The University of Minnesota Extension Center for Youth Development made an organizational decision in 2011 to invest in a system-wide approach to implement youth program quality into the 4-H program using the Youth Program Quality Assessment (YPQA) tool. This article describes the four key components to the Minnesota Youth Program Quality…

There is an urgent need for leadership skills when facilitating communication and engendering acceptance and respect among people from culturally different backgrounds, opposing viewpoints, and vastly different experiences. Thus, when facilitating intercultural group dialogs, varying institutions, agencies, and businesses need culturally competent…

University participation among students from low socio-economic backgrounds in Australia is low and nationwide strategies are in place to help bridge the gap. This article presents a preliminary evaluation of a creative arts-based outreach program to raise awareness and aspiration for university study among students from low-income backgrounds.…

Schools throughout the United States apply comprehensive community partnership strategies to address students' in- and out-of-school needs. Drawing from models like the Harlem Children's Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and full-service community schools, such strategies call for diverse professionals to reach beyond their own organizations to…

The University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), and the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), have a researcher-practitioner partnership called "Shared Solutions." They consider Shared Solutions to be a hybrid of the "place-based research alliances" and "design research teams" described by…

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it as they interact regularly. Higher education leaders are attracted to CoPs because they are a peer-based model of learning with colleagues, which works well for professionals such as faculty. These authors identified…

Engagement is widely recognized by higher education institutions, nation-states, and international organizations as the third pillar in the mission of university education. Despite the global reach of this concept, published research is disproportionately based on examples from the United States. This article brings to light the rich and extensive…

The High School Summer Research Program (HSSRP) is a rigorous eight-week research experience that challenges high school students to a novel scientific question in an engineering laboratory at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The program collates highly…

Background: Despite devotion of substantial resources and effort to increase parent/school partnerships, gaps remain between policy rhetoric and practice, especially in high-poverty communities. Current research focuses on parent involvement or effects of parent motivational beliefs on parent choice for behavior; however, it does not address the…

This article explores the literature and practice of how the Cooperative Extension Service does its work and asks if traditional outreach and engagement models have room for innovative delivery mechanisms that may identify emerging trends and help meet community needs. It considers three innovative approaches to the educational mission:…

Operating a museum in a high poverty, underserved area creates many challenges related to accessibility, programming, and funding. Over the course of nearly a decade, the Ohio Valley Museum of Discovery (OVMoD) has identified several organizational practices that help mitigate these challenges. Located in the southeastern corner of Appalachian…

Strong collaborative partnerships are critical to the ongoing success of any urban or metropolitan university in its efforts to build the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career pathways so critical to our nation. At the University of Nebraska at Omaha, we have established a faculty leadership structure of "community…

The field of speech-language pathology needs a conceptual framework to guide the provision of services in a globalized world. Proposed in this article is a conceptual framework designed to facilitate responsive global engagement for professionals such as speech-language pathologists, who are increasingly serving diverse populations around the…

Herein, we describe an effective and tested model of a week-long summer science intensive program for high school students that aimed to elaborate on concepts covered in a high school chemistry or biology course, and to provide high school students an opportunity to learn about studying and pursuing careers in the sciences. The program was…

New homegrown groups such as iDiversity call attention to the important and essential role that student-based groups play in promoting cultural competency within their own institutions and the profession at large. The iDiversity story outlines (1) how student engagement can be transformed into leadership and action by diversity focus within the…