Nonprofit and Civic Engagement (NPACE) Center: Building Mutually Beneficial Community Relationships

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher McCollough ◽  
Danna Gibson ◽  
Richard Baxter

This paper discusses the purpose, reach, and function of the Non-Profit and Civic Engagement (NPACE) Center in the Department of Communication. Additionally, it explores how the ground-up creation of NPACE resulted from a thorough examination of the strengths and needs of both department and community and how the center offers substantive solutions to meet real-life challenges of both. Along the way, the paper addresses how faculty members negotiated with faculty and administrators across campus to gain support to launch the center. Moreover, the paper discusses key achievements of a few select projects executed in the past 5 years of service to the university and community. It also addresses the value of NPACE to its students, including a recent trend that has potential for further examination regarding the effect of the learning model and the center on fostering the civic and community engagement of graduates. Finally, the paper discusses emerging challenges, lessons learned, and opportunities for NPACE.

Author(s):  
Vicente Borja ◽  
Alejandro Ramírez-Reivich ◽  
Marcelo López-Parra ◽  
Arturo Treviño Arizmendi ◽  
Luis F. Equihua Zamora

A team of faculty members from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has coordinated multidisciplinary courses in collaboration with universities from other countries. The team, who is composed by faculty from the School of Engineering and the School of Architecture, coordinates with pairs of Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Technical University of Munich; to teach three particular design courses. All three courses are related to product innovation but they have different emphasis depending on the collaborating partner. The focal points of each of the three courses are: (1) innovation, (2) user centered design and sustainability and (3) transport in megacities of the future. Engineering and industrial design students are involved in the courses. They are organized in teams that include participants from the two collaborating universities. During the courses teams carry out projects working mostly at a distance; they use different means of communication and information sharing and also pay reciprocal visits between the universities involved in the collaboration. This paper describes each of the three courses highlighting their particular characteristics. The outcomes and results of the courses and specific projects are commented. In the end of the paper lessons learned are discussed and final remarks are presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (11) ◽  
pp. 479-481
Author(s):  
Isabelle Arnet ◽  
Pascal C. Baumgartner ◽  
Vera Bernhardt ◽  
Markus L. Lampert ◽  
Kurt E. Hersberger

An acceptable degree of digital literacy has always been present among the pharmacy teaching staff in Basel, with PowerPoint being the main vehicle to present teaching materials in front of full or half classes. Because cell phones became inseparable from students over the past years, mobile voting (movo.ch) or e-quizzes (mentimeter.com) have been regularly used to hold the attention of all students during collective teaching. Moreover, e-assessment on iPad® with the software BeAxi (www.k2prime.com) was introduced in 2012 and is currently used for all evaluations and exams. Suddenly over the night of March 16, 2020, our university, as all universities around the world, had to transfer all courses to an online format and to empower lecturers to teach from their home. This paper offers one perspective for how this digitial experiment unfolded at the University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Wallerstein ◽  
John G. Oetzel ◽  
Shannon Sanchez-Youngman ◽  
Blake Boursaw ◽  
Elizabeth Dickson ◽  
...  

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community-engaged research have been established in the past 25 years as valued research approaches within health education, public health, and other health and social sciences for their effectiveness in reducing inequities. While early literature focused on partnering principles and processes, within the past decade, individual studies, as well as systematic reviews, have increasingly documented outcomes in community support and empowerment, sustained partnerships, healthier behaviors, policy changes, and health improvements. Despite enhanced focus on research and health outcomes, the science lags behind the practice. CBPR partnering pathways that result in outcomes remain little understood, with few studies documenting best practices. Since 2006, the University of New Mexico Center for Participatory Research with the University of Washington’s Indigenous Wellness Research Institute and partners across the country has engaged in targeted investigations to fill this gap in the science. Our inquiry, spanning three stages of National Institutes of Health funding, has sought to identify which partnering practices, under which contexts and conditions, have capacity to contribute to health, research, and community outcomes. This article presents the research design of our current grant, Engage for Equity, including its history, social justice principles, theoretical bases, measures, intervention tools and resources, and preliminary findings about collective empowerment as our middle range theory of change. We end with lessons learned and recommendations for partnerships to engage in collective reflexive practice to strengthen internal power-sharing and capacity to reach health and social equity outcomes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 160-166
Author(s):  
Abigail Hunt ◽  
Nick Taylor

Abstract This chapter aims to demonstrate how collaborative working between university staff and students, particularly in the context of subject-based research and inquiry, can result in providing effective consultancy to external clients and address real-life challenges linked to the visitor economy. This aim is achieved through critical analysis of the literature around university staff and students collaborating in research and inquiry activities and the co-creation of academic communities of practice to provide business solutions, and examination of the University of Lincoln/Coventry University/LCFC project to ascertain the role the club has to play in developing 'Brand Lincoln' and the city's economy in the 2020s.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Tavares ◽  
Bruno Masiero

This is a lab report paper about the state of affairs in the computer music research group at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Campinas (FEEC/Unicamp). This report discusses the people involved in the group, the efforts in teaching and the current research work performed. Last, it provides some discussions on the lessons learned from the past few years and some pointers for future work.


Author(s):  
Leonard Lye

At Memorial University, for the last several years, instructors of the first-year engineering design course have worked closely with the local chapter of the Tetra Society of North America to provide meaningful open-ended doable design projects that are needed by actual clients. Founded in 1987, The Tetra Society of North America is an independent non-profit charitable organization that recruits skilled technical volunteers to design and fabricate custom assistive devices for people with disabilities. In this paper, several projects that have been assigned to students in the past will be described and example solutions provided by students will also be shown. From the feedback of students, instructors, and clients, this collaboration with the Tetra Society has been very successful in providing real, needed, doable projects, with real clients for first year engineering students.


Author(s):  
Chiara Pierobon

In the past two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have argued that post – communist civil society is weak and structurally deficient and is characterised by low levels of social trust, voluntary organisational membership, and public participation. This article intends to challenge this academic consensus by providing an in-depth analysis of civil society development in Kyrgyzstan, a country, whose non-profit sector has been described as the most vibrant and plentiful of the Central Asian region. To this scope, the article analyses the ways and extent to which the national and international environments have influenced the development trajectory of Kyrgyz civil society. Special emphasis is placed on the specific forms and manifestations of civic engagement characterising the non-profit sector of the selected country and on the strategies it has implemented to overcome its weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The paper sheds new light on factors and features that have contributed to the strengths of Kyrgyz civil society and which can be used to increase our understanding of civil society developments in other transition countries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 10811
Author(s):  
Jasper Hessel Heslinga ◽  
Stefan Hartman

This paper presents a diagnostics tool that we refer to as a ‘governance scan’ and discusses how this tool can contribute to improving governance systems of National Parks. This governance scan combines an analytical framework and an approach to have better understanding of these governance systems. Understanding how National Parks are managed is crucial to achieve improvements and steer towards more sustainable future situations. Governance systems are a fundamental aspect of this, being understood as “associational networks of public, private, civil society actors and how they engage in the making, setting and implementation of rules at various geographical scales”. How these systems are organized and function in practice can greatly shape conservation and development outcomes and hence future states of National Parks. The purpose of this paper is to; (1) elaborate on how this scan is rooted in the literature to explain its theoretical foundation and (2) step-by-step instruct how it is made applicable to use in practice. As an illustrative example, we discuss lessons learned from the application of the governance scan in the real-life context of the recently established ‘New Land’ National Park, located in The Netherlands. We conclude that the scan works as a diagnostics tool, to provide an overview of governance systems in place, facilitate knowledge transfer and discussions among different stakeholders, and set priorities in decision-making processes.


Author(s):  
Lisa Romkey ◽  
Susan McCahan

As an initial step in preparing faculty members for the new outcomes-based accreditation process introduced by the CEAB, a pilot workshop on creating learning objectives was developed for engineering professors at the University of Toronto. As the Graduate Attributes will be mapped to individual courses within engineering programs, the need for course-based learning objectives is even more critical; although research already supports the development and use of learning objectives as an effective educational practice. . This paper will describe the process of developing the workshop, facilitating it for the first time, and the lessons learned that were used in developing a second iteration of the workshop.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-21
Author(s):  
Anne M. Lobdell ◽  
Joseph E. Dansie ◽  
Sarah Hargus Ferguson

Cochlear implants are becoming available to an increasing proportion of the deaf and hard-of-hearing population. As interest in and success with cochlear implants has grown, more and more private practice clinics are incorporating them into their scopes of practice. Over the past 2 years, the first 2 authors of this article have been heavily involved in developing cochlear implant programs in separate otolaryngology private practices. A recent conversation about this process revealed several common experiences and lessons learned. During these same 2 years, the third author began teaching the cochlear implant course at the University of Utah. Although her audiology and speech science background gave her extensive knowledge of the science behind cochlear implants, she had no clinical experience with them. The first author took this course the first time the third author taught it, and the experiences and insights she shared with the third author during and since the course have been an important component of the third author’s personal education in the clinical aspects of cochlear implants. In this article, the first 2 authors share 5 things we wish we had known when first beginning their work with cochlear implants.


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