By Dr. Kwesi Brookins, Interim Vice Provost for Outreach & Engagement
In 1999, a white paper entitled “Recommendations for enhancement of NCSU’s commitment to serving the people of North Carolina” was penned by Professor Ellis Cowling in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources. The conversations Dr. Cowling and others started at NC State were also happening across the higher education landscape and sparked by a report from the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Institutions entitled “Returning to our Roots: The Engaged Institution.” Since that time, NC State’s outreach and engagement have evolved to play a critical role in supporting the land grant mission, engaged scholarship, and the myriad ways the university can generate broader impacts with the communities it serves.
In the past year, NC State has re-committed to this mission through the Wolfpack 2030 strategic plan, specifically, Goal 3, which seeks to “Expand and advance our service to the citizens of the state and beyond ー defining the standard for a 21st-century land-grant university.”
As Interim Vice Provost for University Outreach and Engagement, I am honored to lead our office as we continue that mission. Guided by the goals of the NC State Civic Action Plan, we see our O&E roles as promoting, supporting and connecting faculty, students and staff across the university to help them do their O&E work most effectively and efficiently. I will have more to say about this in future communications but would like to focus on a couple of initiatives we are working on now.
Our March O&E news story described the rollout of our new “Collaboratory” platform. This relational database captures the myriad ways faculty and staff partner with external organizations and communities through research, education, technical assistance and public outreach. Collaboratory has identified over 230 activities and 540 community organizations that 197 faculty and staff are working with across 42 campus units. What is most exciting is that Collaboratory has already begun to generate connections across faculty and community partners that we expect to lead to new research and funding opportunities. Our O&E support team will be making a concerted effort over the summer and into the fall to double these numbers by the end of 2022.
Externally, our Wake Community-University Partnership (WakeCUP) is a hyper-local engagement strategy with the Wake County Office of Social and Economic Vitality. WakeCUP works within two engagement zones, Southeast Raleigh and eastern Wake County. Over the past three years, WakeCUP has connected faculty and students across five colleges in program and research activities directly responsive to community-identified needs in entrepreneurial training, historical and cultural preservation, community leadership development and providing support with pandemic relief efforts. Over the next few months, we expect to expand the partnership to other areas of Wake County. In addition, we have identified collaborations with other community and municipal organizations and other disciplinary units across campus.
The initiatives identified above are only two ways O&E is helping to fulfill the land grant mission. As we enter the Fall of 2022, I look forward to working with our Engagement Operations Council and others across campus on ways we can continue to promote, support and connect our campus community and external stakeholders. Again, I invite readers to let us know how we can engage.