The Office of Outreach and Engagement supports Ohio State's community-engaged scholars and practitioners to foster strong and mutually beneficial community partnerships. Our work encourages high-impact community-engaged scholarship that carries out Ohio State’s land-grant mission.
We further define high-impact engagement as engagement activity that aligns with the following principles and outcomes.
- Robust Reciprocity: Engagement activities that are bidirectional, with the community contributing to, as well as benefiting from, the project.
- Training Students: Engagement activities that enhance the ability of our students to assume future positions of leadership in the context of community engagement.
- Community Improvement: Engagement activities whose primary goal is to improve community processes, conditions and outcomes or seek to address challenges identified by community members.
- Programmatic Sustainability: Engagement activities are designed with an emphasis on long-term sustainability. Projects should consider long-term needs for funding and leadership to continue, sustain or expand activities in collaboration with community partners. Projects that are not intended for long-term sustainability should be clearly articulated to community partners.
- Community Capacity Building: Engagement should seek to increase the capacity of individuals and organizations in the community to act or advocate to meet community needs.
- Proactive, Respectful and Culturally Competent Engagement: High-impact engagement requires proactive engagement that is centered on “meeting the community where they are.” Proactive engagement requires faculty, staff and students to seek to lower barriers to engagement for community partners. Engaged faculty, staff and students should be culturally competent and aware of community context and history.