Community: Communities are groups of people who share commonalities, including geography, affiliation, interest, circumstance, profession or practice, faith, and/or family/natural supports.
Community Outreach: The provision and promotion of university services and resources for community use.
Community Engagement: The collaborative development and delivery of initiatives through partnerships between members of the university and members of the broader public.
Engaged Scholarship / Community-Engaged Scholarship: Discovering new knowledge through activities that collaboratively generate, exchange, or apply academic and community knowledge and practices through reciprocal partnerships among members of the university and members of the broader public. Engaged scholarship often includes methods or approaches such as community-based participatory research (CBPR), engaged action research, and research-practice partnerships (RPPs), etc., and results in the public dissemination of new knowledge through academic publications, policy recommendations, technical reports, co-created exhibitions and creative pieces, and joint projects that benefit the community and the university. (Year of Engagement Scholarship Committee, 2020; Provost’s Advisory Subcommittee on Community Engaged Scholarship in Promotion & Tenure Processes, 2022)
Civically-Engaged Learning / Community-Engaged Learning: Classes that involve students in mutually beneficial community engagement with intermediary organizations or members of the broader public. These community engagements offer students the opportunity to improve the quality of life for people and sustainability of the planet. (Adapted from the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012, p. 15; University of Pittsburgh Working Group, 2020)