The Leeds Anchor Network (or system) was established in 2017 with eight founder organizations. In 2024, membership was 14 and represented 1 in 7 of the Leeds city workforce. Leeds Beckett University is a founding member. This paper explains how the system originated and developed, the role Leeds Beckett University has played in that process, and…

Satellite university campuses -- whereby established universities decentralise part of their activities, often to areas previously lacking a university -- contribute to the diversification of university systems. While satellite campuses, due to their small scale and limited resources, might perform some activities less efficiently than their…

As universities institutionalize a public mission, they seek strategies and opportunities to more deeply involve external stakeholders in all aspects of their work: teaching, research, and service. These partnerships support universities in their efforts to generate new knowledge, educate the citizenry, and to improve the well-being of…

There has been an increasing interest within the academic literature on the role played by Higher Education Institutions in the social and economic development of their communities. The Australia Government has recently released its National Science and Innovation Agenda (NISA) which is designed to incentivise university-community research…

Community development-oriented service learning (CDOSL) is an approach to service learning that integrates service with the school curriculum and the local community development agenda. This study examined the positive impacts that CDOSL has on rural students and communities. Surveys and case study research were conducted with 145 students,…

More than 30 years after the Great Society initiatives, poverty continues to put large numbers of students at risk of school failure. The challenges to education and life success are most severe for children in the nation's poorest rural counties, the 535 rural persistent poverty (RPP) counties. This digest provides background on RPP counties and…

Australian rural communities often suffer from psychological isolation in addition to geographic isolation. Human and social capital are powerful antidotes to psychological isolation and are closely dependent on learning. Rural schools can reverse the negative effects of isolation on educational outcomes if they first work on building human and…

Bordering on North Carolina, the Dan River region of Southside Virginia is a largely rural area south of the state capitol, Richmond, and 135 miles east of Virginia Tech's main residential campus in Blacksburg. The structural problems evident today in this expanse of wooded areas, fields, small cities, and towns were born, in large measure, of the…

This book addresses the need for research information that can be used as a foundation for rural development policy. Part I deals with the four components of rural development: education (human capital), entrepreneurship, physical infrastructure, and social infrastructure. Part II examines analytic methods of measuring rural development efforts,…