applicants) Community Engagement Classification …€œThe Lynk,” a systematic approach to linking liberal education with career preparation. The Lynk includes a guaranteed summer

2015 Documentation Reporting Form: CarnegieCommunity Engagement Classification (First-timeapplicants)3. Applicant’s Contact InformationPlease provide the contact information of the individual submitting this application (for Carnegie Foundation use only):

First Name

Alan

Last Name

Bloomgarden

Title

Director of Community Engagement

Institution

Mount Holyoke College

Mailing Address 1

Weissman Center for Leadership

Mailing Address 2

50 College Street

City

South Hadley

State

MA

Zip Code

01075

Phone Number

4135383072

Email Address

[email protected]

Full Name of Institution's President/Chancellor

Lynn Pasquerella

President/Chancellor's Mailing Address

Office of the President, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College Street, South Hadley, MA 01075

President/Chancellor's Email Address

[email protected]

5. I. Foundational Indicators

1. Does the institution indicate that community engagement is a priority in its mission statement (or vision)?

Yes

Quote the mission or vision:

The Mount Holyoke College Mission Statement reads, in part, “Mount Holyoke's mission is to provide an intellectuallyadventurous education…to prepare students, through a liberal education integrating curriculum and careers, for lives ofthoughtful, effective and purposeful engagement in the world.” The critical phrase, “purposeful engagement with the world”is widely referenced in college communications, including especially program mission statements from across the campus,event descriptions and news stories featuring exemplary engagement. This emphasis informs the role of communityengagement at Mount Holyoke. It is recognized as both an inspiration to pursue integration between curriculum andcareers, and a model for engagement that threads together the College’s focus on women’s leadership and preparation forlives of impact and purpose.

A major focus of Mount Holyoke emerging from recent strategic planning, market analysis and presidential leadership is“The Lynk,” a systematic approach to linking liberal education with career preparation. The Lynk includes a guaranteedsummer internship opportunity for every student, supported and contextualized for students by enhanced advising,preparatory coursework, practitioners embedded into the curriculum, alumnae networks, post-experience reflection,presentation and curricular integration. The Lynk builds upon the strengths of existing community engagement programsat Mount Holyoke, most notably the college’s Community-Based Learning Program and the Nexus “Curriculum to Career”program, and a robust program of summer internship funding.


2. Does the institution formally recognize community engagement through campus-wide awards and celebrations?

Yes

Describe examples of campus-wide awards and celebrations that formally recognize community engagement:

Each year, Mount Holyoke hosts a public Celebration of Community Engagement honoring community work from CBLcourses, Fellowships, Independent Studies, research projects and other community partnerships. Students presentpartnerships and projects with which they have worked to students, faculty, staff, and community partners. Graduatingseniors affiliated with the CBL program are honored for their community engagement.

Additionally, the annual Sally Montgomery Award recognizes two partnerships between Mount Holyoke students and localcommunity organizations - one between a student or team of students and a community organization, program orindividual partner within one of the college’s CBL course courses, and another between a “Community Fellow” (year-longintern) and a community organization, program, individual partner or coalition initiative. This award, named in honor of aformer Dean instrumental in establishing CBL at Mount Holyoke, is supported by a fund to which she has contributed.Nominations are judged upon the quality and extent of the match between student learning and community needs.Monetary prizes of $1,000 are awarded from endowed funds, half ($500) to the student(s), and half to community partners.

Community engagement by students, faculty, and staff also enjoys a high profile in other campus-wide awards andcelebrations. Staff council offers an annual community service award to staff. Several prizes and awards for communityengagement are bestowed at commencement, noted in each year’s program, and are accompanied with recognition and amonetary and/or commemorative gift. These include the H. Elizabeth Braun “Catalyst for Change”, the EnvironmentalActivist, Global Engagement, Kelly Sottile Community Service, and Student Leadership and Service awards.

As a Davis United World College Scholars Program campus, Mount Holyoke is a partner in the “Davis Projects for Peace”program, which aims “to encourage student initiative, innovation and entrepreneurship focusing on conflict prevention,resolution or reconciliation.” Mount Holyoke annually nominates 2-3 proposals that support community service andempowerment projects locally and globally, and nominees consistently receive at least one $10,000 award each cycle. In2012, the award winning project emerged from a Community Fellowship that sparked a CBL course in our SpanishDepartment, continued through the Davis award into a digital storytelling collaboration between adult education programsin Holyoke and Springfield, producing segments about adult learners for our local PBS affiliate.

The Fall “Learning from Application (LEAP)” symposium is Mount Holyoke’s premier showcase of student summer work.Last year, LEAP panels featured students’ work with immigrant-serving non-profits, the intersection of culture andeducation, environmental sustainability, public health and community development. Projects are based locally, nationally,and internationally. Presentations highlight projects to a campus and public audience.

Mount Holyoke annually recognizes excellence in faculty scholarship - two for teaching and two for research. In the lastthree years, three of these selective awards went to community-engaged faculty, reflecting the increasing esteem with whichcommunity engaged teaching and research are regarded. Additionally, a faculty award specifically recognizing communityengaged teaching and/or research is under consideration by the Dean of Faculty and the Office of Advancement fordevelopment.


3.a. Does the institution have mechanisms for systematic assessment of community perceptions of theinstitution's engagement with community?

Yes

Describe the mechanisms for systematic assessment:

Mount Holyoke has made an institutional commitment to a relational approach to understanding community perceptions.Formal mechanisms for assessing effects and impacts in community engaged initiatives do exist, and they have grownsubstantially in the last five years. However, stakeholders from across the institution emphasize that their most effectiveand important assessment work happens through ongoing commitments to continued and visible presence in thecommunity and through relationships cultivated with community partners. These relationships are intentionally cultivatedand maintained at an institutional level by the Director of Community Engagement and Director of Government andCommunity Relations, who collaborate, assign staff and colleagues to stewardship and event/meeting attendance, andfacilitate institution-wide information-sharing. Such responsibilities include regular participation in and attendance atplanning and coalition meetings in South Hadley, Holyoke, Springfield and elsewhere in the region, in education,community/economic development, social services, and related fields. These staff positions devote substantial amounts oftime weekly to attending and participating in meetings as investments in relationships, seeking feedback about perceivedbenefits and challenges they produce. These time commitments are acknowledged and valued in the position descriptionsand evaluations of these two community engagement posts. At a small institution like Mount Holyoke, the information-sharing practices work to keep offices on campus “in the loop” about community perceptions, priorities, and campusresponses.

This relational approach is bolstered by formal assessments. Among the most important of these surveys of thesupervisors and partnering organizations where CBL “Community Fellows” are placed. This approach is far moresignificant than simply assessing the impact of the individual “Fellows,” because these student leadership internships arepositioned critical liaison for the college. Fellows are explicitly “agents of campus community partnership” and named assuch in the CBL Program’s collaborative practices with partners, in educational training and supervisory support they aregiven, and in policies governing campus-community partnership. Community Fellows are prepared and supported tofacilitate partners’ capacities to engage with Mount Holyoke through courses, work-study placements, volunteer servicerelationships and sometimes also independent study and academic research collaborations. As conduits for this work,assessing Fellows’ reception and success is key to gauging community perceptions more broadly. These liaisons haveresponsibilities to communicate perceptions, needs and opportunities to the CBL Program.

In December/January, and again at the conclusion of their work in early May, Fellows’ supervisors are asked to providefeedback on results and processes governing their work, through a Survey Monkey tool that is used to inform follow-upconversations, guide future Fellowships, and explore additional college-community collaborations. Similar instruments areadministered for student-teachers and other students placed as interns, in independent studies, and in off-campus work-study student “placements.” Each is administered at the conclusion of a community engagement experience typically at theend of each semester. Partnerships between Mount Holyoke’s education licensure program and local schools are assessedalso through multiple methods, including informal and formal written evaluations of individual students, surveys ofmultiple stakeholders at partnering schools and focus groups.

3.b. Does the institution aggregate and use all of its assessment data related to community engagement?

Yes

Describe how the data is used:

Data from assessments of community engagement are used by the community engagement programs at Mount Holyoketo assess the effectiveness and reciprocity of partnerships, to understand their impact and inform planning decisions, and toaffect organizational planning at the college. Each program and staff member also seeks to share relevant information withcolleagues, and to refer pressing issues to other campus units or to higher administrators as appropriate. There are strongcollaborative and information-sharing practices, for example between staff in the College’s academic centers (forleadership, environment, and global learning), and between those staff and community-engaged programs and officesincluding in education, the President’s Office, extension, and career development.

This process of shared information gathering and analysis has both been facilitated by increasing coordination among thevarious community engagement efforts at Mount Holyoke, and led to concrete initiatives to reallocate resources andrestructure inside the college. For example, feedback from school and youth program partners in Holyoke identified twochallenges in our engagement practices there - the challenge of coordinating placement, oversight, training andtransportation resources across disparate volunteer service, CBL course, and work-study offices at the college, and thechallenge of holding students from all of these “streams” to high expectations for reliability/attendance, for preparation andtraining, and for impact in tutoring/mentoring work. Taken together, data about impact/outcomes challenges in our tutoringand mentoring partnerships, about student preparation and consistency, and about the challenges of working with multipleoffices at the college led Mount Holyoke to a) centralize oversight of volunteer service, work-study and CBL courseplacements within the CBL Program, and b) establish a new “Youth Partnerships Coordinator” position to be hired in Juneor July of 2014.

As these programs work more closely together, and as infrastructure becomes more aligned, information sharing and usebecomes more streamlined and impactful. Formalized coordination among the curricular, co-curricular volunteer andfederal work-study programs, as well as increased communication and coordination with community engaged programs inother academic and administrative departments, are enhancing the centralization, aggregation and use of communityperceptions, impact and satisfaction data, and other information.

Furthermore, the campus-wide focus on experiential learning via the Lynk is posing important questions to faculty,administrators and departments important questions about where and how community-engaged teaching and learning isaffecting the institution and its partners. The array of campus programs and offices supporting and managing communityengagement have begun to share and align policies and procedures that will, in time, enable shared data tracking andanalysis in ways that will contribute to institution-wide research about impacts and outcomes from expanded andincreasingly embedded Lynk programming. For example, the college has already had course designations for CBL coursesand can now track of Nexus minors on student transcripts. Going forward, integrating data about other experiential learningsuch as internships, participation in the preparatory and post-experiential reflection, presentation and integrationprograms, will enable Mount Holyoke to begin answering some of those questions.


4. Is community engagement emphasized in the marketing materials (website, brochures, etc.) of the institution?

Yes

Describe the materials that emphasize community engagement:

Community engagement by multiple facets of the Mount Holyoke community is emphasized in through multiplemechanisms to multiple audiences. The Office of Communications’ description of the college emphasizes “the College isrecognized worldwide for its rigorous and innovative academic programs, its global community, its legacy of womenleaders, and its commitment to connecting the work of the academy to the concerns of the world.”

The Spring 2013 edition of Mount Holyoke’s Vista publication featured community engagement as its cover story. Thearticle described the work of a CBL Fellow, and the parallels with one of Mount Holyoke’s most noted alumnae, FrancesPerkins, first female cabinet secretary. Noting “Before making history, Perkins was pursuing science within the broad scopeof the liberal arts, and at an institution that believed in connecting women’s education with the world beyond its gates. Morethan a century later—as Mount Holyoke celebrates its 175th anniversary—Rebecca Neubardt ’13 is doing that, too.”Neubardt, the featured Mount Holyoke student, describes her multi-year involvement with a local community health center,the courses and college programs that facilitated her experience there and at domestic and international internships withnonprofits, and the impact of these experiences on her learning, personal growth and career trajectory.

The Winter 2014 edition of the Alumnae Quarterly featured a story about community outreach by Mount Holyokepresident, Lynn Pasquerella, under the title “Pasquerella Seeks to Move Academy Outside of ‘Ivory Tower’” which detailsher work bring academic work to broader audience and notes that she considers such projects “an integral part of hercommitment to education”

At the time of writing, the Mount Holyoke homepage demonstrates the centrality of community engagement with a videoabout a senior’s work to with grassroots women’s empowerment movement in Afghanistan; a news story and prominentbutton directing attention to the Lynk initiative and the college’s commitment to fund an internship for every student; 14Mount Holyoke students developing community engagement projects at Clinton Global Initiative University; and newsstories featuring faculty weighing in on issues of public concern.

The “news portal” highlights the breadth of community engagement by the Mount Holyoke community. A sampling ofstories in recent weeks includes faculty writing about antipoverty programs, alumnae projects to address the struggles ofstudents with ADHD, student policy internships, campus outreach events, student activism against sexual violence, and afood drive in which incoming first year students helped collect more than 12,000lbs of food for a local pantry. as part of theirspring admission orientation to Mount Holyoke.


5. Does the executive leadership of the institution (President, Provost, Chancellor, Trustees, etc.) explicitlypromote community engagement as a priority?

Yes

Describe ways that the executive leadership explicitly promotes community engagement, e.g., annual addresses,published editorials, campus publications, etc.:

President Lynn Pasquerella set a tone of high-profile support for community engagement at the outset of her tenure. Sheentered her position by insisting that a service day be made part of her inauguration celebration schedule. Way beyondsymbolism, her priorities since have since placed community engagement at the center of the conversation about thecollege and its identity - a conversation reaching across the institution and beyond just her presidency. This commitmenthas immediately become visible in the strategic plan, in major initiatives of “Nexus” and “The Lynk,” and in gains forcommunity engagement resources described elsewhere here.

The president continues to promote community engagement on external stages, modeling active community engagementherself. Her January 2012 TEDx talk “Liberal Learning, Academic Access, and Social Justice” has placed college access andsocio-economic change front and center in her administration’s efforts to identify and distinguish Mount Holyoke. As aparticipant in a 2013 White House Summit on college opportunity for low-income and disadvantaged students, shecommitted Mount Holyoke to expanding and diversifying college-community partnership efforts that support collegeaccess, readiness, and affordability. She is a board member of Massachusetts Campus Compact (MACC), advancingcommunity engagement across the state.

The president has made extending the academy beyond the campus a hallmark of her tenure at Mount Holyoke. This hasincluded outreach efforts that use public media to share research findings and discussions of difficult topics with a broadpublic - most visibly perhaps as host of WAMC public radio’s “Academic Minute.” Her personal involvement in SouthHadley and Holyoke, attending, hosting, and supporting local events, establishing relationships with local stakeholders,represents a visible investment in community perception and relationships. In fall 2013, Pasquerella, a philosopher andethicist by training, co-taught a CBL course in Mount Holyoke’s philosophy department which she will teach in fall 2014,investing value in CBL as a pedagogy.

Beyond advocating for community engagement, Pasquerella’s choices in hiring and promoting senior staff have reflectedsupport for this work. Incoming Deans of the Faculty and the College both bring commitment to community-engagedteaching, learning, and scholarship. Appointments elsewhere in academic administration have made explicit reference tothe invigorated focus upon connecting liberal arts curriculum with community-engaged learning.

In 2013, during the first months of her tenure, Dean of the Faculty Sonya Stephens issued a call to all 40 departments andprograms at the College to engage in the Lynk initiative over the coming 4-year period, incentivizing “early adopters” withseed funding, communications and web re-design support, and a facilitated teaching and learning community of practice.Intended to support 10 recipients, 12 departments and programs ultimately joined the effort in its very first year.Participants are addressing questions including: - how do curricular offerings connect with the Lynk, Nexus or Community-Based Learning?- how do you assure students are exposed to communities and opportunities beyond Mount Holyoke? - what opportunities exist for research or internships, and how will departments/programs capitalize on these to enhancestudent learning and engagement?


1. Does the institution have a campus-wide coordinating infrastructure (center, office, etc.) to support andadvance community engagement?

Yes

Describe the structure, staffing, and purpose of this coordinating infrastructure:

Mount Holyoke’s “Community-Based Learning (CBL) Program” was established in the mid-1990s. CBL integratesacademic and experiential learning to advance positive social change, build sustainable and reciprocal communitypartnerships, and foster commitment to social justice. CBL connects Mount Holyoke with communities through courses,independent studies, internships, community-based research, and service projects that combine learning and analysis withaction and social change. By 1999, CBL had become part of the Weissman Center for Leadership, supporting courses,internships, and partnerships. Through 2008, CBL was managed by a faculty member part-time. Volunteer service wasmanaged independently through the “CAUSE” student organization, advised by staff from student affairs. Educationpartnerships were supported independently by Department of Psychology and Education staff. America Reads/AmericaCounts and off-campus work-study resided in our Career Development Center.

In 2008, the CBL program hired its first full- time “Coordinator”. Since, several developments have facilitated strengthenedcampus infrastructure: ambitious growth in partnership project volume, increasing attention to quality practice, increasedresources and staffing, increasing college prioritization of community engagement and curricular integration, and strongsenior leadership. Several substantial infrastructure enhancements have been made since 2008. First, the “Coordinator”position was elevated into a Director of Community Engagement with a campus-wide portfolio, and the CAUSE advisor,once half-time to support co-curricular service, has grown to full-time as CBL Assistant Coordinator, to align volunteerservice with college community engagement partnerships.

Second, CBL now oversees previously separate community engagement programs - CAUSE, Off-Campus Work-Study(OCWS), and support for Education course CBL placements. Gaining managerial oversight of CAUSE has enabled thecollege to strengthen student leadership at community partners, clarify student outreach priorities, and support engagementinitiatives among student cultural organizations. Moving OCWS to CBL enabled Mount Holyoke to leverage communityservice work-study for engaged learning. Federal work-study now supports campus community engagement partnerships,and we increasingly focus placements at strategic partners where greater community impact and improved learning arepossible. Strategic use of OCWS also amplifies CBL’s success attracting and retaining students of color, low-income andfirst-generation students. By eliminating the difficult trade-off between work obligations and community service, we achievea more diverse corps of community-engaged students, benefiting peer learning, community reception and impact. Finally,partnering in Education course placements has enabled the college to support tutoring and mentoring partnerships with:comprehensive and responsive training strategies that draw upon campus and community resources to benefit ALL MountHolyoke placements; improved impact from preparation and training better tied to community needs; attendancemonitoring that improves youth and college student impact; enhanced peer mentoring, supervision, and reflection throughCommunity Fellows’ leadership; and more coordinated, efficient, reliable, and consistent transportation strategies. Workingwith departments, faculty and community partners to annually offer 25-30 CBL courses, employ and train 35-50 studentleaders in Community Fellowships, develop and maintain relationships with local CBOs while providing faculty anddepartmental support for community-engaged teaching and research, CBL functions as an integrative hub, resource, andcatalyst for community engagement that is increasingly pursued across the college’s departmental and office infrastructure.


2.a. Are there internal budgetary allocations dedicated to supporting institutional engagement with community?

Yes

Describe the source (percentage or dollar amount) of these allocations, whether this source is permanent, and howit is used:

Permanent budgetary resources from the College’s annual operating budget support the CBL Program, the “CAUSE”volunteer service program, and Off-Campus Work Study as follows.The CBL Program has an annual operating budget of approximately $37,000. Approximately half of this amount isdedicated to student wages, supporting the Community Fellows, CBL Mentors (students assigned to courses as teachingassistants) and Administrative Fellows (students assigned to support functions like transportation, communications, etc.)programs. These funds are also used to match off-campus work-study funds or fund students ineligible for federal work-study. Remaining dollars provide faculty course support (honoraria for community speakers, materials and food forcollaborative events, etc.), other program and event support, training and professional development for students andprofessional staff, a CBL library and other program costs.

The CAUSE student volunteer service program has two annual funding streams of producing a total of $8,000. One isstudent government funds provided by proposal to the CAUSE student leadership, and the other is an annual budgetallocation managed by the CBL program for community service.

The Off-Campus Work-Study Program, including America Reads/America Counts tutors and other local placements, hasan annual College operating budget allocation of approximately $50,000 to support federal work-study eligible studentcommunity service employment in the community.

Mount Holyoke College dedicates over $500,000 in support of summer internships nationally and globally, many of whichhave a strong community engagement purpose and focus.

During the current budgetary year, at least six staff members and an AmeriCorps*VISTA had elements of communityengagement as a key professional responsibility. In addition Mount Holyoke dedicates administrative staffing and studentworkers to fostering community engagement. Despite a tight budgetary environment, institutional support for CBLcoordination has grown. For 2014-15, the decision has been made to expand the CBL Assistant Coordinator/CAUSEAdvisor to a full-time position (from 27 hours/week), and to fund a new 27 hour/week Youth Partnerships Coordinatorposition.

2.b. Is there external funding dedicated to supporting institutional engagement with community?

Yes

Describe specific external funding:

Mount Holyoke’s alumnae and donor networks are being leveraged to create and expand endowed funding for communityengagement. The CBL program recently received the “Bristol-Rotundo” fund, intended to support community engagementwork. This fund joins two existing endowed funds that support the CBL program. Together they yield approximately$15,000 per year in unrestricted program funds.

Substantial growth in additional funds for internships will likely result from an upcoming fundraising focus on experientialeducation, tied to the Lynk program. The program has a $20 million fundraising goal.

The CBL Program has sought external funding for community engagement initiatives, and there are faculty research grantsthat incorporate community engagement. In recent years the CBL program has received over $100,000 from theMassachusetts Service Alliance for Governor Deval Patrick’s “Commonwealth Corps” initiative to increase tutoring andmentoring efforts in the Holyoke Public Schools; a $7,000 award from the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts, toadvance a girls mentorship program, and a a $4,500 grant from the Massachusetts Service Alliance to support a MartinLuther King Day of Service project to enable both the creation of a promotional video to support the fundraising andmarketing of the Neighbors Helping Neighbors Food Pantry in South Hadley, and enable the participation of 70+ MountHolyoke students with 150+ residents in an annual town food drive. Additionally, CBL resources has enabled the college tohost AmeriCorps*VISTAs based at least 20-25% of their time in partnering community organizations in Holyoke andSouth Hadley, both based at Mount Holyoke and in collaboration with the Five Colleges. In 2011-12, Mount Holyokefunds sponsored the placement of a Massachusetts Promise Fellow in the Holyoke Public Schools to support 8th-9thgrade transitions, and fro 2011-14 VISTA’s have been placed in the Holyoke Schools to support collaborative collegeaccess programming.

Mount Holyoke faculty have received numerous grants that incorporate community engagement into their scholarship.Among these is a project by the chair of the physics to translate science content to non-academic audiences throughScience Cafés. These free, public events in the local community feature presentations by scientists on such diverse topicsas local glacial lakes and the science behind harddrives. They seek to increase science literacy and interest in science topics.Other examples include a multi-year NIH grant to support research on literacy acquisition among adults. The researchproject is rooted in multifaceted partnerships with local organizations, including not only community-based research, but aCBL course and co-curricular tutoring by Mount Holyoke students.

Community engagement has also been underwritten by major grant funds from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to supportthe Nexus program. A current grant from Mellon supports for embedding practitioners into the curriculum, and facultycourse development and redesign to create components of “Nexus Tracks” such as: Development Studies; EducationalPolicy and Practice; Engineering; Global Business; Journalism, Media, and Public Discourse; Law, Public Policy andHuman Rights; and Non-Profit Organizations.

2.c. Is there fundraising directed to community engagement?

Yes

Describe fundraising activities directed to community engagement:

The recent launch of the Lynk initiative and the College’s strategic commitment to experiential education is accompanied bythe launch of a major campaign for fundraising focused on experiential education and community engagement. Thefollowing campaign goals posted recently on the College’s web site depict the institution’s prioritization of experientiallearning with strong community engagement elements:

Endowed Internship—connecting liberal arts to the world of work: $100,000Visiting Practitioners Fund—linking the theoretical to the practical: $250,000Curriculum Development—connecting undergraduate educations to long-term career goals: $500,000LEAP Symposium: $1 millionSenior Symposium: $1 millionDirectorship, Community-Based Learning Program—connecting academic work and purposeful engagement with theworld: $1.5 millionSenior Directorship, The Lynk—connecting students' academic work with practical experience and career exploration: $2.5millionSummer Scientific Research Program—collaborative research between students and faculty: $5 millionNexus Program—7 academic tracks designed to intentionally integrate liberal arts with future ambitions: $10 millionMount Holyoke Internship Program—a paid experience for every student: $20 million

The Development Office additionally maintains ongoing efforts to identify donors and connect them to campus projects thatmatch their interests. These efforts have recently yielded the Bristol-Rotundo fund, and previously established two otherendowed funds supporting the Sally Montgomery award (described above) and student community engagement activitiesrespectively via the CBL Program. Similarly, the College’s Nexus program has had significant private foundation grantfunding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, including a $2.5 million grant in 2007 and a follow-up award in 2013.

2.d. Does the institution invest its financial resources in the community for purposes of community engagementand community development?

Yes

Describe specific financial investments:

Each year Mount Holyoke provides financial support to local groups and cultural and events and offers scholarships forgraduates of the local high school. The Director of Government and Community Relations notes “we try to say ‘yes’“ tosuch requests. More broadly, Mount Holyoke seeks to leverage its financial resources to foster local community development through apolicy of preferential purchasing from local businesses.

For example, there is an institutional commitment to supporting local agriculture, which is also a focus of communityengagement partnerships. Dining Services purchasing of local produce, regionally produced products andsustainable/organic purchases account for more than 20% of total dining service purchases in each of the last two years. Aspart of this commitment, Mount Holyoke has also provided financial support to the South Hadley community farmer’smarket and is a member of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), a local non-profit dedicated to advancinglocal agriculture.

In addition, Mount Holyoke recently secured a $250,000 gift to support a community partnership aimed at restoring a localwetland. Planned through several years of CBL and community-based research projects between Mount Holyoke and thelocal conservation commission, future projects will feature jointly conducted restoration activities, outreach activities to localresidents (including tours of wetland areas run out of the adjacent weekly farmer’s market in South Hadley) andpartnerships with local K-12 schools.

Annually, approximately $5-7,000 from the CBL Program’s operating budget goes directly to support college positivecampus visits by school, youth, and adult learning groups, to support campus community partners program expensesassociated with both core program missions and collaborative involvement of our students and faculty, and honoraria forparticipation in campus panels, class lectures, and sponsorship/supervision of Mount Holyoke students and projects.


3.a. Does the institution maintain systematic campus-wide tracking or documentation mechanisms to recordand/or track engagement with the community?

Yes

Describe systematic campus-wide tracking or documentation mechanisms:

As described earlier, Mount Holyoke’s community engagement has been historically recorded and tracked throughfragmented systems. Recent organizational changes and programmatic innovations have facilitated integration. Movementof supervision of CAUSE volunteer service activities, off-campus work-study placements, and CBL course placements inEducation into the CBL Program management has brought most community engagement activities under one “roof.”Service hours, alignment and tracking of placement and project opportunities and outcomes, and coordination partnershipsare tracked, documented and managed by a single office.

Tracking pertaining to CBL courses is most advanced, through the Registrar. This allows Mount Holyoke to monitor thenumbers and identities of classes, departments, faculty and students participating in curricular engagement in a particularsemester and over-time. This allows Mount Holyoke to review changes in CBL over time. Besides enabling assessmentand survey access to participating students and partners (see below) there are two by-products of this system. First, itsignals to “shopping” students an engaged teaching pedagogy which can appeal to hands-on learners and redirect studentsfor whom the extra time commitment is a deterrent. Second, it enables access to enrollment and placement lists that enableoutreach to and monitoring of student participation in preparation and training.

Tracking and documenting of community engagement by Mount Holyoke students is also integrated within multiplecampus-wide assessment strategies managed by the Office of Institutional Research. These include:Enrolled Student Survey, described elsewhere, which includes participation in multiple forms of community engagement, The New Student Survey which assesses the values and experience with community engagement of students as theyenter, The Senior survey, which assesses values relating to community engagement, participation while at Mount Holyoke, andplans for the future; The 6 Months Out survey which assesses participation in internships and experiential learning with particular attention totheir impact on career/post-graduation pathways.

Specific community engagement programs also undertake finer grained tracking and assessment. The CBL program tracksFellows, for example, through semester by semester lists including community partners and job descriptions detailingobjectives and activities, collected and reported annually. This is supplemented by close supervision from CBL staff,through two concurrent training courses. Internships funded by Mount Holyoke, a sector greatly expanding through theLynk, are tracked starting with a detailed application from students describing the internship and goals. The CareerDevelopment Center maintains records of hosting organizations and students, and on return, students must complete awritten reflection, a course or internship that connects their experience to academics and make a public presentation.Finally, Education students completing pre-practicum and practicum experiences at local schools are tracked throughdepartmental records, including student portfolios and state rubrics for licensure.

In addition, this spring (2014), Mount Holyoke’s Dean of the Faculty and the Advisory Committee on Appointment,Reappointment, and Promotion have committed to tracking faculty engagement through annual record sheets with adedicated section of those forms for this purpose. This data will allow the institution to aggregate information on multipleforms of faculty engagement (teaching, research and service) from across the campus.

3.b. If yes, does the institution use the data from those mechanisms?

Yes

Describe how the institution uses the data from those mechanisms:

To date, the most directly used tracking and documentation mechanisms are the records of CBL course offerings andparticipation; and program-specific tracking. As a focus of community engagement planning, course data provides the CBLprogram and administrators an important view of Mount Holyoke’s community engagement activities. It is regularlyreported on and reviewed for shifts or growth in CBL participation.Program specific tracking data is used to inform program planning, including expected student participation in future terms,resource allocation, training and course planning. As mentioned above, this data is also used to monitor and eitherencourage (for volunteers) or require (for credit-based and work-study placements) participation in preparation and trainingevents, at which attendance is monitored and for which consequences are in place for noncompliance. This data is thus oneimportant route for Mount Holyoke to fulfill its ambitions and commitments to the Holyoke Campus-CommunityCompact to better prepare and support students in their community entry and placement practices.

As documentation mechanisms are developed for faculty participation, they will allow Mount Holyoke to develop a moredata-driven approach to faculty professional development, recognition, and support. However, even the current Registrarsystem helps the CBL Program to identify and target those departments, programs, and faculty who are most and leastcommunity-engaged, and construct outreach and development strategies appropriate to their needs and interests.

Assessment has been a focused planning objective in Dean of the Faculty initiatives to support academic departments toconsider and adopt approaches to encouraging and contextualizing student internships. For example, in 2013-2014, twelvedepartments engaged in groundbreaking and substantial planning to consider how newly-emphasized experiential learningopportunities (the Lynk, Nexus as well as CBL) will connect to courses, curriculum and advising in their departments. Thefirst cohort included Asian Studies, the Art Museum, Architectural Studies, Art Studio, Art History, Chemistry, Economics,Environmental Studies, Film Studies, Geology & Geography, History, and Philosophy. In one gathering, all of thesedepartments met with Professor Jo Beld (St. Olaf’s College) for focused sessions to discuss assessment goals for theirmajor and for the Lynk as a whole. By grounding the development of assessment strategies about the impacts ofcommunity-engaged learning in the academic departments, we hope to gain deep investment from faculty in the practicesand analyses that emerge, and decentralize responsibility for understanding and responding to those effects to benefitstudent learning as well as the sustainability and reciprocity of our community engagement partnerships.


4.a. Are there systematic campus-wide assessment mechanisms to measure the impact of institutionalengagement?

Yes

4.b. If yes, indicate the focus of these systematic campus-wide assessment mechanisms and describe one keyfinding for Impact on Students:

CBL Fellows are assessed with pre- and post- surveys which examine skills, self-efficacy, content knowledge and attitudesabout community partnerships. One notable finding is the impact that the program’s focus on asset-based partnershipshas on student participants across the domains. Fellows’ post-tests reveal statistically significant increases in ratings ofskill in assessing a community’s assets, confidence in their ability to mobilize community assets for a greater public good,and knowledge of asset-based community development and asset maps.

The Enrolled Student Survey compared students who had participated in each of three forms of engagement (course-based, volunteering and internships) in each class year. Students were asked to what extent their experience contributed totheir knowledge, or personal development in two dozen areas. The 2013 assessment found statistically significant (p<0.05and p<0.01) differences between those who had participated and those who had not on 21 of 24 items. These capacitiesrange from the ability to write clearly and effectively, to function effectively as a member of a team, to formulate originalideas and solutions, and to plan and execute complex projects. Among students’ whose education includes experiences incommunity settings, there are statistically significant differences in each class year, for ability to formulate original ideas.The data for seniors who have volunteered are particularly striking. 57% said their experience had contributed “very much”to their ability to formulate original ideas, compared to 37% among non-volunteering seniors. 6% of those who had notvolunteered also attributed very little or no influence. None of those who had volunteered did so.

Starting in sophomore year, students who participate in community engagement give higher ratings for impacts on theirability to work on teams. By Junior year, the gap between intern or service participating students and non-participants haswidened to 19 and 18 points respectively. By senior year 49% of volunteering students and 43% of those who haveinterned give the highest rating. The number of seniors who rate Mount Holyoke’s contribution to their ability to plan andexecute complex projects as “very much” is 11 – 17 points higher for each group of students who had undertaken service,community based learning courses or internships, than among students who did not participate in these activities. Amongstudents who participated in internships, CBL courses and volunteering, 55%, 62% and 63% respectively give the highestrating to Mount Holyoke’s contribution to their ability to write clearly and effectively. Between 38% and 46% of non-participating seniors gave this rating.

Overall, these data have helped to point the way forward for the College’s conceptualization and investments of financialand staffing resources as well as campus political capital into the construction of embedded internships, contextualized bypreparatory, reflective, and disciplinary courses and workshops. Mount Holyoke has taken a clear stance on creatingcollege-wide internships programming that is connected to and supported by the college’s liberal arts curriculum, andwhich is based on research-based practices in the fields of community engagement and experiential learning.

4.c. If yes, indicate the focus of these systematic campus-wide assessment mechanisms and describe one keyfinding for Impact on Faculty:

Data on faculty participation in community engagement has historically been less systematically documented and assessedthan student outcomes. The growth of CBL teaching has indicated increasing interest and investment by faculty, as well as aculture in which such investment is possible. Since 2005, CBL course offerings have more than doubled.

That said, analysis of the partnerships built for those course offerings and the pedagogies used by faculty teaching thoseclasses undertaken in 2012-13 yielded a typology that describes three main “styles” of community-based learning coursesand partnerships at Mount Holyoke. Those three have been determined to be: traditional “service-learning” classes inwhich students are asked to commit 2-4 hours per week to a service project which serves as “text” for class-based reflectiondiscussions and written assignments; various transactional forms of “project-based learning” in which the entire class,teams of students or individuals engage in a collaboration with a community partner to deliver a product or namedoutcome within part of or the entire semester; and community-based research in which the entire class or teams within theclass work with a partner or partners to develop a research question or agenda, develop jointly the tools and methods ofexamining that question, and then collaborate to conduct data collection and analysis. The analysis of campuswide dataabout our CBL Program thus enabled the construction of a home-grown analysis of existing practices that helped identifyrelevant professional and partnership development strategies, strategies for pedagogical improvement and critical feedbackfor both CBL practitioners, and hopeful/aspiring additional faculty considering or planning courses. This analysis hascreated a roadmap to existing successful practices and a network of campus practitioners, and enabled more intentionaldecision-making about practices and partnerships for current and future faculty.

Starting in the upcoming academic year (2014-15), annual record sheets for Mount Holyoke faculty will now explicitly askfor documentation of community engaged activities. This recording will institutionaliz systematic, campus-wide tracking offaculty community engagement for the first time, and this documentation will be gathered and maintained by the Office ofthe Dean of the Faculty. While it is too early in the process to report findings, this data gathering will not only allow forsimilar assessment, professional growth and mentoring strategies going forward, but also signal to faculty that this is workthat is visible and valued.

4.d. If yes, indicate the focus of these systematic campus-wide assessment mechanisms and describe one keyfinding for Impact on Community:

Assessment of community impact happens primarily on a program-level and through conversations and relationshipsbetween Mount Holyoke faculty and staff and their community partners. Conducting effective impact evaluation poses anongoing challenge for most of our community partners as well.

However, CBL Community Fellow evaluations and ongoing conversations draw on the professional judgment of thesepractitioners. These processes serve to identify best practices, areas for improvement and to identify the value of MountHolyoke partnerships. These impacts include providing college-going role models and mentors to youth and providingindividual attention and support for homework and other academic achievement for struggling students. In addition,Fellows’ capacity building focus impacts the organization, including increasing coordination for volunteers, developing newmaterials and curricula, and launching new programs and events. These assessments have also identified practices whichwill increase the positive impact, such as community and program-specific orientations, which Mount Holyoke has workedto implement.

As an intentional consequence of the organizational consolidation of tutoring and mentoring support described above, theCBL program is beginning to undertake more rigorous research-based evaluation of the impact of college partnerships onthe school performance of youth participants. For example, we are gathering data about college tutor training, andattendance to evaluate the possible effects of preparation, consistency, and retention among tutors on programeffectiveness and K-12 student outcomes. We will conduct this analysis in collaboration with both the Holyoke afterschoolprogram partner sites where our college students are placed as tutors, with the Holyoke Public Schools who can providedata on student grade performance, attendance, behavioral referrals, and indicators of engagement which we hope toexamine alongside college student tracking to explore possible correlations, and with local higher education partners whoare similarly eager to ask and answer the questions: does college student tutoring make a difference in youth academic andsocial outcomes, and how?

Mount Holyoke also played a central role in an effort by the Five College consortium to solicit and respond to impacts ofcommunity engagement in the city of Holyoke. This process brought five college campus outreach and partnership staffand faculty together with non-profit and educational agencies in a series of dialogues about the process and outcomes ofcollege-community partnerships in the city. The resulting Holyoke Campus-Community Compact identified best practicesand partnership commitments. Mount Holyoke has not only made it required reading for students and faculty pursuingCBL projects in Holyoke, but also embedded the lessons and principles emerging from the Compact into campus-wideapproaches to preparing and supporting students in community-engaged work locally, nationally, and internationally asdescribed elsewhere in this application (including below).

4.e. If yes, indicate the focus of these systematic campus-wide assessment mechanisms and describe one keyfinding for Impact on the Institution:

Continuing from the previous response, the serious attention given to the Holyoke Campus-Community Compact hashelped Mount Holyoke to develop a culture of support for incorporating the extensively articulated cautions and advisoriesabout ethics, reciprocity and sustainability embedded in the “Compact” into planning and execution of new and ongoingcommunity engagement activities. Furthermore, “cautionary tales” about community fatigue from research projects andneeds assessments that have yielded limited benefits or non-return of benefits, products and/or ownership and capacity tocommunity partner organizations and collaborating individuals, and about failures in ethical practice, reciprocity, mutualityand sustainability that underpinned the development of the Holyoke Campus-Community Compact have become thebasis for institution-wide educational approaches to preparing students for community entry, research practice andreciprocity for ALL experiential learning - through Lynk and Nexus internships, study abroad, practica, work-study andvolunteerism as well as in the CBL courses where such preparation began.

CBL staff and student leaders have become trainers in the preparatory courses and workshops offered by Nexus, theCenter for Global Initiatives, the work-study program and elsewhere on campus precisely to deliver the messages andadvice about reciprocal, ethical practice that emerge from the assessment work about Five College CBL practices that camefrom the Holyoke Campus-Community Compact development and recent years of implementation and impactassessment work. For example, the annual courses and workshops required of departing Nexus, Lynk and other summerinterns, the bi-annual preparation seminar required of departing study-abroad students, and a Fall 2012 faculty seminar toadvance faculty adoption campus-wide of preparatory exercises for experiential learning all included CBL staff and theseassociated materials and messages as featured parts of the curricula. In sum, these developments can be said to positionMount Holyoke not just for growth in community-engaged teaching, learning and scholarship, but for growth that is builtupon responsible, ethical, and sustainable practices. A culture of concern for mutuality and reciprocity has been constructedby a now established, senior cohort of Mount Holyoke engaged faculty practitioners and administrators, one which ishelping to distinguish the college locally, and increasingly beyond, for research-based and ethical practice in campus-community collaboration.

Relational assessments have also more generally have had a significant impact on Mount Holyoke as an institution.Feedback from youth partners, for example, emphasizing consistency of partnerships and the level of preparation andskills the Mount Holyoke students bring have motivated substantial institutional shifts. These impacts include reorganizingcommunity engagement programming, shifting faculty and program practices to provide greater preparation andaccountability, and shifting institutional funds to create a new position focused on youth partnerships. These significantorganizational changes are designed specifically to respond to the key concerns identified in community partnerassessments as described elsewhere in this document.

4.f. Does the institution use the data from the assessment mechanisms?

Yes

Describe how the institution uses the data from the assessment mechanisms:

Information from evaluations is used by each program to improve practice and partnership. Areas of focus includeevaluating students, improving preparation, training and curriculum, and improving and prioritizing partnerships. Theresults of these assessment mechanisms, in particular have guided the development and direction of communityengagement programming at Mount Holyoke. The CBL Community Fellows, for example, are a key component of MountHolyoke’s community engagement and a critical point for assessment as described earlier in this application. Thesestudent positions provide capacity-building at partners, manage co-curricular partnerships and provide support for CBLclasses, volunteers, and work-study placements. The CBL program seeks to document and measure impact through anevaluation which ask community partners who have supervised Fellows to evaluate the process and results of the project,services, or partnership. As the links between community partners, partner organization programming, Mount Holyokecourses, faculty, and departments, Fellows’ impacts and outcomes in the community and on campus are key indicators ofimpacts and outcomes for community engagement by the college more generally.

Broad community assessments such as the Holyoke Campus Community Compact are used to frame appropriatepartnership practice for new student leaders and faculty seeking community partnerships in Holyoke. In an effort tounderstand whether and how our efforts to implement the principles and practices of the Compact are effecting desiredimprovements in sustainability and ethical practices in our partnerships, Mount Holyoke has hosted “Campus Bound”dialogues as informal “focus groups” among community partners, in collaboration with Five College CBL Committeepartners. These gatherings have helped to both understand the degrees of impact from our work, and the limitations of thereach and depth that require greater effort.

Data has been used in individual, more specific partnerships, such as the dialogue with youth and school partners havebeen used to plan major shifts in community engagement infrastructure and programming.

As discussed earlier, our relational approach with our school and afterschool program partners helped the institution tounderstand the challenges to impacts and outcomes, and to accountability and transparency more generally that stemmedfrom the complex and multifaceted college student tutor placement structures we had in place. This feedback wasinstrumental in enabling us to both implement expectations and accountability for preparation, training, and consistency inattendance, and to reorganize our resources so as to position our students to be allocated, prepared and supervised to thegreatest positive effects on outcomes for K-12 students and the programs with whom we partner to serve and supportthem.


5. Is community engagement defined and planned for in the strategic plans of the institution?

Yes

Cite specific excerpts from the institution’s strategic plan that demonstrate a clear definition of communityengagement and related implementation plans:

Mount Holyoke’s first strategic goal specifies an education “that prepares the next generation of women leaders for life,profession, and service through purposeful engagement with the world.” The on-going, mission-driven commitment topurposeful engagement signals the importance of community engagement within the strategic plan.

The plan includes specific strategies and steps to achieve this goal, including:

Increasing experiential learning opportunities. Mount Holyoke has placed increasing opportunities for students to connectlearning in and out of the classroom at the center of its plans. It will build on the model of Nexus (interdisciplinary minor-like programs with experiential learning at their core), existing of CBL programs, partnerships and practices, and otherengagement and experiential learning efforts at Mount Holyoke.

Guaranteeing each Mount Holyoke student a funded internship. This effort is of particular importance not only to studentsof limited economic means, who may have foregone internships for paid employment, but organizations without thebudgetary resources to hire additional staffing. Each Mount Holyoke student is guaranteed college funding to pursue anunpaid or low-paid internship. Internships must be substantive, and students must participate in written reflection, acourse or similarly intensive integrative experience, and share their knowledge in a public forum. The current focus onexpanding “The Lynk” to offer summer internship stipends of $3,000 each for domestic internships and $3,600 forinternational internships builds upon the already strong summer internship programming in place, upon the “Nexus”curricula of interdisciplinary minors tied to such internships, and to the CBL program’s academic-year internships“Fellows” and course-based community engagement opportunities.

Embedding practitioners within the curriculum. Mount Holyoke has committed itself to seeking and financially supportinginitiatives to invite practitioners to campus and engage them in the curriculum. Designed to link the theoretical to thepractical, practitioners may teach or co-teach courses, and/or collaborate with students and faculty to provide experientiallearning opportunities. Practitioners across a wide range of professional and academic fields are already being brought tocampus for short- and longer-term residencies, contributing to classes as guest lecturers and co-teachers, and advisingstudents about internship and career opportunities tied to the majors and disciplines hosting them at Mount Holyoke.


6. Does the institution provide professional development support for faculty and/or staff who engage withcommunity?

Yes

Describe professional development support for faculty and/or staff engaged with community:

Most professional development specific to community-engagement happens through the CBL Program. The Director ofCommunity Engagement (and Adjunct Lecturer in Education), Dr. Alan Bloomgarden, is a published community-engagedscholar, and an active CBL teacher at Mount Holyoke. He provides one-on-one consultation about engaged teaching,research, and learning, and facilitates a developmental approach to engaging faculty in community partnerships thatemphasizes and applies current research about connecting community engagement with departmental, institutional, anddisciplinary priorities for scholarship, tenure and promotion. Faculty are invited to lunches and meetings with fellow CBLpractitioners, community partners, and highly engaged students regularly, both on campus and in community settings.Each semester, faculty are invited and participate in the Five College orientation to community engagement in the city ofHolyoke, called “Holyoke Bound.” Dr. Bloomgarden facilitates faculty break-out sessions for colleagues from areainstitutions to discuss applications emerging from this community-based orientation program. Holyoke Bound is a day-long introduction to the history and culture of the city, to ethical and sustainable practices in community engagement, and topeople and organizations in non-profit, municipal and social service sectors. Sessions have included faculty and staff fromthe Five Colleges, Holyoke Community College, and Westfield State.

Mount Holyoke places high value on quality teaching, and offers professional development to all faculty through theTeaching and Learning Initiative. Led by a community-engaged scholar, Weissman Center Director/Associate Dean of theFaculty Becky Packard, the Teaching and Learning Initiatives program (co-located with CBL in the Weissman Center)focuses on reflective practice by faculty through retreats, workshops, new faculty mentoring, conversations about teaching.

The CBL program sustains a rich resource library of journals, books, examples of course syllabi, reflection exercises andguides, curricular development guides and models of good practice. Experienced, senior practitioners who have beenteaching with community-engaged pedagogies have provided extensive and continuing mentoring to junior colleagues asthey seek to develop their practices and courses. There is also a sufficiently substantial community of these establishedpractitioners to form a cohort of advocates for such work that cuts across disciplines and departments of the college. CBLprogram faculty have emphasized mutuality and reciprocity in their work, building new and deeper relationships amongfaculty and community partners. CBL and Weissman Center staff are working in conjunction with the Dean of the Faculty tosupport departmental planning among the most “ready” and eager departments, as priorities for professional developmentin the next academic year. This is deeply supported by the Dean of the Faculty whose Lynk initiative (described above) willenable all 40 departments and programs to substantially revise curricular offerings, advising strategies, and both internaland external communications vehicles to advance the profiles and practices of curriculum and career connectivity for currentand prospective students. The ambitious goal is for all such departments/programs to have achieved substantialtransformation “prior to the graduation of the Class of 2017” (from the Dean’s call to college departments, “Curriculum toCareer: The Importance of a Liberal Arts Education and The Lynk,” summer 2013).


7. Does the community have a "voice" or role for input into institutional or departmental planning for communityengagement?

Yes

Describe how the community’s voice is integrated into institutional or departmental planning for communityengagement:

Community voice has a direct and extensive role in shaping community engagement. One example has been a multi-yeardialogue between Mount Holyoke and youth-serving programs (principally K12 schools and community-based after-school programs) in Holyoke and South Hadley. Conversations with community partners highlighted college studentpreparation and consistency as essential to achieving joint goals for program quality and impact. School- and community-based afterschool program partners, meeting together via the multi- institutional collaborative “PeckACCESS” committee,have heard from Holyoke Public School officials and afterschool program partners serving their students and families thathome-school alignment, family engagement, and outcomes-based practices are all necessary to improve outcomes inwhat is chronically one of the worst-performing districts in Massachusetts.

Mount Holyoke has worked to align internal practices and structures to achieve this, pursuing organizational and policychanges to preparation, training, and accountability of college student tutors. Subsequent changes range from getting facultyto define and enforce consistent expectations for students working in K12 schools, to changes in work-study managementthat moved students to more accountable and outcomes-focused training and management, to creating a staff position tomanage and coordinate youth partnerships. These changes are direct responses to voices of school officials saying ourpartnerships must and yet do not consistently yield meaningful and measurable positive outcomes for K-12 students,voices of afterschool program partners that saying tutors must be trained and reliable, and voices of community leaders forwhom positive impacts of interventions, research and service are not consistently visible, measurable, or relevant.

Community engagement work is guided by principles jointly developed by community partners and Five Collegestakeholders to create the “Holyoke Campus-Community Compact.” This Compact specifies commitments of college andcommunity partners and defines best practices. Principles include ensuring that: campus-community collaborations resultin reciprocal benefits through long-term commitments; partnerships recognize CBO’s contributions and time in co-education and share clear, mutually developed goals; partnerships are characterized by trust, respect and shared decisionmaking and attend differing perspectives; partners are able to define needs and expectations, and have access to campusleaders. Referenced elsewhere, the Compact is used by staff, faculty, and students to define quality and reciprocity inpartnerships, and work toward alignment with expressed goals and priorities of communities - Holyoke and beyond.

Community partners increasingly also have a voice in community-engaged classrooms. The MAT program incorporatesteachers and staff at partner schools in its curriculum, who help make admissions decisions, guest lecture, and teachmethods courses. The Spanish Department engages youth and professional staff as co-instructors. Partners teach digitalmedia production skills, which students use to create digital stories and videos on issues of importance to the localcommunity. Such collaborations are expanding through the “embedded practitioner” program. All teaching faculty can nowapply for $6,000 to $10,000 per year to involve current “practitioners” in co-teaching, residencies, and/or “virtual”involvement. The CBL Program’s “Engaging the Pioneer Valley” course, which introduces students to local communities,organizations and issues, will have a community co-instructor when next offered.


8. Does the institution have search/recruitment policies or practices designed specifically to encourage the hiringof faculty with expertise in and commitment to community engagement?

Yes

Describe these specific search/recruitment policies or practices:

The value that Mount Holyoke places on community engagement and experiential learning, and its mission to educate forpurposeful engagement, provide essential context for all searches. Community engagement is highly regarded in therecruitment process: our Dean of Faculty states that “While we do not make explicit statements about communityengagement in the recruitment process, I can say that it has a very positive impact in the process if there is evidence ofthis.” This opinion is supported by several facts. First, the Director of Community Engagement has frequently beenincluded or at least invited to be included in first- and/or second-round interviewing and screening processes for candidatesin departments including Psychology and Education, Sociology, Spanish/Latina/Latin American Studies, and academic andadministrative department searches. Mount Holyoke’s CBL Program has become a “stop” on the campus tour forprospective candidates by their own request too, based on either campus informational materials sent by the searchcommittees or candidates’ own exploration. Second, newly-arriving faculty to Mount Holyoke are more actively and morequickly seeking out the support of the CBL Program, and more consistently asking to meet community partners or developcourse-based project opportunities for students early in their tenure at the college than ever before. New facultyappointments (both tenure-track and visiting) in all of the departments mentioned above, for example, are among the cadreof faculty members introducing CBL courses in the last three to five years.

A formal proposal is currently under consideration by the Advisory Committee on Appointments, Reappointments, andPromotions (Mount Holyoke’s elected faculty promotion and tenure committee) to make a commitment to hiring facultywith expertise and commitment to community engagement explicit in standard search language. The proposed languagereads in part “Mount Holyoke welcomes applicants with interest and experience in public scholarship and experientiallearning.” and connects such expertise to the college mission and priorities. Similar language has been proposed for theweb page directed toward prospective faculty. The Advisory Committee will be considering the matter this spring (2014).


9. Are there institutional level policies for promotion (and tenure at tenure-granting campuses) that specificallyreward faculty scholarly work that uses community-engaged approaches and methods?

No

If needed, use this space to describe the context for policies rewarding community engaged scholarly work:

Mouth Holyoke’s promotion and tenure systems reward effective teaching, innovative scholarship and meaningfulcontributions to the college community and beyond. Within these intentionally inclusive guidelines, a culture has emergedthat increasingly recognizes CBL pedagogy and research methods as a valuable route to achieve these overarching goals.

This culture of support has not yet been formalized into institutional level policies. However, work is in progress toexplicitly express Mount Holyoke’s support for community engagement as a mode of teaching and research which reflectsMount Holyoke’s mission to prepare students for purposeful engagement with the world. Specifically, the AdvisoryCommittee on Appointments, Reappointments and Promotion was asked in January 2014 to review the criteria for tenureand promotion, with explicit recognition that this kind of work be very much a part of those deliberations. Proposals underconsideration would address formal statements valuing community engaged teaching, scholarship or service.


10.a. Is community engagement rewarded as one form of teaching and learning?

Yes

Please cite text from the faculty handbook (or similar policy document):

Mount Holyoke faculty, institutional culture and promotion and tenure systems place a high value on quality teaching, andare characterized by openness to multiple ways of achieving these results. Community-based learning is increasinglyrecognized as a rigorous pedagogy that fosters deep academic learning, critical thinking and advances Mount Holyoke’smission and learning goals, and is valued as such. But the wider institutional initiative to embed experiential learning intothe curriculum in a variety of places and ways is encouraging faculty and departments to examine many approaches toincorporating engaged teaching and scholarship into local practice.

This value is reflected in competitive campus-wide teaching awards given recently to CBL faculty in both Spanish, Latina/o,Latin American Studies, and History. The growth of CBL courses, which have more than doubled in recent years alsopoints toward this growing value. This value is also reflected in the college’s focus on efforts to expand experientiallearning, to integrate curriculum and careers, and its mission for purposeful engagement with the world.

As reflected above, a proposal is under consideration to revise tenure and promotion processes to better and moreexplicitly reflect the current, implicit support for community engagement as a mode of teaching and learning.

10.b. Is community engagement rewarded as one form of scholarship?

Yes


Like teaching, Mount Holyoke’s institutional culture values and rewards high quality scholarship; and increasingly, thoughstill informally, the college recognizes community engagement as a route to accomplish this scholarship. This value isreflected not only in the widespread expressions of support for purposeful engagement and experiential learning, but alsothe recent award of the 2013 Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship to Philosophy Professor ThomasWartenberg. Wartenberg’s scholarship is deeply rooted in his community engagement, particularly a long-term partnershipwhich uses children’s literature to teach philosophy to children in a local urban school. His recent publications include ASneetch is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children's Literature. This scholarlyexamination of the pedagogy of teaching philosophical concepts and the philosophical method through children’s booksgrows from Wartenberg’s scholarly inquiry into the subject via the course partnerships he has managed over the years withthe Martin Luther King Charter School, The Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion School, the Jackson Street and JFK MiddleSchools in Northampton, and elsewhere.

Similarly, Becky Packard in our Department of Psychology and Education followed a trajectory of community-engagedteaching and scholarship that has been rewarded by her Department and the college. She began by joining Girls, Inc. ofHolyoke as a mentor in their community-based mentoring program in her first years as a tenure-track faculty member.Over time, she organized her Educational Psychology course to incorporate community-based mentors working withteams of students in the class as liaisons for an array of community-based programs. Her scholarly work turned towardexamination of pathways to college and to retention in college, most particularly related to the issues of STEM education,first generation students and students of color, two- to four-year degree transfer success and retention, and the roles ofmentoring in college success and persistence. She not only gained tenure on the basis of this and related work, but hasbeen both promoted academically (to Professor) at a fast pace for her scholarly work in the discipline and promoted to thenow three significant college leadership positions she holds as Director of the Weissman Center, Associate Dean of theFaculty, and Director of Teaching and Learning Initiatives.

10.c. Is community engagement rewarded as one form of service?

Yes


The focus described above is upon achieving formal recognition for community engagement in the domains of teachingand scholarship. This will help faculty efforts to contribute to the college’s strategic priorities and revitalized mission asreflected in the Lynk initiative and its associated curricular implications. However, Mount Holyoke’s enduring commitmentsto the town of South Hadley and the City of Holyoke create value in the many ways faculty and staff at the college contributeto local communities personally - through volunteer and public service with boards, organizations, schools and socialservice agencies.


11. Are there college/school and/or department level policies for promotion (and tenure at tenure-grantingcampuses) that specifically reward faculty scholarly work that uses community-engaged approaches andmethods?

No

Which colleges/school and/or departments? List Colleges or Departments:

What percent of total colleges/school and/or departments at the institution is represented by the list above?:

Please cite three examples of colleges/school and/or department-level policies, taken directly from policydocuments, that specifically reward faculty scholarly work using community-engaged approaches and methods:


12. If current policies do not specifically reward community engagement, is there work in progress to revisepromotion and tenure guidelines to reward faculty scholarly work that uses community-engaged approaches andmethods?

Yes

If yes, describe the current work in progress:

Like the Mount Holyoke culture across the campus, departmental promotion and tenure processes increasingly recognizecommunity engagement as a way to achieving high quality teaching and scholarship, and alignment with the institutionalmission. While this support remains implicit and is not yet formally recognized at the departmental level, the currentinitiatives coming especially out of the Office of the Dean of the Faculty to encourage departmental strategic planning,curricular overhaul and embracement of departmental advising and embedding of experiential learning are the essentialgroundwork for substantive advancement of faculty rewards for engaged scholarship. The natural consequences ofdepartmental transformations such as the growth of Nexus, CBL, the Lynk and embedded practitioners programs aresupporting include powerful shifts toward favoring engaged faculty work that is productive and recognized institution-widefor excellence.

The Community Based Learning Program has also identified department-wide planning for community engagement as thecurrent strategy for expanding and enhancing community engagement development at the college. Initial departmentalconsideration of community-engaged curricular growth have happened in the last two years with several departments,including Africana Studies, Environmental Studies and the Department of Spanish, Latina/o, Latin American Studies. Eachdepartment already features community engaged courses and scholars, and has demonstrated specific interest in growth inthe form of adding CBL course requirements to majors and minors. The developing investment in community engagementon the departmental level is evident, for example, in the decision by the Spanish, Latina/o, Latin American Studiesdepartment to seek internal budgetary support and external resources to host a Campus Compact VISTA within thedepartment to facilitate its community engagement with educational partners for 2014-15.

However, significant work is in progress to formalize and make explicit Mount Holyoke’s existing support for communityengaged teaching and scholarship, as described above. Proposals have been submitted to formally acknowledgecommunity engagement as a teaching, research and service priority of the college within Faculty Legislation and/or aseparate document from the Dean of Faculty. These proposals are scheduled to be considered in a comprehensive reviewof promotion and tenure policies by the Advisory Committee on Appointments, Reappointments and Promotion inSpring 2014.

In addition, institutional and/or departmental convenings which would involve campus leaders and faculty on such topicsas defining high quality community engagement, evaluating community-engaged scholarship and strategies for aligningcommunity engaged teaching and scholarship with curricular, departmental and institutional policies have been proposed.These proposals have met a receptive audience among key decision makers, including the Dean of Faculty’s observationthat Mount Holyoke “takes very seriously community engagement at both the point of hire and of tenure and promotion.”


1. Is community engagement noted on student transcripts?

Yes

Describe how community engagement is noted on student transcripts:

The embedding of community engagement within the curriculum primarily serves substantive learning and partnershipgoals, but also serves to intentionally ensure its inclusion on students’ transcripts. Each of the primary community-engaged academic experiences – CBL courses and Independent Studies, Fellowship and Internship associated classes, andNexus/Lynk experiences – are recorded on student transcripts. Mount Holyoke is also exploring a system of e-portfolios which will allow students to provide even greater detail abouttheir Mount Holyoke education and the role of community engagement within it.

Currently, there are two ways in which student transcripts thus reflect community engagement. First, community-basedlearning courses are designated as such by the Mount Holyoke course catalogue. There are, moreover, certain courses thatare increasingly part of Mount Holyoke students’ academic careers which are tied to substantial experiential learningopportunities such as the Community Fellows program and Lynk summer internships. These include the CUSP 202,Networking, Reflection and Meaning and CUSP 203, Integrating, Learning, Service and Social Action courses for Fellows,COLL 211, Tying it all Together: Curriculum to Career, required of all those who receive college funding for summerinternships.

Second, students are increasingly electing to integrate their community engagement within a “Nexus” – a minor-likeprogram with experiential learning at its core. Each Nexus requires a substantial practical experience, credit-bearing pre andpost experiences courses and related academic courses. The “Nexus” chosen by a student appears as a minor does onstudent transcripts.


2. Is community engagement connected with diversity and inclusion work (for students and faculty) on yourcampus?

Yes

Please provide examples:

Community Engagement at Mount Holyoke emphasizes respectful and collaborative relationships, across significantdifferences of race, socioeconomic status or other significant factors. Our most extensive work in the socio-economicallydiverse communities of Holyoke and Springfield, Massachusetts, makes integration of race and class identity educationessential for student growth and learning, and for sustainability and success in our partnerships. 79% of CBL Fellows saythat the community in which they are working is somewhat or very different from the community in which they grew up.More than a quarter of CBL courses offered in the 2013-4 academic year specifically meet Mount Holyoke’s MulticulturalPerspectives distribution requirement. CBL courses are frequently vehicles for students of color to seek avenues forinvolvement with off-campus affinity populations, and to engage in multicultural education alongside socio-economicallydiverse and extensively international peers.

Annually, the flagship community engagement internship program of CBL Program “Community Fellows” positions acohort of students in intensive social action leadership development that has at its core diversity and inclusion work on andoff campus. Nearly one-half of the 35-50 Community Fellows each year are first generation and students of color, makingthe program over-representative of such students compared with the Mount Holyoke student population. Mount Holyoke’sfocus on developing CBL Fellowships, funded academic year capacity-building positions at community-basedorganizations, and guaranteeing funded summer internships to each student, address key inclusion goals by makingcommunity involvement -- and the concurrent skill and leadership development -- accessible to students who wouldotherwise have to work for wages during the academic year and/or summer sessions.

Mount Holyoke is additionally the site of the very first “civic engagement posse,” as a partner with the Posse Scholarsprogram. The Posse Foundation identifies, recruits and supports cohorts of students from urban public high schools toattend selective colleges with the intention fostering the individual scholars’ achievement, and simultaneously helpingcolleges change campus cultures to be more welcoming of students from all backgrounds. Since 2010, Mount Holyoke haspartnered with the Posse Foundation to launch one of two civic engagement-focused “posses” nationally. Members of thecivic engagement Posse at Mount Holyoke are recruited from community organizations in Miami, Florida for leadershipand community engagement prior to college. During their Mount Holyoke career, they spend at least two summersparticipating in internships at community organizations in their home community. Each Posse cohort has had strongrepresentation in community engagement activities at Mount Holyoke, often seeking to build on their work in homecommunities through leadership, CBL and other civic engagement activities at Mount Holyoke. For example, one PosseScholar and CBL Fellow, for example, launched “Diversity Days” in collaboration with the South Hadley YouthCommission. Several others have led or participated in youth mentoring programs with Holyoke and Springfield middle-and high-school students, developed family and community supports for recent immigrants in Amherst and Springfield,and sparked community-engagement connections between Mount Holyoke cultural organizations (especially Latina,Asian, and African-American associations) and local community initiatives and programs.


3. Is community engagement connected to efforts aimed at student retention and success?

Yes

Please provide examples:

The Posse program described above is intentionally aimed not only at encouraging diversity in college admission andenrollment, but also at retaining and supporting first generation, low-income students of color to succeed and thrive.Community engagement provides leadership and skill building, and a shared group identity which foster persistence.Posse students are recognized as campus achievers even as many are simultaneously strong community-engaged leadersin the CBL Community Fellows program.

Connections between community engagement and retention and success efforts also extend to other portions of thestudent body. Approximately 80% of first year students at Mount Holyoke enroll in a first year seminar. Each student whoenrolls in a fall First Year Seminar co-enrolls in CUSP 101 Connections course, which seeks to increase studentpersistence and success. This course seeks to increase student engagement with campus programs and resources.Community-based learning program opportunities - including off-campus work-study, CBL courses, volunteeropportunities and “community fellowships” (academic-year internships) are introduced to Connections students (over 500of them), along with other experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad and campus employment, precisely asa student engagement and retention strategy. The Dean of Studies and Director of the First Year Seminar Program notesthat one of the goals is to help students see that community engagement and experiential education can be a core part ofthe Mount Holyoke experience.

Mount Holyoke works to establish engagement with the college that research shows is central to student persistence. Thisis a particular concern for spring admits who enter the college mid-year. In recent years the efforts to welcome thesestudents (between 50 and 80 annually) have intentionally incorporated community engagement. Students participate in acommunity learning program timed to coincide annually with the national Martin Luther King day (and the associatednational “day of service). A full weekend of orientation programming includes a panel about the Pioneer Valley region andabout local issues especially those relating to hunger and food security, a film addressing related themes, a day of service insupport of a local “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” South Hadley food pantry (in which students accompany South Hadleyresidents around town to retrieve canned/dried goods donations bagged on residents’ porches), small group discussions,and facilitated reflection sessions after the service. These efforts are designed to foster connections among the students,between students and college, and with the place in which they will be studying for four years.

26. II. Categories of Community Engagement

1.a. Does the institution have a definition, standard components, and a process for identifying service learningcourses?

Yes

Discuss how your institution defines service learning, the standard components for designation, and the processfor identifying service learning courses:

The Mount Holyoke College Bulletin and Course Catalogue defines Community-Based Learning as follows: CBL connectsacademic work and purposeful engagement with the world. It links students with communities through courses, term-timeinternships, independent studies, and research and service projects that combine learning and analysis with action andsocial change. Students learn about communities as they learn to apply ideas, theories, and models to social issues in apractical context, gaining insights from practitioners in communities and in community-based organizations. MountHolyoke’s CBL program fosters sustainable, mutually-beneficial campus-community relationships to support learning,research and service. CBL courses follow research- and practice-based principles of best practice in communityengagement. Along with enhancing students’ understanding of public concerns and the processes of social change, CBLaims to foster leadership, citizenship, and advocacy skills.

The Community-Based Learning Program (CBL) has developed and disseminated descriptions of three models ofcommunity based learning: Service-Learning, Project-Based CBL, and Community-Based Research. Each modelspecifies: teaching and learning modes; benefits for student learning and community partners; time and structures forstudent commitments; challenges and strategies; and concrete examples of Mount Holyoke courses with experiencedfaculty contact information to represent the three models. Faculty who adopt one of these models may request their coursebe designated as Community Based Learning. CBL is one of six official characteristics which can be used to distinguishcourses in Mount Holyoke’s course catalogue and registration system. These descriptors are included in course listings andare searchable allowing interested students to easily located community based learning courses.

CBL at Mount Holyoke is guided by principles of practice which define CBL as courses which offer an intellectually richexperience with strong connections between classroom and community experiences, which require critical analysis,reflection and synthesis of the diverse sources of knowledge and which involve the community partner in the planning,execution and assessment of a project which meets a community-identified need.

1.b. If you have a process for designating service learning courses, how many designated, for-credit servicelearning courses were offered in the most recent academic year?

27

What percentage of total courses offered at the institution?:

6%

1.c. How many departments are represented by those courses?

16

What percentage of total departments at the institution?

55.2%

1.d. How many faculty taught service learning courses in the most recent academic year?

25

What percentage of faculty at the institution?

11%

1.e. How many students participated in service learning courses in the most recent academic year?

463

What percentage of students at the institution?

21.2%

1.f. Describe how data provided in 1. b-e above are gathered, by whom, with what frequency, and to what end:

All CBL course data were gathered from the Mount Holyoke course registration system based on official CBL designations.Each course listing includes departmental and faculty affiliations, which were counted by CBL program staff. Studentenrollment is generated by the registrar for the CBL program’s internal and external reporting. The number of CBL coursesis reviewed each semester, the number of faculty, department and students, on an annual basis at the conclusion of eachacademic year. Total student and faculty data are based on the Common Data set compiled by the Office of InstitutionalResearch. Faculty is FTE equivalent (full time plus 1/3 full time, CDS I2); Student is total undergraduate enrollment (CDSB1). All data sources except for student course enrollment are publicly available through the college’s website. All data isbased on the 2013-14 academic year. This data is regularly collected for internal and external reporting and to document thegrowth of CBL courses.


2.a. Are there institutional (campus-wide) learning outcomes for students' curricular engagement withcommunity?

Yes

Please provide specific examples of institutional (campus-wide) learning outcomes for students’ curricularengagement with community:

The Learning Goals for the Mount Holyoke Curriculum encompass curricular engagement with the community as acomponent of a Mount Holyoke education. The framing statement to these goals begins “By combining the provenstrengths of a liberal arts education with the transformative power of experiental learning, the Mount Holyoke Collegeliberal arts experience provides the best foundation for citizenship and career in a global world.” The bulleted statementswhich follow include these additional, selected references:Develop skills in more than one language and engage with cultural communities other than their own.Conduct independent or collaborative research incorporating diverse perspectives and skill sets.Apply the liberal arts through experiential learning in work and community environments.Learn practices of self-assessment and reflection for academic, personal, and career growth.

As such, institutional learning outcomes for community engagement are incorporated within the outcomes for theoverarching curriculum. These include critical thinking abilities, communication skills, disciplinary and interdisciplinaryknowledge and research. The curricular goals also include such elements of good CBL practice as the last item above.

2.b. Are institutional (campus-wide) learning outcomes for students’ curricular engagement with communitysystematically assessed?

Yes

Describe the strategy and mechanism assuring systematic assessment of institutional (campus-wide) learningoutcomes for students’ curricular engagement with community:

Institutional surveys provide data about the extent to which students achieve these and other learning outcomes. TheEnrolled Student Survey addresses both disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning, leadership skills and multiple elementsof critical thinking. The Office of Institutional Research, which administers the survey has worked with the CBL program togather data specific to community engagement. Currently, institutional learning outcomes are primarily assessed within thecontext of individual courses and programs, by faculty and staff.

As described earlier in this document, however, plans are underway this year to develop departmental and programassessment strategies associated with “Lynk” efforts to deepen integration of experiential learning with disciplinary andinterdisciplinary curricula. The Lynk frames a set of intellectual experiences embedded in our curriculum. Four elements, oranchors, comprise the Lynk framework: goal setting, exploration and identification of relevant opportunities; professionaldevelopment through enhanced advising, site visits, alumnae mentoring and social networking; gaining practicalexperience including internships, field research, community-based learning, exposure to practitioners, and; the “launch” --presentation and persuasion, senior capstones, LEAP and Senior Symposia. This last stage represents reflection andintegration, involving the translation or articulation of academic and experiential linkages. Here are the evaluative questionsposed by the Dean of the Faculty in her summer 2013 letter that, together, comprise the institution-wide challenge toMount Holyoke Departments and Programs:

What are the core skills and knowledge delivered through your major/curriculum?

How do you assure that students are:

exposed to communities and opportunities beyond Mount Holyoke?

equipped to develop relevant questions and to conduct research in the field, individually and in collaboration?

at ease with diverse individuals and perspectives?

experienced in the application of intellectual skills acquired in the curriculum?

able to demonstrate the capacity for problem-solving, and continued new learning?

able to form judgments and demonstrate ethical judgment and integrity?

How does your curriculum intersect with other Lynk initiatives or activities?

Do you offer courses that contribute to a Nexus track or to community-based learning?

What opportunities exist for research or internships? And how do you capitalize on these to enhance student learning andengagement?

Who are your notable alumnae, and to what extent do you draw on their experience to enhance student learning andprofessional opportunities?

What would your department or program do to make these connections more visible?

Are there embedded practitioners connected with courses or classes in your department or program?

How might you benefit from the integration of an ePortfolio?

How do you assure that students are meeting the learning goals that you have identified in the major? And how are theMHC Learning Goals met by your curriculum?

How do you see these goals as relevant to post-graduation success?

Addressing these questions as departments, programs and an institution will provide the essential foundation forassessment of the “embedding” of experiential and community-engaged learning into the liberal arts curriculum. Asdescribed earlier, all 40 of Mount Holyoke’s departments and programs will be required to articulate responses to thesequestions by spring 2017.

2.c. If yes, describe how the assessment data related to institutional (campus-wide) learning outcomes forstudents’ curricular engagement with community are used?

The ambitious initiatives described above are still at formative stages. Learning outcomes data which has been mostintentionally utilized in the context of community engagement to date is the data gathered on CBL Fellows. Thisinformation informs partnership and program planning, in particular the training and support that is provided to studentsundertaking these roles. The Dean of the Faculty’s (and President’s) efforts at mobilizing departments and programsaround “The Lynk” are aimed at the goal describe above: to link institutional learning goals with explicit experiential learningand community engagement practices, opportunities, and programs that will become universal among Mount Holyokestudents within the next three years.


3.a. Are there departmental or disciplinary learning outcomes for students' curricular engagement withcommunity?

Yes

Provide specific examples of departmental or disciplinary learning outcomes for students’ curricular engagementwith community:

Again, the “Lynk” initiatives describe above will yield these shortly. Meanwhile, however, the Nexus Program, whichcenters experiential learning within interdisciplinary minor-like programs has established with multiple goals for curricularengagement with the community. Nexus programs of learning are directed and supervised by faculty from manydepartments, and in this way are major learning vehicles by which students are pursuing disciplinary learning goals.Outcomes sought by Nexus among students are for them to:

- Meaningfully link liberal arts education with career goals, by offering a focused, intentional means of connecting academicwork with valuable off-campus professional experience, and providing structured opportunities for students to synthesizeand critically analyze these experiences. - Promote local engagement and awareness of local issues through involvement in internship opportunities that integrateacademic coursework and experience. As a result, students will understand different organizations and their cultures, andhow to position themselves within these contexts. - Encourage students to make deep, interdisciplinary connections by combining rigorous co-curricular programs andacademic learning, resulting in a much deeper understanding of these issues and the processes available to them.

The Psychology and Education Department, which incorporates substantial community-based work into its curriculumhave identified the following as goals for community-based learning:- Enhance students’ understanding of issues of public concern and foster their leadership and advocacy skills- Encourage students to think creatively and discover the meaning and relevance of their work outside the classroom- Critically examine questions of significant public interest- Promote action for social change- Gain a deeper understanding of communities

3.b. Are departmental or disciplinary learning outcomes for students’ curricular engagement with communitysystematically assessed?

Yes

Describe the strategy and mechanism assuring systematic assessment of departmental or disciplinary learningoutcomes for students’ curricular engagement with community:

Within the Psychology and Education Department, student learning is assessed through journals, field notes anddiscussions integrated within the context of the course. For student teaching and practicum experiences, assessmentadditionally includes frequent communication by faculty and staff of the education department with community partnersthroughout the experience, and formal end-of-program written evaluations of student evaluations and the overallexperience.

Within the Gender Studies Program, a field-placement course serves as an applied learning lab for all graduating GenderStudies majors, who are required to spend 4-6 hours a week on-site in the community. Their experiential learning isdocumented in both project work and reflection journals, and their course-based discussions and assignments for thebasis for evaluation of student integration of both engaged contributions and academic learning through this capstonecourse. Within the Nexus program, learning is assessed through courses, in particular COLL 211, Tying it All Together:Curriculum to Career in which students develop a critical analysis of their internship experience and the organizationalsetting in which it occurred, identify the skills developed and reflect on broader goals. In addition, each student must publiclydemonstrate some element of their learning through the experience at the LEAP symposium.

3.c. If yes, describe how assessment data related to departmental or disciplinary learning outcomes for students’curricular engagement with community are used:

Nexus has been identified as a model for increasing integration of experiential and classroom education across thecampus, and its assessments are used to improve practice within the program, to identify successes. These practices theninform broader conversations about the role of experiential learning and the connections between curriculum and careers atMount Holyoke.

Within Psychology and Education Department courses, assessment information is used to facilitate conversations withlocal partners about the relationship. Key themes for these dialogues include: whether the goals were achieved; whether theexperience successful for both students and community partner; and whether modifications are necessary going forward.Assessment information is also used to assess student performance.

For education students participating in education field experiences assessments also inform departmental planning forcurricula and other preparation which may impact student performance in school-settings.


4.a. Is community engagement integrated into the following curricular (for credit) activities? Please select all thatapply:

Student ResearchStudent LeadershipInternships/Co-opsStudy Abroad

For each category checked above, provide examples:

Student research

Community engagement at Mount Holyoke features extensive student research through course-based and independentresearch projects. Course-based examples include Urban Politics and Community Development courses offered byPreston Smith, in which students partner with South Hadley and Holyoke residents, community organizations andbusinesses to examine economic development strategies and impacts. An Education course teamed students with a localK-8 school administrators, students and families to conduct action research regarding safety, arts integration and familyengagement strategies. Students have conducted significant credit-bearing independent research, for example, a meta-analysis of research on writing interventions critical to developing strong writers and readers in adult education classrooms,requested by a local literacy organization. Another example is an undergraduate honors thesis in Anthropology thatexamined community perceptions and public discourse concerning the city of Holyoke’s decision to locate a solid wastetransfer station in a low-income, Puerto Rican residential neighborhood.

Student leadership

Mount Holyoke students take and develop significant leadership roles within community engagement programming atMount Holyoke in the Weissman Center for Leadership’s CBL Program and public policy internship program. CBLMentors are experienced students who work with a specific CBL class to facilitate community partnership projects. CAUSE(the student-led, CBL Program-advised volunteer service organization) board members lead co-curricular student serviceand awareness-raising projects. Community Fellows work as capacity-builders with community partners in academicyear-long internships, serving as volunteer recruiters, peer mentors, project and event leaders, mentors, etc.. WeissmanCenter public policy internships place student leaders in policy analysis and support positions with municipal, state andnational leaders and organizations.

Internships

The most prominent current vehicle for internships that are integrated into the curriculum is the year-long CommunityFellows program of CBL, in which students are paid and required to take concurrent Fall and Spring “Curricular Support”courses (2 credits each). Mount Holyoke’s catalogue also enables students to pursue independent studies with a “P”designation, for practicum, in which students can pursue a credit-bearing academic practicum as an internship. Nexustracks provide mechanisms for integrating internships into a curricular plan that is intentional and sequenced in substantiveways. Mount Holyoke’s investments in the Lynk are expanding curriculum-integrated internships campus-wide andbuilding disciplinary and academic connections.

Study Abroad

The McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives, created to anchor and implement global education, includes the coordinationof study abroad. The McCulloch Center has identified eighteen programs that integrate experiential learning into studyabroad. Based on four continents, these include seminars on service and volunteerism in Buenos Aires, and a course inthe Dominican Republic that integrates internships at a local grassroots development agency with an academic explorationof development. A well-developed example is graduate level field study in South Africa. Designed to a provide acommunity-based research approach to understanding and evaluating progress made by social justice and human rightseducation initiatives, the program combines introduction to South Africa, course-work lead by academics and communityleaders from the host community, community-based placements in schools, community agencies and NGOs, and dailyreflection.

4.b. Has community engagement been integrated with curriculum on an institution-wide level in any of thefollowing structures? Please select all that apply:

Graduate StudiesCapstone (Senior level project)First Year SequenceIn the MajorsIn Minors


Graduate studies

Mount Holyoke is primarily an undergraduate liberal arts college. However, the college has recently established Master ofArts in Teaching program has incorporated extensive community partnerships that extends well beyond student-teacherplacements. Teachers from partnering schools teach methods classes, participate in the admissions process and guestlecture in seminars. The program is developing new partnership with two local districts will allow talented and locallyknowledgeable paraprofessionals to earn teaching credentials. First YearParticipants in First Year Seminar courses, co-enroll in CUSP 101, First Year Connections course, which explicitlyintroduces community engagement, and encourages students to plan intentionally for a Mount Holyoke career than braidsclassroom, career and community together.

Capstone

Two majors at Mount Holyoke currently require CBL course experiences as elements of capstone courses - EnvironmentalStudies and Gender Studies. Both involve a senior-level course that is a requirement for the major. Environmental Studiesstudents work with the CBL Program to develop and/or extend projects with community partners that range fromenvironmental education, to policy advocacy, to field data-gathering and analysis with community partners. Gender Studiesstudents embed themselves in non-profit community organizations for at least 4-6 hours per week and contribute to themissions of those organizations while engaging in field observation, reflection journals and discussions about genderissues.

General Education

Mount Holyoke does not have courses or requirements designated as general education; rather its curriculum is organizedby distribution requirements across 5 academic categories and physical education. CBL courses have been offered thatmeet each of the five academic distribution categories.

In the Majors

The Psychology-Education major, in addition to teaching practicum requirements, requires multiple foundational CBLcourses addressing educational psychology and social issues in schools. All Gender Studies majors undertake a field studyproject and course and a capstone designed to connect scholarship and social action.

Both the Gender Studies and Environmental Studies majors at Mount Holyoke have a required capstone integrative coursewhich are designated CBL courses. The Gender Studies capstone requires a 4-6 hour/week field placement with acommunity organization, while the Environmental Studies capstone encourages and facilitates individual and team projectpartnerships with several community organizations to conduct workshops and/or educational outreach, pursue researchquestions, develop curricula, gather field data, etc.

In the Minors

Nexus, interdisciplinary programs that in many ways mirror minors, allows students’ to intentionally link a liberal artseducation to career develop. Experiential education is a key component of this process; each Nexus must include a practicalexperience, bookended by required pre-experience and post-experience courses to foster reflection on the experience.Currently approved Nexus tracks include Non-Profit Organizations, Development Studies, and Education Policy andPractice. The recently-approved Latino/a Studies minor has a requirement of a CBL course, as does Africana Studies, EducationalStudies, and several others.


5. Are there examples of faculty scholarship associated with their curricular engagement achievements (researchstudies, conference presentations, pedagogy workshops, publications, etc.)?

Yes

Provide a minimum of five examples of faculty scholarship from as many different disciplines as possible:

Mount Holyoke’s community engagement has produced numerous examples of scholarship across multiple disciplines,including both engaged scholarship and the scholarship of engagement. A key example of this scholarship is the longstanding integration of partnerships with local adult literacy organizations, into both the undergraduate curriculum andresearch agenda by psychology professor, Kathy Binder. This scholarship has produced at least a half-dozen publishedarticles about literacy skills and acquisition in adults. Including recently “Reading expressively and understandingthoroughly: An examination of prosody in adults with low literacy skills” (Reading and Writing, 2013) "Reader Profiles forAdults with Low Literacy Skills: A Quest to Find Resilient Readers." (Journal of Research and Practice for Adult Literacy,Secondary, and Basic Education, 2012).

Professor of Psychology and Education, Becky Packard’s community collaborations related to mentoring and collegeaccess, which have included partnerships with Girls, Inc. of Holyoke and Bay State Health as well as campus-based workrelated to success of first-generation college students, have resulted in numerous examples of scholarship, most recently“Becoming Job-Ready: Collaborative Future Plans of Latina Adolescent Girls and Their Mothers in a Low-Income UrbanCommunity” (Journal of Adolescent Research, 2011). Becky Packard worked with a team of girls and moms in Girls, Inc.who wanted to craft their own stories (they presented this work in London at an international conference). Becky alsoworked with girls and her students on analyzing possible selves in community spaces.

Another form that scholarship based in community-partnerships at Mount Holyoke has taken is the result of a partnershipin which Mount Holyoke students in a CBL course teach philosophy to elementary children at a local public school throughchildren’s literature. The faculty member who developed the partnership, Tom Wartenberg, has published two books onphilosophy for children A Sneetch is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children'sLiterature (2013) and Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy through Children’s Literature (2009).


1. Indicate which outreach programs are developed for community. Please select all that apply:

learning centerstutoringextension programsnon-credit coursesprofessional development centersother (please specify): Science Outreach


learning centers

The Gorse Child Study Program offers two half-day preschool programs, and a half-day kindergarten program, open tocommunity residents and supported by the work of Mount Holyoke Students. In addition, the Gorse Children’s Centeroffers infant, toddler, preschool and school-age afterschool programs for local children.

tutoring

Mount Holyoke supports tutoring programs extensively with more than 150 students in course-based placements, paidoff-campus federal work-study and America Reads/America Counts placements, and volunteer placements annually.Tutors work in partnership with school- and community-based youth programs. Aligning and improving the outcomes inthese partnerships has been a major focus of both CBL and CAUSE programs for several years. These partnerships willreceive additional support beginning in 2014-15 year through a dedicated “Youth Partnerships Coordinator” staff position,which will build upon the work of Massachusetts Campus Compact AmeriCorps*VISTA positions placed at MountHolyoke for the last 8 years.

extension programs

Mount Holyoke College’s Professional and Graduate Education (PAGE) office, formerly known as Mount HolyokeExtension, connects interested students with graduate degree programs, a postbaccalaureate pre-medical program,professional development opportunities, and a range of credit courses.The Postbaccalaureate Pre-Medical Program has astrong record of serving aspiring doctors, nurses, dentists, physical therapists, and veterinarians. In addition, both theTESOL certificate program and the mathematics leadership programs serve novice, as well as experienced educators, whoseek to advance their careers. The mathematics leadership program is an innovative in-service teacher education programthat provides professional development opportunities for teachers, teacher leaders, and math coaches.

non-credit courses

Residents of Mount Holyoke’s home community, South Hadley, may audit courses across the breadth of the curriculum.For the vast majority of courses, such access is provided free of charge.

professional development centers

Mount Holyoke offers K-12 educators the Mathematics Leadership Program (MLP), which offers summer institutes,academic year courses, online courses for teachers and seminars on mathematics education for both teachers andadministrators. Numerous faculty members have conducted professional development internships and programs for localeducators. These projects include summer workshops on nanoscience and biomechanics for local teachers.

other (please specify

Mount Holyoke has made a commitment to share science knowledge with local communities, and to encourage morepeople, especially girls, to become involved in science. Activities include Science Cafés organized by Computer ScienceProfessor Kathy Aidala in conjunction with National Science Foundation funding. Held at restaurants and coffee shopsthroughout the region, practicing scientists present scientific topics in places and formats that are broadly accessible. Otherfaculty have welcomed local high school girls, adult learners, and teen mothers in their research laboratories, organizedworkshops for middle school students, and developed science exploration kits available for parents and children at the locallibrary. Our partnerships with South Hadley, Holyoke, Springfield and other schools have provided vehicles for this,including Biology Professor Rachel Fink’s “Science Buddies” program in which Mount Holyoke science majors supportteachers to deliver science units, and our Girls, Inc. of Holyoke partnership which has brought predominantly low-incomegirls to campus labs.


2. Which institutional resources are provided as outreach to the community? Please select all that apply:

co-curricular student servicework/study student placementscultural offeringsathletic offeringslibrary servicestechnology


co-curricular student service

CAUSE, Creating Awareness and Unity for Social Change, is Mount Holyoke’s principal vehicle for coordinating studentco-curricular service. One of the largest student organizations on campus, it connects the Mount Holyoke student bodywith community service opportunities through partnerships with community organizations, awareness raising events andvolunteer projects. It supports more than 15 community service projects ranging from after-school youth programs,through VITA tax programs, to supporting a local food pantry. Mount Holyoke also hosts chapters of Best Buddies, LoveAcross the Coast (a service organization focused on education for children in rural China) and Unite for Sight.

work-study placements

Mount Holyoke places 100-120 students in off-campus federal work-study positions in the region, primarily in Holyokeand South Hadley, with a dedicated budget of approximately $50,000. As of January 2014, these are now placed inpartnerships associated with the college’s CBL Program, reinforcing strategic collaborations and efforts to concentrateimpacts especially in America Reads/America Counts placements to achieve measurable school performance, attendanceand engagement outcomes. A “Youth Partnerships Coordinator” will oversee partnerships, placements, student trainingand supervision, and outcomes assessment starting in August 2014.

cultural offerings

Mount Holyoke offers an extensive calendar of cultural and educational events, nearly all of which are free and open to thepublic. Beginning in 2011, the CBL Program in cooperation with the Office of the President began creating periodic “emailblasts” to the college’s community partners, promoting upcoming cultural and academic events open to the public andfacilitating, where necessary, transportation and or reserved seats.

In addition, the college maintains several notable educational resources, including an art museum with a collection of morethan 16,000 objects. The art museum hosts more than 1000 school children annually, at no cost. In addition, the extensivegardens, historic green house and Skinner Museum, housing a diverse collection of cultural artifacts, are free and open tothe public.

athletic offerings

Mount Holyoke welcomes the general public to nearly all of its Division III sporting events. But beyond this, the College’sathletics department is extensively engaged in the Holyoke schools. Since 2008, a weekly program of team and club visitsto schools in Holyoke has brought college athletes to afterschool programs to teach about health, nutrition, sports andexercise,and leadership. Since 2013, several Physical Education courses have involved students as coaches and physicaleducation teachers in Holyoke schools as part of their course expectations.

library services

Mount Holyoke’s library serves as a community resource, providing access to space, technology and in-library resourcesto the surrounding community. Residents of Mount Holyoke’s home community, South Hadley, also receive borrowingprivileges.

technology

Mount Holyoke’s Department of Library and Information Technology Services routinely donates computing equipment andassociated technology to local public school systems as it rotates out materials on a 3-4 year replacement cycle.


3. Describe representative examples of partnerships (both institutional and departmental) that were in placeduring the most recent academic year (maximum=15 partnerships). Please follow these steps:

Download the Partnership Grid template (Excel file) and save it to your computer;Provide descriptions of each partnership in the template; and then,Upload the completed template here.

MHC 2015_Partnership_Grid FINAL.xlsx


4.a. Do the institution or departments promote attention to the mutuality and reciprocity of the partnerships?

Yes

http://nerche.org/images/stories/projects/Carnegie/2015/2015_Partnership_Grid.xls

http://surveygizmoresponseuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/fileuploads/51277/1183353/35-ff9f059924336ce78f44336deae0f9cd_MHC+2015_Partnership_Grid+FINAL.xlsx

Describe the strategies for promoting attention to the mutuality and reciprocity of the partnerships:

Reciprocity and mutuality of partnerships is an explicit goal for all of the Mount Holyoke staff and faculty involved incommunity engagement work. The CBL Program emphasizes reciprocity, mutuality and good partnerships practicethrough both its own Principles of Practice and the Holyoke Campus-Community Compact. The Compact was developedby community partners and representatives of area colleges, including Mount Holyoke during a year-long process offorums and dialogues designed to explore both the challenges and best practices in college-community partnerships. Theresulting Compact identifies five key principles -- reciprocity, shared decision making, clear goals, adequate preparation andsupervision, and capacity building among community partners -- and practices which advance them. CBL principles ofpractice build on the Compact, providing particular guidance for community engaged faculty including reading experience astext, returning knowledge to the community, reflection and community-identified needs.

Perhaps most significantly, the CBL Program’s principles of practice are extensively employed and referenced by facultyacross the academic curriculum, staff in other programs on campus, and the college’s administration. There is asubstantial, operationalized commitment to reciprocity and sustainability in community engagement work at MountHolyoke.

This commitment is evident in diverse partnerships, which strive through programming developed specifically for thispurpose, to provide consistent support to partners across semesters and mitigate the effects of the academic calendar, tobalance voices and authority in CBL courses, and to support the development of staff and organizational capacity atpartnering organizations. Examples of high quality practices from Mount Holyoke partnerships include:

- Devoting research grant funds to staff community partnerships with local adult literacy organizations to ensureconsistency of student participation across multiple semesters, and coordination and communication with partners. - Incorporating community partners as co-instructors who provide both methodological and community knowledge.- Cultivating opportunities for staff at partnering schools to gain professional development, leadership, and financialsupport through their work with Mount Holyoke programs. - Sharing research materials, methods, and partnership project outputs (products, papers, electronic documents) withpartners directly and made available in perpetuity via a specially-developed on-line “CBL Digital Archive.”

4.b. Are there mechanisms to systematically collect and share feedback and assessment findings regardingpartnerships, reciprocity and mutual benefit, both from community partners to the institution and from theinstitution to the community?

Yes

If yes, describe the mechanisms and how the data have been used to improve reciprocity and mutual benefit:

The priority Mount Holyoke places on relational and conversational assessment of community partnerships facilitates atight feedback loop. Two-way conversations and multi-year relationships allow for a two-way exchange of information.Feedback about partnerships, reciprocity and mutual benefit guide Mount Holyoke’s community engagement in ways largeand small.

At the most macro level, Mount Holyoke’s partnership efforts are guided by the Holyoke Campus Community Compact,the result of deep and extensive conversations between community partners in Holyoke, and representatives of MountHolyoke and neighboring colleges. This dialogue process identified key principals of good practice and partnership whichcontinue to guide community engagement at Mount Holyoke.

End of semester evaluations of Fellowships collect direct feedback on students, the process of hosting fellows, and thesuccess of student capacity building projects. These serve as the basis of dialogues about partnership, reciprocity, thebenefits for each partner, and necessary adjustments.


5. Are there examples of faculty scholarship associated with their outreach and partnerships activities (technicalreports, curriculum, research reports, policy reports, publications, etc.)?

Yes

Provide a minimum of five examples of faculty scholarship from as many different disciplines as possible:

Most of Mount Holyoke’s partnerships incorporate multiple modes of collaboration, rooted in the undergraduatecurriculum, they also foster faculty scholarship. Examples of this scholarship which sets the partnership and process asthe focus include:

Spanish professor, Rogelio Miñana, has published and offered a conference presentation at the Modern LanguageAssociation (2014) examining the role of Spanish and other language departments, and arguing for communityengagement in linguistic communities as a key feature of that future development.

Partnerships between Mount Holyoke, neighboring institutions of higher education, and the nearby community of Holyokewere the focus of a book chapter co-authored by political science faculty member, and previous CBL director, Preston H.Smith II. The analysis of the "Holyoke Planning Network" laid the groundwork for metropolitan collaboration in Holyokeamong multiple CBL and service offices at multiple colleges and universities. His recent (2014) article argued for anapproach to teaching American politics that would nurture “democratic values, such as civic engagement, public service,and social solidarity, at liberal arts colleges.”

Becky Packard’s work with Baystate Health on their after-school and career-technical high school programs resulted infederal grants and publications, and for the partners, built a deeper understanding of the motivations and challenges facingstudents in their programs. She has additionally published, presented at national gatherings on community-college transfersuccess, building upon her lead authorship of “Navigating Community College Transfer in Science, Technical,Engineering, and Mathematics Fields” in the 2012 Community College Journal of Research and Practice.

The Philosophy for Children partnership, lead by Tom Wartenberg, has produced extensive web-accessible curriculaextending and exploring the model. These include more than 100 book modules, three sample course sequences, andvideo and web-based materials for both parents and educators engaging children in philosophical exploration.

Alan Bloomgarden's contributions in the field of education include a 2005 research report for Holyoke's "Avanza -Partnership for Latino Education" collaboration between the Office of the Mayor, the Holyoke Public Schools, HolyokeCommunity College, and two dozen community-based organization, identifying avenues for campus-communitycollaboration with the nearby Five College Consortium in western Massachusetts. In 2012, he was the lead author of therecommendations for higher education as a Governor's appointee to the Massachusetts Special Commission on CivicEngagement and Learning, entitled "Renewing the Social Compact."

36. III. Wrap-Up

1. (Optional) Use this space to elaborate on any short-answer item(s) for which you need more space. Pleasespecify the corresponding section and item number(s).

This material expands upon the responses in section 4, items a and b.

The Enrolled Student Survey, which is generally administered every odd year by the Office of Institutional Research,broadly surveys Mount Holyoke students’ engagement, participation and satisfaction. In 2013 the Enrolled Student Surveywas sent to all 1st years, sophomores and juniors who were not on leave/abroad and half of seniors who were not onleave or abroad, with an overall response rate of 63%.

Notably, community engagement is embedded within this survey allowing for campus-wide assessment. The Office ofInstitutional Research has worked with the CBL program to collect assessment data regarding outcomes for students whohave participated in CBL courses, volunteer work and/or internships. Additional impact assessments are provided by the 6-Month Out survey, also conducted by the Office of Institutional Research, which recently added specific questions to assessthe influence of various forms of community engagement on career and other outcomes.

More nuanced assessments are done on a program-by-program basis addressing the specific community and campusgoals. Fellows learning impacts and outcomes are themselves assessed in two places. First, through a pre- and post-survey which examines changes in skills (including assessing community assets, planning a social action project andleadership) self-efficacy, content knowledge (including the roles of non-profits, asset based community development, andcollege-community partnership) and attitudes towards civic engagement. And second, through written assignments andclass participation by Community Fellows in the two required CUSP 202 (Fall) and 203 (Spring) tied to every Fellows’employment with the CBL Program.

Engagement with local schools by the Education Department is assessed through multiple tools including writtenevaluations of student work; a survey of partnering school staff; and focus groups with school partners to review theprogram as a whole. In addition, students and partnerships are constantly evaluated through ongoing conversations.

Internships by Mount Holyoke students are currently assessed through an evaluation by the hosting organization andreflective writing by funded students. With the expansion of Lynk funding, Mount Holyoke will be developing a multifacetedassessment program. Both qualitative and quantitative measures are being developed to assess student communicationabilities, confidence, increased understanding of how academic learning can be applied, among other outcomes.

37. III. Wrap-Up

2. (Optional) Is there any information that was not requested that you consider significant evidence of yourinstitution's community engagement? If so, please provide the information in this space.

The roles played by and impacts of key community-engaged staff in consortial, collaborative community development andeducational improvement initiatives do not necessarily have an obvious location within this framework. Investment of timeand energy to leading or even just participating in collaborative initiatives can be significant, and our current strategies andtools for measuring the "payoff" of such work are weak. Whether we are discussing "process" payoffs (better alignment,improved communication, stronger relationships) or "outcomes" payoffs (accomplishments institutions and organizationscan achieve together which they could not achieve acting independently), coalition work is increasingly essential and yetunderrepresented and its investment costs are unseen or undervalued in the field more generally.

Here are three examples of collaborative investments made by Mount Holyoke staff and faculty we consider to beimportant representations of community engagement:

- leadership in Holyoke's "Full Service Community Schools" and "Full Service Community District" initiatives: staff atMount Holyoke including most prominently the Education Dept.'s Sarah Frenette and Lenore Reilly, and CBL's AlanBloomgarden, have played significant leadership roles as conveners, facilitators, researchers and contributors to coalitionsamong school and community organization personnel in the areas of, respectively, instructional improvement, familyengagement, behavioral management, and college/career access. All of these individuals have committed professionalskills, students, courses, college academic and financial resources, and labor to building shared vision, goals and practicesto align multi- institutional resources with Holyoke public school objectives.

- investments in cross-institutional collaboration in higher education: staff and faculty across departments and programsincluding CBL, Africana Studies, Education, Spanish, and others have devoted substantial efforts to linking with both FiveCollege institution colleagues and resources at more than eight other nearby higher education institutions toward thespecific end of facilitating productive, community-centered responses to community needs. Examples include thedevelopment of the Holyoke Bound bi-annual training for students; a Five College shared afterschool bus to transportvolunteers, CBL course students, and work-study tutors to school- and community-based tutoring programs and otheryouth-serving organizations in Holyoke; efforts by Five College African Studies Council members, sparked and led byMHC faculty participant Professor Holly Hanson and Director of Community Engagement Alan Bloomgarden, tocoordinate student and faculty support and spark Springfield-area network development to expand literacy and citizenshipeducation for western Massachusetts refugees and immigrants.

Reciprocally, the place and value of active participation and sustained presence in such community initiatives to theinstitution are similarly underrepresented. Mount Holyoke has a healthy campus commitment to placing "communitypresence" as a valued professional responsibility among staff (including President's Office personnel such as Director ofGovernment and Community Relations Kevin McCaffrey and Senior Advisor to the President Lenore Reilly) and faculty.The most obvious and tangible benefits from this are the opportunities for additional engaged partnerships, internships,etc. that come from being in the right rooms and meetings. But less obvious are the contributions to the local reputation ofthe institution that come from collective, sustained presence and access.

38. III. Wrap-Up

3. (Optional) Please provide any suggestions or comments you may have on the application process for the 2015Elective Community Engagement Classification.

With regard to the partnerships grid: asking the campus applicants to complete the section on Community Impact is insome ways problematic. It is also understandable that it may not be ideal to solicit community partners for contributions toa fundamentally campus-benefitting application. However, it seems that there could be ways to request or require directinput from community partners about impacts, perceptions, outcomes that could yield both more candor and validity to thequestions of what impacts come from community engagement work.

39. Request for Permission

Please respond to A or B below:

Yes No

A. I consent to having the information provided in the application for the purposes of research. In providingthis consent, the identity of my campus will not be disclosed.

B. I consent to having the information provided in the application for the purposes of research. In providingthis consent, I also agree that the identity of my campus may be revealed.

X

Partnership

Name

Community Partner Institutional

Partner

Purpose Length of

Partnershi

p

Number

of faculty

Number

of

students

Grant funding Institution Impact Community Impact

1 CHOICES CHOICES Afterschool Program,

Holyoke, MA

CBL, CAUSE, Off-

Campus Work-

Study (OCWS),

Athletics, Dance,

Psychology,

Education

CHOICES is a middle school afterschool

program sponsored by Holyoke Community

College, and staffed by Holyoke teens, UMass

Amherst student volunteers and Mount Holyoke

volunteers and work-study students. CHOICES

combines academic enrichment and support

activities with structured homework support.

Partnership goals include increasing academic

success, student engagement and retention, and

the program takes a holistic approach to youth

development including healthy choices,

empowerment and self-confidence.

Since 2009 5 43 A 2012-13 $7,000 grant

from the Women's Fund of

Western Massachusetts

supported an 8th-9th grade

girls mentoring program

designed to bolster retention

of teens at risk, lower

pregnancy and raise

graduation rates. This

program built upon a 2008-

11 Massachusetts state

"Commonwealth Corps"

grant from the

Massachusetts Service

Alliance (total of

approximately $100,000) of

middle-school mentoring by

Mount Holyoke, UMass

Amherst and Holyoke

Community College

students

MHC students in the Choices partnership gain leadership

experience, and opportunity to develop a project that applies

an area of their interest through independent projects. In

addition they gainr communication skills and knowledge of

youth development. The largest institutional impact at Mount

Holyoke stems from the strong relationship built under the

Commonwealth Corps grant partnership between Peck School

administrators, Holyoke Community College employees who

run CHOICES, and UMass Amherst's "Student Bridges" staff

and student volunteers. We share practices in student

preparation, relationship management, assessment; we

collaborate in delivering college access "fairs" and events

through the bi-annual "Hip Hop Revolution" event, and we

coordinate our calendar of college access events including

campus visits.

MHC students have provided afterschool tutors and mentors in

Choices programs. In AY 12-13, a girls mentoring program

worked to encourage school persistence, college acces sand

widen the scope of possibility perceived by middle school girls.

In 2011-13 MHC student leaders created and implemented

programs incorporating youth empowerment, fitness, nutrition

and healthy choices, and afterschool dance education and

performance.

2 Connections CONNECTIONS After School

Program, Holyoke, MA

CBL, CAUSE,

Psychology,

Education, OCWS,

Athletics

CONNECTIONS is the district-wide, 21st

Century Grant-funded afterschool program

serving schools in Holyoke. Mount Holyoke

students support students in grades 2-5 and 9-12

with homework support and academic

enrichment clubs, including gardening, dance,

robotics, athletics, nutrition, and poetry. MHC

partnerships strive to increase academic

achievement, and provide positive mentor and

role models

Since 2007 5 49 Our Connections

partnership has been the

beneficiary of several years

of "Summer

AmeriCorps*VISTA" funding

support from

Massachusetts Campus

Compact through Mount

Holyoke to support

research, evaluation, and

program development

Participating students gain project and/or curriculum

development skills, tutoring/mentoring experience, and

organizing and leadership skills. Institutionally, Mount Holyoke

built

MHC students have provided tutoring, built capacity within the

tutoring program to manage college student volunteers, and

lead enrichment activies include arts and empowerment and

drama-based clubs.

3 GTC Gardening the Community,

Springfield, MA

Community Based

Learning, Miller

Worley Center for

the Environment,

Department of

Environmental

Studies

Gardening the Community, and it's MHC

partnership, strive to supoprt food justice in

Mason Square neighborhood of Springfield,

fosture youth leadership and build equitable

communities

Since 2006 1 3 MHC students have gained knowledge, skills and experience

with urban agriculture, community outreach and youth

leadership development. GTC has provided students with

among the most sophisticated and in-depth experiences with

anti-racism work, as they build in professional development

and "undoing racism" workshops for students, staff and

volunteers that transforms urban agriculture and youth

development work into significant social justice work.

GTC has gained support for its gardening and farmers' markets

programs and young leaders to work with its' youth. They have

also connected through Mount Holyoke to other urban

agriculture, food security and food justice, and youth

development programs through the Pioneer Valley region.

4 Girls, Inc. Girls, Inc. , Holyoke, MA CBL, CAUSE, Dept.

of Biological

Sciences

Girls, Inc. works at empowering young girls ages

six to eighteen to be successful, through after-

school programs that encourage healthy minds

and bodies. MHC partnership goals include

tutoring and mentoring suport, and increasing

the number of girls who pursue college.

Since 2000 1 12 Students learn about youth development, mentoring and the

opportunities and challenges faced by local communities.

Mount Holyoke aligns its mission as a women-serving

institution with the mission of Girls, Inc. to help girls become

"strong, smart and bold," though ongoing college access and

academic support mentoring.

MHC partnerships provide not only tutors, but role models of

college-going women and women undertaking leadership

projects that provide powerful examples to Girls, Inc. program

participants. Girls, Inc. strengthens its local and national case

for specialized resources supporting the development and

growth of women and girls by aligning its activities and aims

with a women's institution.5 Holyoke Public

Schools

Partnerships

Holyoke Public Schools "Full

Service Community District"

initiative, in particular Peck Full

Service Community School

Community Based

Learning,

Education

Department,

Athletics Programs

MHC has been a long time partner with mutltiple

schools in the neighboring community of

Holyoke. It has been a partner in the multi-year

project to develop Peck as a full-service

community school and has worked with efforts to

extend the full-service community school model

to other schools. Academic acheivement, and

increasing college access have been key goals

for this partnership.

Since 2008 6 (embedded

in other

afterschool

program

partnerships

represented

here)

Past: Several

Massachusetts Campus

Compact

AmeriCorps*VISTA

placements from Mount

Holyoke have had Holyoke

School placements as a

significant part of their

responsibilities; CBL/Mount

Holyoke sponsored a 2011-

12 Massachusetts Promise

Fellow at the Peck School

The partnership offers multiple opportunities for MHC students

as tutors/mentors, project researchers, and family outreach

assistants. Institutional impacts include increased alignment

between practices of preparing teachers, tutors and mentors,

between that preparation and urgent school performance

priorities, and involvement in/knowledge of schools,

educational policy and social issues and leadership especially

in Holyoke, MA.

Mount Holyoke has been a strategic partner, district-wide but

also in particular to the Peck Full Service Community School, in

helping to engage families; and increase out of school time

support for Holyoke youth. Examples include leadership

programming lead by MHC students, athletics programs and

extensive tutoring and mentoring. Mount Holyoke staff and

faculty have provided valuable leadership to collaborative

initiatives involving multiple higher education and non-profit

organization community partners in aligning coalition and

organizational goals and practices with schools priorities.

6 Philosophy for

Children

(Department of

Philosophy)

Martin Luther King, Jr. Charter

School of Excellence,

Springfield, MA

CBL Course in

Philosophy Dept.

MLK School seeks to prepare K-5 students for

academic success and engaged citizenship,

inspired by the example of Dr. King. The MHC-

MLK partnership seeks to engage students in

critical thinking, speaking and reading through

philosophy.

Since 2006 1 16 MHC students who participate show high levels of academic

engagement, develop interpersonal and team skills, and a

deep understanding of the philosophical course materials, and

of education.

MHC has partnered with MLK since it's second year to offer

philosophy for children. Impacts on the children include multiple

oral literacy skills, discussion process and critical thinking that

meet Common Core standards.

7 Town of South

Hadley

Government

South Hadley Conservation

Commission, South Hadley

Master Plan Implementation

Committee, Town Administrator

for South Hadley

CBL Program,

Departments of

Environmental

Studies, Biological

Sciences,

Anthropology, and

Sociology

The collaboration with the Conservation

Commission is designed to identify and preserve

key wetlands and restore a wetlands habitat

which occupies both campus and community

land involving students and community members

as joint researchers, habitat restorers, and

educators. Collaboration with the Master Plan

Implementation Committee and office of the

Town Administrator is to support qualitative and

quantitative research and outreach concerning

quality of life impacts of the August 2010 South

Hadley Master Plan.

Since 2013 5 35 A $250,000 gift to the

college is supporting the

wetlands restoration and

education project beginning

in 2014.

MHC students are gaining substantial experience and

knowledge of ecological planning, and restoration design.

Students also build skills at environmental curriculum

development, communications about science, and

presentation skills (leading public tours). Mount Holyoke

benefits from opening the campus to the public and engaging

the community in both active restoration and education.

Faculty and students in social science disciplines are being

engaged in applied research through community-engaged

methods training, and new faculty in all four departments are

entering tenure-track careers with substantial community-

engaged research and teaching practices.

To date, MHC partnership has conducted preliminary

assessment and research to undertake a restoration project,

their recommendations and designs have been approved and

endorsed by both town agencies and town meeting. Resulting

initiatives will both restore a damaged wetland, increasing the

ecological health of the surrounding area, and provide

education, outreach and engagement opportunities to residents,

schools and youth to participate in service learning activities

contributing to environmental reclamation. Master Plan

implementers and town residents are gaining systematically

gathered data about the efficacy and impacts of extensive town

planning initiatives on conditions and trends in town, guiding

future planning and resource allocation.8 South Hadley

Schools

Partnerships

South Hadley Schools and The

Discovery Center of

CBL Program,

Education

Department, Office

of the President,

Department of

Biological Sciences

Mount Holyoke partners with the elementary,

middle and high schools in its home community

of South Hadley, MA through tutoring and

mentoring, educational events and other

partnerships. Goals include increasing reading

and math achievement, and improving the

school climate, including a anti-bullying

mentorship program. The "Science Buddies"

program also supports K12 science education.

Since 2010 5 15 Students gain a greater understanding of the community in

which their college experience is based, they gain significant

leadership, planning and educational skills through significant

student leadership and curriculum development projects and

tutoring experiences.

MHC partnerships have bolstered resources and opportunities

including family literacy events, science programming, peer

mentorship to address bullying and school climate concerns,

founding a writing center at the high school and increasing

intercultural competence through diversity programming.

II.B.3. Using the following grid, describe representative partnerships (both institutional and departmental) that

were in place during the most recent academic year (maximum 15 partnerships).

Name of Institution: Mount Holyoke College

9 Renaissance

School

The Renaissance School,

Springfield, MA

CBL Program, CBL

Courses in History

Dept, MA Teaching

Program

Renaissance is a a public magnet school (6-12)

in a underresourced urban system. It has an

Expeditionary Learning curriculum and a focus

on success in college and beyond. Partnerships

are designed to foster college access and to

educate MHC students about expeditionary

learning and inequality.

Since 2006 1 25 Undergraduate students in a CBL course on the history of

inequality experience a school that is sucessfully addressing

structural inequality and see the local application of their

studies

Parterning with MHC, to bring Mt. Holyoke students to

Renaissance and Renaissance students to MHC, makes

college tangible, raises knowledge, aspirations and exposure to

college and its' associated opportunities for Renaissance

students. 100% college admission among the 2010-2013

graduating classes.

10 Community

Narratives (Dept.

of Spanish,

Latina/o, and Latin

American Studies)

WGBY (PBS Affiliate)

Springfield MA:

CBL Program, CBL

Courses in Spanish

Dept.

Telling Our Legacies Digitally (TOLD) and the

Latino Youth Media Institute (LYMI) are

community engagement programs at local public

TV station WGBY which engages

underrepresented communities as media

creators and increases media representation of

local community perspectives.

Since 2009 1 11 WGBY staff serve as co-instructors in a CBL course. From this

and student projects in the community they gain technical and

media production skills, increase understanding of community

issues, and increase Spanish speaking/listening skills in a real

world context.

Partnerships have helped produce community media

addressing local issues, including community perspectives on

school drop out rates, health and other community issues which

feature the voices and perspectives of community members.

11 Immigrants and

Refugee Family

Tutoring/Mentoring

Program

Springfield YMCA, Jewish

Family Services, East African

Cultural Center

CBL Program,

Dept. of History,

Africana Studies

Program

To meet significant gaps in support services for

resettled refugees and immigrants in the

Springfield, MA area by providing english

language learning and basic citizenship

education support. Focus is primarily upon

women and families for whom services are

sparse, and upon east African refugees (from

Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan) but

participants include Iraqis and others)

Since 2012 2 43 Mount Holyoke and Five College consortium partners in the

regional "African Studies Council" are finding invaluable the

opportunities to develop mutual learning communities with

diasporic African populations for scholarly and teaching

purposes. Student involvement is enabling new forms of

"global engagement" in curricular and co-curricular learning.

We are providing needed support to dramatically underfunded

and undersupported local, national and global resettlement

processes, programs and agencies. Even more importantly, by

working toward mutual learning practices in this partnership, we

are working to change the local political dynamics and

discourse from negative complaints about the stresses

resettlements are placing on already overburdened social

services, to acknowledgement and celebration of the cultural

wealth and positive economic impacts of increasingly diverse

and contributory immigrant communities.12 Crocker Farm The Crocker Farm School in

Amherst, MA

CBL Program in

partnership with La

Unidad Latina

Cultural

Organization

Family engagement and empowerment among

immigrant Latino and Puerto Rican families at

the Crocker Farm Elementary School in Amherst

Since 2012 0 30 Building sustainable community engagement among members

of La Unidad, Mount Holyoke's Latina student organization is

creating a model for group community engagement that is

sustainable and reciprocal, and ideally replicable by other

campus cultural organizations (including especially the strong

and well-organized Asian, African American, and South Asian

cultural organizations which have, to date, engaged only

sporadically and short-term with community partners).

Assisting school administrators to conduct bilingual outreach,

engagement and cultural celebratory activities that bring "under

the radar" families into the schools to benefit community-

building, student achievement, and parental involvement.

13 Homework House Homework House CBL, CAUSE,

Psychology,

Education, OCWS

Homework House is a rigorously structured

afterschool tutoring and academic support

program for low-income youth that provides both

a safe space for children between 3 and 6pm

daily, college student tutoring and mentoring

aimed to improve academic outcomes, student

learning and engagement, and social

development in a predominantly english

language learning, non-college educated and

highly transient community.

Since 2007 5 54 Homework House placements are providing large numbers of

course-based and work-study tutors with important

opportunities for understanding the intersecting relationships

between poverty, education, college and career access, family

engagement, and campus-community collaboration.

Furthermore, by working closely with Homework House,

Connections, Choices and other partners to the Holyoke Public

Schools to align training, tutoring, and assessment practices,

we are moving from a "placement" or "traffic "model for

community partnership toward an impact and outcomes model

that demonstrably (and positively) affects learning, social, and

performance outcomes for K12 students and families in

Holyoke.

Mount Holyoke students, staff and faculty are assisting

Homework House to align the out-of-school-time (OOST)

tutoring that happens at their sites with school literacy,

achievement and engagement measures. We are also assisting

Homework House to develop outcomes-oriented assessment

techniques and strategies.

14 South Hadley

Food Pantry

Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Food Pantry

CBL, Office of the

Dean of the College

Student Orientation

Mount Holyoke College has now tied the

orientation program for incoming spring-admitted

students to education and service about food

insecurity in our backyard, while committing to

annual support for food pantry outreach to

educate residents about hunger, solicit food and

monetary donations, and then gather, organize

and store the food donations in a single day's

work of community and campus volunteerism on

Martin Luther King Day each January.

Since 2012 0 82 A 2013-14 grant of $4,500

from the Massachusetts

Service Alliance funded the

creation of a short film

about the food pantry for

fundraising and

communications, as well as

materials to sustain the

annual food drive.

Incoming spring admitted students to Mount Holyoke -

annually between 50-80 each year - are now consistently

involved in a Martin Luther King Day of Service food drive

collaboration with South Hadley residents, around which we

organize panel discussions and film showings about food

insecurity, hunger in America and the region, and then

reflection sessions that help new students chart avenues for

continued involvement during their Mount Holyoke education.

Mount Holyoke's status as a community-engaged partner in

South Hadley has been dramatically improved with the 150+

community volunteers seeing and serving alongside incoming

students.

The Food Pantry can now count on a substantial crew of

volunteers to gather, sort and store the 10-15,000 pounds of

food donations it counts on to stock the shelves needed to feed

150-200 families per month throughout the year. Mount Holyoke

students, and as an institution, are viewed as partners in

addressing urgent needs of low-income residents in a sustained

fashion.

15 Adult Basic

Education

Volunteer Tutor

Program

The Valley Opportunity Council,

Read/Write/Now, Holyoke

Community College Adult

Learning Center, Western

Massachusetts Women's

Regional Correctional Facility,

Springfield Housing Authority.

Department of

Psychology and

Education, CBL

To support adult basic education, GED support,

English language learning

Since 2005 2 52 Kathy Binder's funding from

the National Institutes of

Health and other sources

have supported both staff

supervision and placements

of students at 5-7 area adult

basic education

organizations that have

combined research and

service to adult learners.

Mount Holyoke now commits approximately 50 students

annually to area adult education initiatives in Holyoke,

Chicopee, and Springfield that support rich student learning

about both challenges and solutions to issues of literacy and

citizenship among marginalized low-income adults. Visits to

campus by adult learner groups and the collective experiences

of student tutors and their faculty/staff supervisors have also

raised the profile of lifelong learning among Mount Holyoke

students who, as a consequence, complicate their ideas about

"who is a student?" and develop more sophisticated analyses

of the obstacles and barriers to success in school settings.

Mount Holyoke's work across otherwise isolated adult learning

programs has facilitated network development and resource-

sharing among partner organizations in a fragmented and under-

resourced field. Adult learners in programs gain access to

mentoring and practical advice from current college students

about future educational opportunities, while teaching

undergraduate tutors a great deal about life in ways that

reinforce and build their self-esteem and self-conception as

having valuable knowledge. Visits to campus for adult learners

that include celebrations of adult literacy provide participants

with valuable public presentation and confidence-building

opportunities as well as opportunities for visualizing

continuation of formal learning.

Documents

applicants) Community Engagement Classification …€œThe Lynk,” a systematic approach to linking liberal education with career preparation. The Lynk includes a guaranteed summer