Overall Rating Gold - expired
Overall Score 66.05
Liaison Yumiko Jakobcic
Submission Date Feb. 27, 2015
Executive Letter Download

STARS v2.0

Grand Valley State University
EN-13: Community Stakeholder Engagement

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 2.00 / 2.00 Yumiko Jakobcic
Campus Sustainability Coordinator
Office of Sustainability Practices
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Has the institution adopted a framework for community stakeholder engagement in governance, strategy and operations?:
Yes

A brief description of the policies and procedures that ensure community stakeholder engagement is applied systematically and regularly across the institution’s activities:

The Civic Engagement Task Force, appointed by the Provost, includes four workgroups for systematic application of community stakeholder engagement. These include professional development, communication, strategic positioning, and data collection. In addition, GVSU’s new strategic plan for 2015-2021 includes community engagement as one of five outcomes, along with a number of objectives that specify outcomes of our work in this area. Many offices across campus support this work, including Faculty Teaching and Learning Center, Office for Community Engagement, Community Service Learning Center, the Office of Sustainability Partnerships, and others. What’s more, these offices are working toward common objectives, metrics, and mutually supporting activities.


A brief description of how the institution identifies and engages community stakeholders, including any vulnerable or underrepresented groups:

GVSU continues to engage in challenged neighborhoods in proximity to our campus. We are beginning to connect our existing partnerships in these neighborhoods in a more integrated and interdisciplinary fashion. Overall, our goal is to develop sustainable two-way partnerships. To achieve this, our partnership relationships must be mutually beneficial and reciprocal. We seek to identify a shared vision and values, and invest time toward building trust and mutual respect. We collaboratively plan, implement, and evaluate our work together.


List of identified community stakeholders:

In general, our stakeholders include the City of Grand Rapids and other municipalities in our area, neighborhoods—especially in the City of Grand Rapids—nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, businesses and industries with which we actively partner, as well as legislators. In addition, we increasingly find ourselves collaborating with other institutions of higher education in our region.


A brief description of successful community stakeholder engagement outcomes from the previous three years:

We have hundreds of examples of outcomes in areas of education, economic development, sustainability, healthcare, infrastructure, and social services. Most of our efforts in the past three years have been individually implemented. Examples include watershed restoration, juvenile justice initiatives, increased access to local and healthy food in inner-city areas, improved information literacy, math, and reading in urban schools, and development of small businesses and entrepreneurial initiatives.


The website URL where information about the institution’s community stakeholder engagement framework and activities is available:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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