Best of 2013: Community Engagement Initiatives

Omaha – It was a special year for UNO in 2013 with countless events, achievements, special guest visits and national recognitions for students, faculty, staff and alumni.

With the year coming to a close, the spotlight is on one of UNO’s strategic goals: engagement. In fact, UNO continued incredible momentum this year in community engagement initiatives, and UNO was rewarded for those efforts nationally. Here are 2013 UNO engagement highlights:

In late 2012, UNO celebrated the groundbreaking of the new Community Engagement Center, the first of its kind in the country. In early 2013, Sara Woods, former associate dean for the College of Public Affairs and Community Service, was named UNO's community engagement lead. As Assistant to the Senior Vice Chancellor for Community Engagement, Woods has helped work with a wide variety of organizations hoping to utilize UNO's Community Engagement Center.

It was soon after that UNO was once again was nationally honored for its community engagement efforts by the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. UNO is the only Nebraska school to make the honor roll since it began in 2005 and the only Nebraska school to have ever been a finalist for the Higher Education Community Service President’s Award, which occurred in 2010.

Throughout the year, construction continued on the Community Engagment Center. UNO also provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to Nebraska and Iowa through service days like Seven Days of Service, held over UNO's Spring Break, and the Service Learning Academy’s P-16 Initative, which pairs local-area K-12 schools and UNO classrooms with community partners.

As a credit to UNO's service and engagement efforts, this year's International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement conference was held in Omaha with UNO as the host school. As part of the conference, world-renowned engagement scholar and writer Parker Palmer provided a keynote address.

In September, Paul Sather, director of the UNO Service Learning Academy, and Rose Strasser, associate professor of psychology received special recognition for their community engagement efforts. Sather was awarded the Nebraska Campus Compact Community Engagement Professional of the Year award, and Strasser was awarded the Excellence in Community-Based Teaching & Scholarship Award.

They were awarded at the Campus Compact Heartland Conference in Tulsa, OK.

The Community Engagement Professional of the Year award recognizes one professional from a member campus in Nebraska who has worked toward the institutionalization of academic service-learning and/or service, created and strived toward a vision of service for his/her campus, promoted higher education as a public good, provided exceptional support to faculty and students, and has been instrumental in forming innovative campus-community partnerships.

The Excellence in Community-Based Teaching & Scholarship award recognizes one faculty member from a member campus in Nebraska who has 1) successfully incorporated service-learning into at least one course with demonstrable outcomes, and 2) conducted outstanding research in the field of service-learning and engaged scholarship.

In November, UNO was also honored with the donation of the world's largest collection of community engagement materials and research, thanks in large part to Barbara A. Holland, a leading figure in community engagement research who has helped UNO oversee the design of its new Community Engagement Center. In honor of her assistance with acquiring the collection, which will be housed in UNO's Criss Library, the collection was named in her honor.

Looking into the future, it was just a month ago that the Community Engagement Center also announced its first partner members - 15 in all - who would be utilizing space within the new building once it officially opens. A call for an additional set of partners was also sent out in 2013, which means there will be a strong contingent of community leaders, nonprofits and small groups utilizing campus resources in just a few short months.

Scheduled to open in April 2014, the UNO Community Engagement Center will be a beacon of collaboration and learning not just for UNO faculty and students, but for a wide variety of community organizations that may not otherwise have a space to call their own. For decades UNO has gone out into the community to share its resources, but starting next year, it will be UNO's chance to embrace the hard work and energy of the metropolitan community it calls home.

Related Links:
UNO Community Engagement Center Home
Omaha World-Herald Story on Community Engagement Center
KETV Story on 7 Days of Service

Previous 'Best of 2013':
UNO Dean Wins Emmy