Overview

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The Collaborative for Community Engagement adopts a multi-pronged community impact strategy, focusing on: cultivating co-curricular civic leadership pathways to promote applied learning through long-term community partnerships, promoting community-engaged learning in the classroom, and expanding access to community engagement across the college.

 

Sustained Civic Leadership Pathways

We cultivate structured, multi-year civic leadership pathways to promote applied learning through long-term community partnerships, equip students with real-world skills, and cultivate a deep sense of civic responsibility.  For example, we offer the Bonner Fellowship, a paid fellowship that pairs learning about changemaking with multi-year community-based internships with nonprofits like Food to Power, Catholic Charities, and Rocky Mountain Field Institute.

Community-Engaged Learning in the Classroom

We promote Community-Engaged Learning in the classroom – courses that integrate collaboration with off-campus community partners into the curriculum in a way that benefits both students and the community. Students produce or do something of value for the partner, and the community work deepens learning related to course goals. As examples from the 60+ CEL courses our institution offers each year, recent CEL courses include computer science classes creating a pilot app for a public art organization, a math class doing quantitative data analysis for a city department, a music class creating performing music in a prison, and an astronomy class teaching local middle school students about astronomy.

Campus-Wide Culture of Community Engagement

We expand access to community engagement across the college—students, staff, and faculty —embedding public purpose into daily life and the heart of our institutional culture. By promoting mission-aligned community engagement opportunities with widespread, inclusive participation across divisions and stakeholders, we ensure CC shows up consistently and visibly in the region.
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