central to supporting effective community engagement practices between higher education and communities. The discussion and review of these core competencies are framed within a broader context of the changing landscape of institutional community engagement and the emergence of the Community Engagement Professional as a facilitator of engaged teaching, research, and institutional partnerships distinct from other academic professionals.

This research, conducted as part of Campus Compact’s Project on the Community Engagement Professional, seeks to identify the shared knowledge and practices of Community Engagement Professionals by looking to empirical practice literature. Chapters include an exploration of competencies applicable to those in Community Engagement Professional roles generally, and also to those specializing in specific areas such as faculty development, partnership facilitation, and other areas of responsibility. The authors trace the evolution of engagement administration over time and the role of those facilitating community-campus engagement toward a “Second Generation” professional who is at once a “tempered radical, transformational leader, and social entrepreneur.”

Central to the work is a presentation of the core competency findings, along with suggestions for continued exploration. Dostilio and her colleagues argue that Community Engagement Professionals should claim a professional identity grounded in a set of core competencies, values, and knowledge, and through association with a community of scholar practitioners similarly dedicated. Additional work to understand and empower Community Engagement Professionals in their role as distinct from other higher education professional types will enable both broader impact for institutions and communities now with a view to prepare those coming to the role for a dynamic and demanding environment without distinct boundaries.