Customer Service is important for a myriad of reasons, such as retaining customers, building customer loyalty, getting customer referrals, improving employee happiness, and remaining competitive. However, as a company grows, the focus may be on sales and production, with customer service efficiency and effectiveness being seen as an overhead…

This study provides an overview of the literature of Florida's only Community Partnership Schools™ model, as a strategy to enhance family and community engagement in low performing high poverty elementary schools. More specifically, the focus of this study was to determine to what degree parents perceived the effectiveness of family and community…

Community-engaged scholarship (CES) is frequently recommended as a postsecondary practice for producing knowledge to address real-world issues and support the public good. But CES has multiple meanings, and understandings overlap with similar terms, such as publicly engaged scholarship. I draw upon recommendations in the field to propose an…

This article considers the historical and current national context for integrating community engagement into graduate education. While it might be argued that most graduate education contributes generally to society by advancing knowledge, we are referring here to community engagement that involves some reciprocal interaction between graduate…

In this article the authors reflect on KerryAnn O'Meara and Audrey Jaeger's 2006 article, "Preparing Future Faculty for Community Engagement: Barriers, Facilitators, Models, and Recommendations" (EJ1092909) reprinted in this 20th anniversary issue of "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement." Ten years ago, O'Meara…

The purpose of this article is to describe a model for creating a successful service engagement partnership with a community organization that may lead to the development of a short- or long-term service engagement project or course. The article explains how to create a successful partnership, including how to identify and choose the right…

This article describes the evolution of the Charlotte Action Research Project (CHARP), a community-university partnership founded in 2008 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and focuses particularly on the program's unique organizational structure. Research findings of a project evaluation suggest that the CHARP model's unique…

The Authors@UF program series emerged to showcase the scholarship and creativity of faculty, creating an intellectual forum within the academic library, and providing informal, extra-curriculum, academic engagement between students and faculty outside the classroom. This article identifies steps to launch an author program, and considerations in…

School science laboratory classes and hands-on public engagement activities share many common aims and objectives in terms of science learning and literacy. This article describes the development and evaluation of a microbiology public engagement activity, "The Good, the Bad and the Algae", from a school laboratory activity. The school…

The Downtown Education Collaborative (DEC) is an innovative collaborative which includes public and private colleges working with community organizations in interdisciplinary community service learning. This article reviews DEC's development, from its inception as a shared vision aspired to by its partners, to a functioning collaborative. We…

Chilean educator and poet Gabriela Mistral warned that children's needs are immediate and comprise more than just academic concerns. Implementing comprehensive community schools is an increasingly successful approach to taking her warning to heart, particularly in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. The reason is simple: education does…

Inner-city schools located in high poverty communities often operate with insufficient resources to meet the educational needs of students. Community residents serving as paraeducators offer the dual benefits of expanding instructional capacity and fostering family-school relationships, provided they are appropriately prepared and incorporated…

This article presents the unique approach to university-community partnerships developed and practiced at Michigan State University (MSU). We have established a model of campus-community partnerships that builds a wide-reaching system of networks connecting the university to communities. Our approach is "developmental",…

This study examines how communities participate in schools across diverse contexts in developing countries and the results attributed to community participation. It reviews evaluations of participatory approaches to education in developing countries to answer two basic questions: 1) How do communities participate in school in developing countries?…

This article considers the historical and current national context for integrating community engagement into graduate education. While it might be argued that most graduate education contributes generally to society by advancing knowledge, we are referring here to community engagement that involves some reciprocal interaction between graduate…