Cooperative Extension has a long-standing history of placing individuals in communities to lead community-wide change. These individuals are employees of the nation's land-grant universities, with significant roles and responsibilities working between and among institutions and their communities. They often must maintain dual identities and roles,…

Responding to longstanding calls to develop institutional support for boundary-spanning faculty and staff in ways that enhance collaborative community-university engagement, our study investigated a novel, facilitated approach to building community-university collaboration derived from the collective impact framework. In particular, we present new…

Neoliberal ideology and an overemphasis on generating quick results dehumanizes higher education community engagement by overlooking the multiple roles and identities of boundary spanners, individuals engaged in community-based scholarship. If university-community partnerships are to prosper and be sustained, their human aspect deserves more…

Research on higher education community engagement (HECE) rarely places university or institutional voices in conversation with the community partners' voices. Boundary-spanning frameworks such as Weerts and Sandmann's (2010) for universities and Adams's (2014) for community partners help boundary spanners, but such models draw boundaries between…

Indigenous people are often hesitant to participate in research projects because they lack trust in researcher intentions. In this article, we explore the critical role that Indigenous boundary spanners play in research conducted with Indigenous communities through our research on oceans and human health. Our analysis centers around five…

For over 100 years, Cooperative Extension has served communities through local Extension agents with expertise in such topics as agriculture, youth development, and family and community health. In 2008, the Oregon State University Extension Service launched a pilot (Open Campus and Juntos) to broaden Extension's reach by placing agents with…

The transgender community is rich with wisdom about how to live authentically, embrace duality, and embody intersecting identities, but our stories have been widely missing from or misrepresented in research. "Insider" community-engaged research offers a framework for boundary-spanning researchers to blend their "insider" and…

This essay reports on engaging academic and community partners whose positionalities spanned diverse lived experiences and power structures. Using groundwork from several literatures, we reflect on developing, nurturing, repairing, and expanding a container as a critically reflective space for experimenting with new ways of being and doing. A…

Feminist community-engaged scholars and practitioners value deep relationship building with their community partners, which can be challenging during periods of disruption. Increasingly, disruptions occur at multiple levels (e.g., pandemics, civil unrest, community/campus violence, partner staffing and leadership turnover, experiences of illness…

Using the metaphor of a medieval village, I share and reflect on my story as a PhD student, holder of an underrepresented identity in STEM, and next-generation boundary spanner in science communication. I am a science communicator to faith-based communities--a neglected and often contentious space in science communication. Through 6 years of…

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the practice of community-engaged scholarship and challenged internal and external boundary spanners to maintain and grow authentic and meaningful relationships. Female-identifying scholars and practitioners faced, and continue to face, extra personal and professional demands in the postpandemic era…

Why are many urban universities' relationships with their surrounding communities fraught despite university efforts at community engagement? Relationships between the factors underlying university-driven neighborhood change remain largely unexplored. In this article, I take the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as a case study and examine the…

In response to continued calls for research centering community perspectives in service-learning and community engagement, this mixed-methods article examines the experiences of community fellows who were a part of a university service-learning development program. The purpose of the program was to train faculty and community partners in…

This qualitative dissertation aimed to understand if an after-school kinesiology service-learning program changed the relationship between a large Research I institution and a local public school. Eight 7th- and 8th-grade students, three classroom teachers, and one administrator participated. Data collection methods included semistructured…

Engaged learning seeks to cultivate integrative approaches that require students to use multiple points of view or approaches in their coursework. Similarly, civically engaged courses ask students to consider public problems that involve multiple stakeholders, institutions, and policies. We are interested in whether courses designed to meet civic…