FACILITATE COLLABORATION
How might we facilitate intracampus collaboration toward more strategic, impactful, community-engaged goals?
In our listening sessions, the theme we heard most clearly was that while numerous examples of community-engaged work exist across the campus, we are often unaware of what one another are doing and how we might work together. What might we be able to accomplish if we rooted our work in the principles of collective impact, establishing shared goals and investing in fewer but deeper initiatives? What if we simply tried to row our boats in the same direction?
Through greater coordination of engaged initiatives and coalition formation across the campus, we can harness passion and creativity toward shared goals - deepening community impact, adding coherency to our institutional narrative and identity, and strengthening student learning. Moving forward, the CCE will employ a "big tent" strategy, providing spaces where those with shared interests can gather and explore how they might work together. In this work, we aim to embody democratic principles and the core insight of public work that all of us is better than any of us.
Goals
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Lead collaborative community-engaged projects and partnerships aimed to deepen collective impact.
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Elevate current community-engaged work at CC to increase awareness of existing partnerships and projects.
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Organize structures for community-engaged collaboration.
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Cultivate intracampus relationships to lay a foundation for collaboration.
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Create ongoing opportunities for diverse stakeholders to collaboratively guide the strategic direction of community-engaged work at CC.
Strategic Initiatives
CCE Co-op
This program creates a cooperative of student organizers committed to facilitating intracampus collaboration to deepen CC's collective impact throughout Colorado Springs. Student organizers are responsible for co-leading an issue-based, ongoing coalition. In doing so, co-op leaders aim to organize students working on similar issues in an effort to foster collective intentionality, pool resources, reduce redundancies - and educate other students about their issue of interest. The coalitions' work will culminate in issue-awareness weeks on campus and recommendations about ways CC should engage in the issue.
CC Week of Action
Building on the CC Day of Service, this campus-wide week of opportunities and events mobilizes and inspires CC students, staff, and faculty to engage in local community-based work. In doing so, we aim to expose our campus community to shared issues, challenges, and organizations with which they can continue to engage. Piloted in the fall of 2018, we had around 250 members of the campus community participate in 16 diverse opportunities organized with 9 campus partners and 26 community partners.
Incorporated Strategies
- Establish structures to enable students to organize students
- Identify and promote collective challenges and shared problem-solving through highlighting specific organizations and issues
- Invite collaboration within CCE programming to leverage expertise across the college and build stakeholders
- Build partnerships and coalitions with and between diverse organizations