OCE CONNECT

June 2023

New Offices Complete An Exciting Year of Community Engagement at Iowa

The Office of Community Engagement's recent move from Van Allen Hall to the University Capitol Centre completes an exciting year of new community engagement programming and partnerships at Iowa. Located on the 2nd floor of the UCC, we welcome all faculty, staff, students and community partners to visit our new space as we continue to advance community-engaged teaching, learning and research. We are also excited for the launch of the Faculty Engagement Corps (FEC) program June 5th and 6th. The FEC will provide this year's faculty cohort with a deep dive into best practices and strategies for designing and teaching community-engaged courses. More information about this new program, and all OCE offerings, is available at engagement.uiowa.edu.

As we settle into summer and spend time planning for the upcoming academic year, we also celebrate the achievements from this past year, including the 2023 GEC Grant Award winners. The inspiring engagement work of our faculty, staff, students and community partners propels us to envision new programs and initiatives, and we look forward to future engagement work in partnership with all of you.

We hope to see you in our new space soon!

In partnership,

Nick Benson

Executive Director

Join our Team as a Faculty Fellow for Engaged Teaching and Scholarship!

The Office of Community Engagement is excited to announce that applications are now open for a Faculty Fellow for Engaged Teaching and Scholarship, with a background in community engagement at the University of Iowa and experience working in communities to affect change. Full time faculty members in the tenure, clinical or instructional track at or above the rank of associate professor are eligible to apply.

Applications will be reviewed through Monday, June 26. This would be a 20%-time commitment for the '23-'24 academic year. Fellows are eligible for salary offset plus fringe from the Office of the Community Engagement. Full time faculty members in the tenure, clinical or instructional track at or above the rank of associate professor are eligible to apply.

The Faculty Fellow for Engaged Teaching and Scholarship will focus efforts on strategies to support the development of community-engaged teaching and community-engaged scholarship on our campus.

Learn More and Apply

Event Spotlight

DISSERTATION DISH- Community-Engaged Practitioner-Scholar Professional Identity Development

When rhetoric does not match reality for higher education institutions’ commitment to community engagement, graduate students may find counterspaces to the academy are necessary and allow them to reset and reframe, collectively organize, and push back against normative socialization processes of the academy that do not serve their needs as emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars. This basic, exploratory qualitative study examined professional identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through participation in a community engagement.

Dissertation Dish is an ongoing webinar series and a collaboration between the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE), Imagining America, and LEAD California (formerly California Campus Compact). Each Dissertation Dish will highlight quality emerging research in the field of service learning and community engagement by providing a platform for recent doctoral degree recipients to share their work more broadly.

Thursday, June 8, 2023

10:00 - 11:30 am PT / 1:00 - 2:30 pm ET

ONLINE

Voices of Community Engagement

SJMC and Nonprofit Leadership and Philanthropy student finds success after graduation due to community engagement

Since 2021, I have had the privilege of meeting with community engagement advocates, instructors, students, and community partners across the University of Iowa to learn and share their experiences and impact in Iowa and beyond. Each month, our office brought their stories to you in our Voices of Community Engagement series, which live permanently on our website as an enduring example of the work being done across disciplines to connect campus and community partners with educational opportunities which uplift and improve the lives of people in communities large and small across the state.

The final impact story I wish to share is my own, and how community engagement allowed me to excel as a Hawkeye and formed the foundation for my career ambition to help nonprofit organizations and the communities they serve. With this intention, I entered the School of Journalism and Mass Communication with an eye on the Nonprofit Leadership and Philanthropy Certificate. The goal was to learn the tools of mass communication to help nonprofits tell their most important stories as a vehicle for strengthening partnerships, raising awareness around community impact, and building support.

Many of the courses I took had a community engagement component, which allowed me to immediately begin having an impact by applying the tools of journalism and mass communication to support local community partners while learning how to lead and manage a nonprofit organization. With each successive course, I worked directly with organizations to craft fundraising material, promotional videos, written and audio stories, and strategic and board planning materials. Not only did these experiences allow me to provide deliverables to community partners to aid in their mission, but I also received practice working with leadership teams and board committees, along with groups in class, to align mission, vision, and voice while participating in critical, high-level conversations.

These experiences led to a passionate enthusiasm for community engagement. In classes that did not have a community engagement component, I began seeking community partners for projects that could have been a model or thought experiment. I developed an automatic response, asking myself if there was an opportunity to leverage in-class assignments to benefit a partner outside the University.

Those community-engaged courses led to an internship, bringing the communications skills I had learned and my community-oriented mindset to the Office of Community Engagement. I gained a deeper understanding of what community engagement was and the role that it had played in enriching my education and preparing me to uplift communities after graduation. By applying that model of impact-driven storytelling to a department focused on broad community impact at the University, I learned to bring those skills into focus, leading communications strategy for a large entity while creating and enhancing processes for institutionalizing demonstrated impact.

As the internship became a formal position, the engagement mindset expanded to colleges and departments across campus as I became dedicated to identifying and uplifting diverse voices and projects and sharing them in these impact stories, through social media, and across our many communications channels. As the OCE developed and expanded programs, such as the Graduate and Faculty Engagement Corps, Community Engagement Network, and leading the charge on Community Engaged Courses, new opportunities arose to share important stories of these programs' impact on uplifting communities in projects of their own.

These experiences, supercharged by community-engaged courses that I had taken, prepared me to respond to opportunities to assist local nonprofits with their communications strategies through creating websites, social media strategies, and advocacy for impact demonstrated at all levels of an organization. These volunteer projects became board committees and led to employment opportunities directing communications and now leading nonprofits from an executive level.

Without a doubt, the success that I have had is due to the quality of education and instruction received at the University of Iowa, empowered by the efforts of Melissa Tully at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, the guidance of Frank Durham and Rachel Young, and the never-ending support of Jennifer Vick and the Nonprofit Leadership and Philanthropy Certificate. But the secret ingredient that ignited those experiences was community engagement, led by Nick Benson, which formed the foundation of service-oriented work and the importance of community partnerships now woven into the rest of my career.

Thank you for the opportunity to share the impact that Hawkeyes are having on Iowa communities and beyond.

CERT Fellowship Application Due June 1st

Are you a University of Iowa faculty member, researcher, or graduate student looking for $10,000 to facilitate developing relationships and solving environmental health challenges in collaboration with campus and community partners?

The Environmental Health Sciences Research Center has an RFP open now for the Community Engagement and Research Translation (CERT) Fellowship for topics related to environmental contamination, environmental practices, community health and wellbeing, the effects of climate change on health, and community engaged research.

2023-2024 Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE)

Fellows Program Call for Applications

The PAGE Fellows Program invites graduate students to participate in a yearlong working group in support of collaborative art-making, teaching, writing, storytelling, and co-creating knowledge with and within community.

PAGE Fellows will receive:

Complimentary registration, lodging, and $500 fellowship award to suport travel to the 2023 Imagining America National Gathering Oct. 20-22, 2023 in Providence, RI.

Opportunity to apply for additional professional development funds.

Access to year-long mentorship and community-building events.

Imagining America invites applications from graduate students enrolled at an IA member institution and with a demonstrated interest and commitment in public scholarship and/or artistic practice.

Application deadline:

Friday, June 30, 2023

Apply Here

Getting Published

ENGAGE! Co-created Knowledge Serving the Public Good

ENGAGE! publishes articles that reflect community-engaged and community-based participatory research (CEnR/CBPR). Both are inclusive and collaborative inquiry processes. To the extent possible, all partners participate in and share decision-making. Control over all stages of the research process - defining the problem, collecting and interpreting data, disseminating findings, and applying the results to address community issues- is shared.

Learn More

The Office of Community Engagement is here to help with letters of support and one-on-one meetings with our office to discuss upcoming courses, research projects, and community partnerships.

Submit an Inquiry

The Arts

Arts Share

Pandelirium! Steel Drum Band Performing in Lone Tree, IA

The Pandelirium! Steel Drum Band will perform at the first annual Iowa City VA Health Survivorship Celebration since the COVID-19 pandemic began. This year's theme is "Spice Up The Fight" on Sunday, June 4th, from 12-3 PM in Lone Tree, IA, at the Lone Tree American Legion.

Grant Wood Art Colony

Completed GWAC Fellowships

It's that time of year where we must thank our outgoing 2022-2023 GWAC Fellows for their service and impact on the University of Iowa campus. We are grateful for the lectures, workshops, and events that these artists led and wish them the best in their future artistic endeavors.

Visit their websites to learn more about their work and follow their upcoming projects!

PAINTING & DRAWING

Michael Dixon is an oil painter born in San Diego, California. He received his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in painting and a BFA from Arizona State University in painting and drawing. Dixon is currently a Full Professor of Art at Albion College. His imagery explores the personal, societal, and aesthetic struggles of belonging to both "white" and "black" racial and cultural identities, yet simultaneously belonging fully to neither.

Website

INTERDISCIPLINARY PERFORMANCE

Kieron Dwayne Sargeant is a Trinidadian-born interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, dancer, and dance researcher emerging out of the African-Caribbean tradition. Sargeant received an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Florida State University and MA in Community Dance Practice from Ohio University. Over the past 20 years, he has been involved in documenting, assessing, and analyzing dance traditions of the Caribbean and establishing a canon of dance teachings and workshops, informed by his research, to popularize the ancestral survival of movement traditions between the Circum-Caribbean and Western Africa.

Website

PRINTMAKING

Johanna Winters' work engages printmaking, puppetry, video, performance, and sculpture to dispatch anxieties about aging in a female body. Currently this work considers the condition of a puppet-protagonist who totters between keening self-pity and private indulgences while performing her sensuality for the camera. Winters holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Website

Professional Development

Ensuring Reciprocity and Sustainability in Community Engagement

Loyce Arthur, Associate Professor, Theatre Arts and Travis Kraus, Associate Professor of Practice, School of Planning and Public Affairs, and Director of IISC discuss best practices for creating mutually beneficial and reciprocal community partnerships and how to sustain them over time.

The workshop features presentations about collaborative course partnerships, followed by Q&A.