January 2007
UC Berkeley is a land grant university that has maintained a strong commitment to community engagement and public service outreach. As a highly decentralized organization, most initiatives at the university are established and developed by individual units. The last few years have been marked by a concerted effort to build a stronger coordination among UC Berkeley’s various community engagement initiatives. This effort has resulted in the establishment of the UC Berkeley Civic Engagement Collaborative. The Collaborative is composed of the directors and managers of nineteen campus-wide units and centers that are responsible for managing and organizing civic engagement policies, programs, and initiatives that are connected to or support the academic work of Berkeley’s students, faculty, and departments. These civic and community engagement activities address a broad range of social and community issues through research, teaching, and/or service activities.
The Collaborative tackles complex, campus-wide issues as they pertain to the policies, practice, and assessment of civic engagement within and across units; these are issues that no one unit can address fully on its own. The Collaborative provides a forum to convene the directors and managers of these campus units and centers as a way to strengthen, expand, and better coordinate the civic engagement at UC Berkeley for the individual participating units as well as for the collective whole. The chair of the Collaborative is a faculty member who directs one of the units, ties civic engagement into his research, serves as the Chair of the Council of Academic Partners (campus teaching and learning units for undergraduate education), serves on the Chancellor’s Committee for Civic Engagement.
For 2006-2007, the Collaborative Is focused on 12 actions steps designed to advance UC Berkeley as an engaged campus. The actions steps include: a white paper competition to solicit students’ involvement in activating strategies for addressing community issues; a marketing campaign to promote civic engagement activities through various media outlets; an on-line marketplace that describes what students’ accomplishments, needs, and interests; a visibility campaign to put civic engagement on the “front page” of campus newspapers and websites; inclusion of community engagement work in orientations for new student and faculty; a coordinated set of forums for campus members to explore various engagement issues; engaged campus awards; awards and recognition for engaged campus leaders; articulation of goals for student civic competencies; a white paper to Chancellor to articulate unit managers’ goals and desires for civic engagement; a series of focused engaged workshops; and a shared calendar that coordinates the events currently facilitated by individual units.
