Working Together
The tools do a lot. But tools don't ask the harder questions: what does community-engaged research mean at your institution? Who defines it? How does your P&T process account for it? What would a strategic plan built around it actually look like?
That work happens in rooms with people. We do it together.
The challenges institutions face around community-engaged scholarship don't arrive as isolated problems. They arrive together, and they compound. Faculty don't know what counts for P&T because the institution hasn't defined it. Strategic plans bypass operational grounding because the terrain hasn't been mapped. Community partners grow skeptical because institutional commitment stays rhetorical.
Our work together follows the logic of the problem. We start upstream — building shared meaning — and move toward implementation, tool use, and sustained institutional change. You can enter at any point. But the progression matters.
You cannot chart a purposeful course for community-engaged research without first agreeing on what it means in your context.
This workshop guides participants through a structured three-step mapping process to collaboratively develop a working definition of community-engaged research. It draws on sensemaking tools — including Apiary, our open hexagonal canvas — to make meaning-making visible and negotiable before decisions are locked in.
Participants engage interactive mapping tools and leave with a replicable process and access to an online toolkit for continuing the work at their home institutions.
Institutions cannot chart a purposeful course for community-engaged research without agreeing on what it means in their context.
- A collaboratively developed working definition of community-engaged research, grounded in your institutional context
- A replicable three-step mapping process your team can use independently
- Access to an online toolkit for continuing the work
- Clarity about where agreement exists, and where productive disagreement remains
Format: Half-day or full-day workshop. Adaptable for department teams, faculty senates, community engagement offices, or cross-institutional convenings.
CEnTR*IMPACT gives you the components. Implementation is about calibrating them to reflect what your institution actually values.
This engagement helps institutions move from understanding what CEnTR*IMPACT measures to actually using it: for faculty evaluation, accreditation evidence, grant reporting, and community accountability.
We work with your team to configure the framework to your context, pilot it with a cohort of faculty, and identify where the existing system needs to adapt to recognize the full range of engaged scholarship your institution produces.
- A locally calibrated SCE weight structure with documented rationale
- Pilot evaluation data from a faculty cohort
- P&T policy language that can accommodate engaged scholarship
- A roadmap for institutional adoption at scale
Format: Multi-session engagement over one semester. Can be scoped as a pilot with a small faculty cohort or a broader institutional initiative.
Most strategic plans for community engagement describe aspirations. Fewer describe the operational infrastructure needed to realize them.
This engagement begins with a landscape assessment: using CEnTR*SEEK and CEnTR*MAP to understand the current state of engagement across your institution. That picture then becomes the foundation for planning that is operationally grounded, not just rhetorically ambitious.
We work alongside institutional leadership, faculty governance, and community partners to develop plans that are credible to all three audiences, and that build the longitudinal evidence base the CET is designed to track.
- A landscape assessment of current community engagement across institutional text and records
- Stakeholder sessions with faculty, leadership, and community partners
- A strategic plan with operational commitments and evaluation metrics
- Integration of CEnTR* tools as the institutional evidence infrastructure going forward
Format: Semester-long or academic-year engagement. Scoped based on institutional readiness and goals.
The people doing the work that matters.
Faculty Affairs & P&T
Build evaluation systems that recognize the full range of engaged scholarship, without subordinating it to traditional academic categories or leaving it undefended.
Community Engagement Offices
Move from coordination to strategy. Use the tools and frameworks to build a credible, longitudinal case for the engagement your institution is already doing.
Provosts & Academic Leadership
Ground strategic commitments in operational infrastructure. Make engagement legible to accreditors, funders, and governing boards, in terms they can evaluate.
Faculty Developers
Help faculty articulate and document their engaged work in ways that travel: across department lines, into P&T portfolios, and out to public audiences.
Community Partners
Participate in processes that represent your assets and your priorities, not just as recipients of institutional documentation, but as co-interpreters of what the work means.
Jeremy Price is the founder of CEnTRInnovations and a scholar of community-engaged research practice. His work focuses on the institutional conditions that make genuine, reciprocal community engagement possible, and the systems that document it, evaluate it, and sustain it over time.
He brings both conceptual depth and practical experience to this work: having navigated promotion and tenure processes, led faculty development around community engagement, and worked directly with community partners to build relationships that outlast individual projects.
Book time with JeremyNot sure where to begin? That's fine. We can figure it out together.
Every institution is in a different place. Some need to start with definitions. Some have definitions and need tools. Some have tools and need strategy. Book a conversation and we'll figure out where you are, and what would actually help.