This article investigates how strategic community partnerships form the bedrock of successful institutional community engagement activities. In this investigation, these engagements encourage institutional practitioners to consider how truly effective community economic development materializes when the university assumes a reactionary role by…

Mental health challenges for youth continue to be a growing concern. Youth-serving organizations have the potential to play a significant role in recognizing the signs and symptoms of mental health challenges in youth. The Youth Mental Health First Aid (YMHFA) training course is widely used to equip adults working with youth with skills to support…

Background: The perspectives of community partners about their experiences working with medical students and how service-learning experiences affect the communities they serve remains understudied. Objective: This study addressed gaps in the literature by reporting on in-depth interviews conducted with community partners who participated in a…

This study examined six diverse school districts in Maine that have successfully formed partnerships between their districts and community or regional organizations to expand supports to students and their families that go beyond academic support to include health, mental health, social services and other supports.

This case study examined the first two years of adult preparation or "readiness" for an elementary school's adoption and implementation of a trauma-informed, social emotional learning (SEL) universal curriculum. SEL programming served as a key lever for improving the academic growth and achievement of students over a 3-year period. The…

This paper explores the potential for postsecondary community-based educational experiences to impart the skills employers most desire from new college graduates. We gathered one U.S. university's community-engaged learning (CEL) stakeholders to collect detailed descriptions of the behaviors students practice during CEL. Students, faculty, and…

This paper examines how the structural features of engineering engagement programs (EEPs) are related to the nature of their service-learning partnerships. "Structure" refers to formal and informal models, processes, and operations adopted or used to describe engagement programs, while "nature" signifies the quality of…

In this article we expand the scope of school-university partnerships to include a community partner. This study involved an afterschool tutoring program known as the Discovery Center (pseudonym) partnering with a university reading class. This partnership, which is in its sixth year of implementation, prepares teacher candidates in the area of…

American youths are becoming increasingly less physically active and have poor nutrition habits. Nationwide, less than one third of students reported achieving the recommended level of physical activity (one hour of exercise per day). In addition, most youths consume less than the recommended daily amounts of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.…

Engaged scholarship (ES) entails a symbiotic relationship between the community and the university. This article reports results from an evaluation of an ES symposium Eastern Carolina University held to increase awareness of ES as a means for integrating research, teaching, and service and to potentially change unfavorable perceptions about ES…

Family-school partnerships have a positive impact on both students and schools, yet they remain challenging to establish and maintain, particularly in the presence of parent-teacher conflict. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the experiences of parents, teachers, and students when parents and teachers disagreed about a student's…

As academic libraries struggle to remain relevant when technological advancements and electronic resources threaten to make them obsolete, libraries are learning to re-invent themselves by molding and adapting staff skills to cultivate innovative outreach programs. The Science Outreach Committee of the John D. MacArthur Campus library at Florida…

A school-community partnership team implemented an aggression management curriculum in an afterschool program as an early-intervention strategy at the upper elementary level. Although statistically significant differences in physical or psychological aggression were not found, the partnership team gained a better understanding of evidence-based…

School-community partnering activities promote the education of children, the well-being of families, and the vitality of communities. This study explores the connections that exist and are desired between a small, rural elementary school and its local community. Interviews (n = 21) with district and school administration, teachers, parents, and…

As a central construct in the theory of service-learning, reciprocity for community partners is not often the subject of scholarship, especially scholarship that seeks to understand the benefits and opportunity costs of service-learning. This article explores how reciprocity works in higher education service-learning from the perspective of…