LI Course
CE Hours: 3 contact hours

Partnership: Community-Campus Partnerships for Health is organizing this learning institute. We expect the Community-Based Public Health Caucus, Academic Public Health Caucus and Spirit of 1848 Caucus to co-sponsor it.

Statement of Purpose and Institute Overview: The purpose of this institute is to provide community-engaged faculty members, post-docs and graduate students who are committed to advancing social justice with tools, tips and strategies for successful academic careers. We posted draft information about the proposed institute on academic public health listservs and received an overwhelming response, with more than 100 people indicating they would attend such an institute, many mentioning they would bring graduate students or post-docs with them. There are a number of significant, persistent impediments to a successful career as a community-engaged scholar committed to advancing social justice. There are few established professional development mechanisms or pathways for graduate students, post-doctoral trainees and faculty members who seek community-engaged careers in the academy. Unlike well-developed and recognized mentoring and career development programs for basic science research faculty, for example, community-engaged faculty members are often left to piece together their own with little support. Building a faculty portfolio for promotion and tenure review can be daunting for those focusing on community-engaged scholarship (CES), particularly when review committees are not familiar with this form of scholarship. Peer-reviewed journal articles are essential for communicating the results of scholarship to academic audiences, but they are not sufficient and are often not the most important mechanism for disseminating the results of CES. These include applied products such as training materials and resource guides, and community dissemination products such as newspaper articles and editorials, websites and public testimony. With the exception of journal articles, these other products of CES are usually not peer-reviewed, published or disseminated widely. These diverse scholarly products are thus often perceived by promotion and tenure committees as being of less importance, quality, credibility, and value than peer-reviewed journal articles. This learning institute builds on six years of learning from two successive national initiatives led by Community-Campus Partnerships for Health with grant funding from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in the U.S. Department of Education. The most recent, Faculty for the Engaged Campus, aims to strengthen community-engaged career paths in the academy by developing innovative campus-wide competency-based models of faculty development, facilitating peer review and dissemination of products of community-engaged scholarship, supporting community-engaged faculty through the promotion and tenure process, and broadening the definition of “peer” to include community partners, without whom CES would not be possible.

Session Objectives: *Describe the core competencies needed to succeed as a community-engaged scholar *Explain ways to identify both academic and community mentors and get the most out of a mentor-mentee relationship *Identify vehicles for developing and publishing diverse products of community-engaged scholarship *Identify funding sources for service-learning, community-based participatory research and other community-engaged work *Formulate a strategy for successfully navigating the promotion and tenure system *Identify the key components of strong portfolios for promotion and tenure *Design a personalized action plan for moving forward to apply the knowledge gained through the institute

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH)