By Kate Rich
From interning with local nonprofit organizations to monitoring the marine economy, research, teaching, and learning at the University of Washington regularly involves community engagement work. The Building Tri-Campus Capacity for Community Engagement initiative’s Priority Work Team defines community engagement at UW as “the collaboration between the University (students, faculty, staff, and alumni) and our extended communities (local to global), including Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities for the equitable and mutually beneficial co-creation and exchange of knowledge, insights, creativity, resources, and capacities (labor and relationships) to address critical social issues and/or envision and contribute to the future well-being of our communities and planet.”
As a part of tri-campus efforts for increasing capacity for community engagement, partners across the University of Washington sought a way to improve the documentation and assessment of community engagement. They approached the eScience Data Science & AI Accelerator program seeking tools for this purpose and found unexpected insights in the process. During this collaboration, eScience Senior Social Scientist Anissa Tanweer and Community Engagement & Leadership Education (CELE) Center Community Engagement Analyst Afomia Assefa quickly realized that they could not immediately jump to establishing metrics for assessment. They would first need to explore higher level questions about goals and strategy, as well as take stock of the technical landscape and support available to execute future assessment. Before they could even get to the point of discussing specific metrics, they needed to be clear about why the university was doing assessment in the first place. They also needed to establish who is going to use the results and for what purpose. In the process of exploring these ideas, Assefa and Tanweer also asked what the drawbacks or risks might be of trying to assess community engagement. Because, as Tanweer notes, “from our perspective, you can’t avoid those pitfalls unless you know to look out for them.”
The resulting report, “Assessing Community Engagement at UW: A Roadmap,” offers expansive technical, qualitative, and strategic insights for best practices in assessing community engagement at the University of Washington. This report is not a plan, but a tool for those who are in the position to assess community engagement.
The road to this roadmap reflected the complex process of community engagement and the nuanced approaches of the stakeholders who partake in it. As Assefa puts it, the roadmap metaphor was born from a need to visualize this process as “an ongoing journey.” There are so many paths that could move through this roadmap to represent the myriad ways of doing community engagement. Tanweer shared that the roadmap helps convey that there is “no single right pathway. There are multiple pathways that can be helpful.” Community engagement looks different and is supported differently across various fields and institutions. There is a need to offer a more flexible and decentralized approach through a roadmap that can be helpful for groups with different resources and constraints. In other words, there is no one size fits all approach to community engagement.
To map out all these possibilities, they needed relevant perspectives ranging across academic fields, roles, and UW campuses. The authors assembled a core team across all three campuses of faculty and staff directly involved with community engagement work. The core team helped identify key entities and user stories to inform the roadmap. Assefa and Tanweer included technical landscape mapping and assessment tool compilations in the report before finally putting together focus groups and listening sessions.
These panels involved extensive dialogues with individuals doing community engagement at the University of Washington. The authors found that many organizations across UW were already assessing community engagement through formal measures, while others were engaging in more informal conversations with their partners. Given these different circumstances, imposing a singular agenda on these organizations could prove challenging and ignore their existing practices. Informed by the varying contexts focus group participants came from and by a review of assessment instruments from other institutions, the authors developed three questions for each type of partner that could be used across a range of situations to assess community engagement. These questions can help determine how students, faculty or staff, and community partners each evaluated the quality of community engagement experiences at the university. Rather than a universal prescription, these questions are a starting point for assessment that could guide future approaches.
After the first round of four focus groups provided input, they distributed a draft of the report based on these findings and received feedback through three listening sessions. The final report reflects this feedback from key stakeholders at each campus because, as Tanweer explained, “you can’t separate the work of assessment out from the work of community engagement. If you want people to actually participate in this it has to be actually beneficial to community engagement.”
The resulting roadmap offers a novel framework for thinking about community engagement at the university. Much like the diverse stakeholders that contributed to the report, tri-campus community engagement leaders and eScience collaborated across very different ends of campus to bring a more comprehensive outlook to this work. In the process of seeking tools for evaluation, Assefa and Tanweer went a step further to understand how we might ensure important voices in community engagement shape every step of the way towards assessment.
You can read more about the report and its findings at the University of Washington Community Engagement Resource Hub.