Lincoln, Neb. —As part of the N-2025 Strategic Plan, the University of Nebraska – Lincoln has recently gained membership in the Engagement Scholarship Consortium (ESC). ESC is the premiere organization for higher education institutions that are committed to engagement and works collaboratively to build strong university-community partnerships anchored in the rigor of scholarship and designed to help build community capacity.
University of Nebraska – Lincoln’s ESC membership provides UNL faculty, staff and students with resources, workshops, and conference opportunities, plus a network of peers. ESC benefits faculty/staff can access including:
1) Professional development on engagement topics (virtual throughout the year)
2) Emerging Engagement Scholars Workshop
3) Outreach and Engagement Professionals Network
4) ESC small grants program
5) ESC awards program
ESC also has a broad scholarly agenda that includes:
- Researching and studying the scholarship of engagement throughout the world.
- Facilitating the adoption of engaged scholarship within faculty performance evaluations.
- Encouraging the realization that the scholarship of engagement is a critical aspect of university responsibility.
- Promoting research and study of the impacts of community-campus partnerships.
- Conducting national and international meetings, workshops, institutes, symposia, conferences, and congresses.
- Disseminating research (original, basic, and applied) from a wide variety of disciplines on the impact of campus-community partnerships.
- Publishing and disseminating, through print and electronic media, research on the scholarship of engagement through newsletters, books, monographs, reports, studies, and periodicals.
For more information about ESC resources and events please visit: https://engagementscholarship.org/
The ESC is a non-profit 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization composed of higher education member institutions, a mix of state-public and private institutions.
The ESC traces its origins back a decade when Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Extension initiated an annual meeting to share knowledge about their community-based programs (the National Outreach Scholarship Conference). Since then, recognizing that multi-institutional efforts could help catalyze some of the changes they wanted for their own institutions, ESC emerged.
Learn more about UNL’s Engagement work at: https://engage.unl.edu/.