°®½´ÊÓÆµ will deepen its longstanding commitment to community engagement by fostering meaningful connections across classrooms, cultures, and collaborators. The 2025–2030 strategic plan focuses on strengthening partnerships, expanding learning opportunities, and enhancing global understanding.
It aims to build and leverage relationships, align and resource experiential learning across academic and co-curricular units, and increase participation in local, national, and international engagement experiences.
Build new and leverage existing partnerships for mutual benefit.
Strategy A
Strengthen infrastructure to identify existing and potential partnership opportunities.
- Create and maintain a professional directory of faculty credentials, experience, and research specializations for potential alignment with community-based partners.
- Update and communicate the missions, visions, and values of the university’s specialized program offices/centers (e.g., CILS, IGNITE, Saffrin Center, Kennedy Institute for Mobility Innovation and Technology) to identify resources available to support new and existing collaborative efforts.
- Identify existing partnerships aligned with faculty expertise and interests of the university’s specialized program offices and centers.
- Conduct periodic environmental scans to identify new partnerships (including for profit, not-for-profit, government, and community-based organizations).
- Strengthen the town-gown relationship to promote °®½´ÊÓÆµ as a collaborative partner and vital community asset.
Strategy B
Prioritize initiatives aligned with the University’s mission, vision, and strategic goals.
- Develop a process to prioritize new partnerships and initiatives and track internal capacity and available resources to discern feasibility, fit, and fiscal impact.
- Build a shared university-wide repository that tracks external engagements with existing and potential community partners.
- Engage alumni, community, and industry partners to promote community, economic, professional, and academic advancement.
Strategy C
Seek external funding to enhance partnerships.
- Identify funding interests of local, statewide, and national organizations that are aligned with identified areas of expertise and priorities of °®½´ÊÓÆµ.
- Develop preliminary project proposals inclusive of expected deliverables, responsible parties, projected outcomes, and proposed budget to aid in grant writing efforts.
- Seek and secure resources to support initiative development, data collection, analysis, and communication of community partnership outcomes for grant writing and storytelling efforts.
- Engage in relationship building efforts with funders to facilitate a comprehensive development process.
Strategy D
Analyze the financial implications and opportunities of offering discounted tuition and/or other enrollment incentives to partners.
- Review existing tuition discounts and other enrollment incentives to determine uptake, financial implications, and return on investment.
- Conduct cost-benefit analysis to determine viability of existing and potential discounted tuition and other enrollment incentives vis-a-vis volume, revenue generation, and reach.
- Develop guidelines for the creation and assessment of discounted tuition and/or other enrollment incentives for community partners.
Advance experiential learning opportunities aligned with the strategic goals of the University.
Strategy A
Align resources to build capacity, develop, and sustain experiential learning opportunities.
- Inventory existing experiential learning activities within °®½´ÊÓÆµ.
- Explore strategic opportunities for experiential learning aligned with the interests of °®½´ÊÓÆµ students, faculty, administrators, staff, and alumni; academic departments, programs, and/or administrative units.
- Develop new community-based partnerships for experiential learning by building on existing activity.
- Cultivate potential partnerships to address strategic opportunities, to coordinate, and to assign institutional responsibility for building and maintaining those relationships.
Strategy B
Integrate work of various departments, programs, and administrative units to facilitate and amplify co-, extra-, and curricular experiential learning activities.
- Provide opportunities for faculty and staff to develop experiential learning activities.
- Review existing offerings to identify opportunities for, continuance, expansion, diversification, collaboration, or elimination.
- Develop signature and synergistic programming to support experiential learning.
- Explore the feasibility of creating a comprehensive university calendar and communication mechanisms to showcase experiential learning opportunities.
Strategy C
Monetize experiential learning opportunities sponsored by °®½´ÊÓÆµ departments, programs, and administrative units.
- Promote °®½´ÊÓÆµ resources to the larger community.
- Incentivize faculty and staff to create revenue-generating professional development curricula for distribution to wider audiences.
- Seek external funding for interprofessional- and simulation-based professional development opportunities for students, alumni, and practitioners.
Enhance student access to and opportunities for global learning.
Strategy A
Sustain current programming and relationships with global partners.
- Identify and address existing barriers to participation in study abroad.
- Promote study abroad opportunities including faculty-led, semester abroad, and college exchange programming through internal promotion and outreach.
- Train faculty to design and lead study abroad programs.
- Explore opportunities to engage with global partners, as well as their affiliated colleges and universities, to expand affordable and accessible programming.
Strategy B
Expand external resources to support global experiential learning opportunities.
- Identify diverse funding mechanisms including alumni and donor funds, scholarships, grants, and sponsorships to resource global experiential learning initiatives.
- Explore potential for employment- and internship-based global experiential learning programs.
- Investigate availability of specialized support for global learning opportunities for persons with disabilities.
Strategy C
Identify and develop regional opportunities to promote understanding of diverse cultural perspectives.
- Cultivate new and strengthen existing relationships with regional organizations affiliated with global populations.
- Develop and sustain curricular and co-curricular opportunities for students within regional organizations affiliated with global populations.