California's 4-H Youth Development Program adopted an asset-based and systematic community development approach to studying successful Latino-serving youth development programs. This effort included a scan of Latino engagement resources and Latino-serving youth development settings as well as key informant interviews. Beyond generating important…

With the digital age in full swing, helping rural communities transition to, plan for, and prosper in digitally minded ways is critical. This article describes an innovative outreach process that relies on asset-based community development and the intelligent community concept. More importantly, the process relies heavily on Extension personnel…

A partnership between Ohio State University Extension and the Ohio Housing Finance Agency blends effective community outreach with rigorous research. Community outreach of the partners ranges from home buyer education to foreclosure prevention in Ohio. Research projects of the partnership target program design, pilot testing, and evaluation. The…

The use of big data in smart cities poses new questions about higher education and community-university engagement practices in addressing longstanding social and economic exclusion in urban communities. Drawing on transdisciplinary ideas in higher education, cultural theory, and science and technology studies, primary concerns in the era of big…

Community engagement has evolved as a respected field and now occupies a seat at the academic table. In the past, this work had often been relegated to the institutional fringes of higher education, its practitioners marginalized, and the work often portrayed as service, not scholarly. Today, higher education community engagement is a dynamic and…

The Cooperative Extension Service (Extension) is part of the land-grant university system with a mission of outreach and service in the areas of agriculture, natural resources, family and consumer sciences, youth development, and community economic development. As the number of minorities grows in the United States, Extension needs to ensure that…

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,…

Service-learning has the potential to create mutually beneficial relationships between schools and communities, but little research explores service-learning from the community's perspective. The purpose of this study was to (a) understand how community-based organizations (CBOs) benefited from partnering with students and (b) examine whether…

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…

Many academic departments are making efforts to increase faculty and student community engagement as part of a movement to revitalize the civic function of higher education. A case study of the development of a public sociology program provides examples of steps that can be taken to involve educators and students in communities in multifaceted…

This essay examines how the social construction of community may influence faculty perceptions, roles, and actions in rural community development outreach. Special attention is given to the social construction of rural communities and how disciplinary perspective and popular culture influence these perceptions of community. The essay considers how…

This article discusses the current dynamics at African universities concerning the quality of teaching, the role of research, the level of community outreach, and the position of higher education in the educational sector as a whole. Points of reference are experiences at the University of the North in South Africa as well as experiences at…

All corners of the media are scrutinising David Cameron's "Big Society", from every conceivable angle. While the concept has caught the public's imagination, the greater challenge of fleshing out what the Big Society will actually offer and require of communities is unfinished business. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations…

Using stories from two employees in the UK Sure Start initiative, this paper offers insight into the complexity of developing a professional identity within a newly established, nebulous role of "outreach worker". Such a role is highly diverse in terms of its duties and the people with whom it engages. As such, it poses challenges for…

Community is important to many institutions of higher learning, but it is very difficult to imagine Berea College disconnected from its primary community--the Appalachian region. Since its mid-nineteenth-century beginning as a radical experiment in interracial education and coeducation centered in community, the college has been dedicated to…