Community Engagement Resource Guide

OEO has compiled a Community Engagement Resource Guide comprised of engagement resources and guidance to help the UW Community to launch and coordinate outreach and engagement programming. 

Background

The Office of Engagement and Outreach (OEO) was established to provide innovative, collaborative, and strategic leadership and support for the University of Wyoming’s strategic priority of engagement with communities across the state (and beyond). OEO seeks to align community engagement to the university’s land-grant mission by working with the campus and partners to coordinate and streamline engagement efforts to achieve enhanced consistency, follow-through, and impact. OEO strives to link campus expertise and community needs, fostering mutually beneficial partnerships between the university and the community and supporting best practices in outreach and engagement. 

OEO works to increase UW’s ability to effectively address complex challenges and opportunities facing the University and Wyoming through enhanced student opportunities, faculty and staff development, scholarship, teaching, and service. OEO adopts the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching definition of "community engagement" which emphasizes "the partnership between university knowledge and resources" with those of the public and private sectors "to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching, and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good."^[1] These considerations ring particularly true in Wyoming today, which is facing economic-related challenges that UW is uniquely equipped to address.

Inherent in UW’s land grant mission, and within the mission, as articulated by UW’s Strategic Plan, Breaking Through: 2017-2022, as an institution we emphasize “service and outreach” that extend UW’s talent and capacity “to serve people in our communities, our state, the nation, and the world.” As the OEO Strategic Plan for Community Engagement further notes, our commitment to communities today includes providing a breadth of outreach activities, as well as building depth in our community engagement partnerships. Today, every college, school, and division of UW participates in numerous activities in the state, with significant impacts on communities in each of Wyoming’s 23 counties and on the Wind River Indian Reservation. 

 

 

[1] See The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “Elective Community Engagement Classification,” (First-Time Classification Documentation Framework, 2020 Classification), Swearer Center, Brown University, p. 1 at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ddFaZj2SP1bIh-NaamxzioEUjNtrHXt6/view