Michigan State University
EN-13: Community Stakeholder Engagement

The Provost's Committee on University Outreach (1993) defines outreach as scholarship that cuts across teaching, research, and service. It involves generating, transmitting, applying, and preserving knowledge for the direct benefit of external audiences. As a land-grant institution, Michigan State University has a mandate to develop, apply, and share knowledge to serve the public good. MSU advocates a scholarly model of outreach and engagement that fosters a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship between the University and the public. The Office of the Associate Provost for University Outreach and Engagement (UOE) fosters MSU's land-grant mission by connecting university knowledge with community knowledge in mutually beneficial ways. UOE provides resources to assist academic departments, centers and institutes, and MSU Extension on priority issues of concern to society by encouraging, supporting, and collaborating with MSU faculty and academic staff to generate, apply, transmit and preserve knowledge. This scholarship focus is applied to a broad range of community-defined needs, with special focus on: Children, youth, and families Community-economic development Technology-human interface Community health and well-being Within these contexts, UOE also engages in research designed to demonstrate the disciplinary and inter-disciplinary impact of engaged scholarship and on faculty work and university-community partnerships. In all of its work, UOE emphasizes university-community partnerships that are collaborative, participatory, empowering, systemic, transformative, and anchored in scholarship.

Given that most social issues are complex in nature, MSU promotes multidisciplinary approaches to outreach and engagement. It does this by: 1. developing the Office of University Outreach and Engagement, which supports outreach work and creates teams to address community-identified social issues 2. investing in centers, institutes, and communities of interest around issues such as children's health, community vitality, land policy, and usability and accessibility related to information technology. See the Process Model at http://outreach.msu.edu/ProcessModel.aspx.

Go to http://communitybuilders.msu.edu/CommunityBuilders

Initiated by Leap, Inc. and the Prima Civitas Foundation, the MSU Community Builders program recognizes businesses and organizations that are working with Michigan State University to advance economic development and quality of life in the Mid-Michigan region. Since the launch of the program in September 2008, 74 companies, agencies, and organizations have been recognized as MSU Community Builders. These organizations were selected in recognition of their sustained and active engagement with MSU. These engagements have resulted in broad and enduring positive community impacts.