Róisín McGrogan /
Róisín was appointed the first Civic Engagement Officer of Trinity College Dublin in 2009 with a view to promoting, encouraging and incentivizing greater civic engagement and volunteering by members of the College community. Róisín liaises with over 150 community organisations to promote opportunities for volunteering, curricular service-learning and research collaborations among students and staff of the University. She works closely with the student led Volunteer Opportunities Forum of the University and has worked on Ireland-wide collaborations such as the “Building a Voice for Student Volunteering Ireland” student conference and “We Volunteer!” Exhibition to celebrate the European Year of Volunteering. Róisín previously worked in research on the rights of people with disabilities and in her own student days led volunteer projects with local schools and awareness campaigns supporting student welfare as a Students’ Union officer. She has volunteered abroad in Kenya, India and Thailand and continues to volunteer in Dublin’s inner city with a women’s community drug project and youth spirituality organisation.
This role has three primary areas of work- supporting volunteers, fostering institutional engagement and building relationships with community. In terms of supporting volunteers, work includes raising awareness of opportunities and benefits, one-to-one consultations, a suite of training seminars, work alongside a student forum, advocating for volunteers in the development of policy and in community settings, brokerage, supporting student led projects and the implementation of the Dean of Students’ Roll of Honour which recognises student learning through voluntary activity. We are also formulating a proposal for staff volunteering. In order to foster more structured engagement including within the curriculum, work has focussed on building a community of engagement practitioners, identifying local champions and facilitating occasional seminars with international experts as well as regular knowledge sharing opportunities. A system of mini-grants to support service-learning has been implemented and structures for allowing community research questions to feature as project options for students is planned. Building relationships with the community has included networking through local volunteer centres, involvement with local volunteer managers meetings, outreach events, brokerage, facilitation of research projects and academic contacts as well as the development of a Memorandum of Understanding with a key community partner. All of this work is supported as possible through the online resource of the resource.
Key successes /
  • Dean of Students’ Roll of Honour.
  • Endorsement of TCD Civic Engagement Report and its recommendations by University Council.
  • Five year commitment to the area through position of Civic Engagement Officer from 2011.

Key challenges /
  • Personnel throughout the University at capacity.
  • Rollover of Executive Officers in 2011.
  • One man band.

Questions for discussion /
  • Recognition of Student Volunteering- credits, hours and appreciation.
  • Making Engagement by academics worthwhile- Exclusive Accolades v Acknowledgement for all
  • Where does this belong? Careers, Teaching and Learning, Communications?

TCD Civic Engagement:
TCD Strategic Plan 2009-2014: See Chapters 4 and 5 in particular
National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030: see 5.3, “Engagement with community”
Teresa A. Bennett /
Teresa Bennett is Director of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s (IUPUI) Solution Center, the campus’s office for community-based engagement. Since 2004, the Solution Center has facilitated community partnerships with over 700 organizations and businesses, resulting in nearly 3,000 research projects, internships, and other community-serving engagements. Ms Bennett administers the IUPUI Community Venture Fund, a grant program that has granted over $2 million dollars for community-based and community-serving projects. Through the Venture Fund and Solution Center initiatives, Ms. Bennett is responsible for bringing over $5.5 million in grants, gifts, and match funding to the campus in support of university-community partnerships. Ms. Bennett also teaches the Graduate Capstone course for the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs and has earned numerous awards for teaching. Ms. Bennett earned a Master of Public Affairs degree from Indiana University, a Bachelor of Arts in Communication degree from Purdue University, and has completed doctoral courses in Philanthropic Studies.
Culture Change: Implementing a Community Public Health Awareness Campaign
In early 2011, IUPUI launched the IUPUI Near Eastside Legacy Initiative (NELI). NELI will involve over 100 students and faculty from 17 schools in projects that support goals for a public health awareness campaigns aimed at increasing healthy habits and lifestyles in the Near Eastside of Indianapolis, Indiana. The Near Eastside is made up of 20 distinct neighborhoods and 40,000 residents. The community faces population decreases, housing deterioration, and increasing crime.
The Near Eastside has been singled out by the city’s 2012 Super Bowl Committee for special revitalization efforts aimed at increasing quality housing, community education, and affordable access to fitness, wellness, and health-related resources. Corporate, foundation, and NFL leaders also have joined together to build and open an education and fitness facility, called the Chase Legacy Center & Fitness Zone. However, Near Eastside community leaders find themselves challenged to create and implement the programs required to market, grow, and sustain the programs left behind by corporate and community sponsors.
NELI is a two-year initiative led by the IUPUI Solution Center, in partnership with IUPUI schools and business community sponsors. IUPUI’s NELI will rely on multiple points of campus engagement and community service, with students and faculty, working alongside community leaders, high school students, and the business community. Together, the university and community will use Asset Based Community Development principles to develop and implement a comprehensive communication strategy and public health awareness campaign in support of the Near Eastside’s Legacy Center launch and ongoing education and fitness programming.
Deliverables will include a community health asset map, K-12 programming, targeted social media and new media tools, a public health awareness campaign, and community health and fitness events in collaboration with the NFL, Finish Line Corporation, IUPUI, and campus and community health providers.
Funding and in-kind support for the initiative will be provided by the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Finish Line Youth Foundation, the National Football League, and IUPUI. NELI will be achieved in four phases beginning with a communication audit in the fall of 2011, through final implementation and evaluation in the fall of 2013. The estimated cost for the two-year initiative is nearly $250,000.
Key successes /
  • Near Eastside community buy-in.
  • Corporate funding and support.
  • Campus support, buy-in, and involvement.

Key challenges /
  • Solution Center capacity to manage a distributed network of for-credit and non-credit internships, projects, and course-based teams and contributors.
  • Ensuring the cultural competence of a large number of faculty and students working largely autonomously on projects over the course of two years.
  • Data determination, collection, and evaluation.

Questions for discussion /
  • Solution Center capacity to manage a distributed network of for-credit and non-credit internships, projects, and course-based teams and contributors.
  • Ensuring the cultural competence of a large number of faculty and students working largely autonomously on projects over the course of two years.
  • Data determination, collection, and evaluation.

Louella McCarthy /
Senior Lecturer (Medicine in Society) at the School of Medicine, University of Western Sydney (UWS), Australia. My PhD was undertaken at in the School of History, University of New South Wales (Sydney), and examined the historical development of women’s medical practice in Australia. I have published broadly in the fields of gender, history of medicine, public history and the role of community in medical education. I was a founding member of the School’s CAMERA (Culture & Medicine) Group, and am currently President of the Australian & New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine.
I convene the 3rd-year community-engaged teaching and learning course, Medicine in Context (MiC). This is a required term-length course providing UWS students with an opportunity to work in and with the community. MiC’s learning objectives are varied, ranging from an introduction to the social determinants of health through to professionalism and communication skills.
The UWS SoM is a new medical school (first intake 2007), which set out to be an “engaged school” from its foundation: MiC is one component of this broader objective. MiC was also the first engaged teaching and learning program undertaken systematically by the School, and is often the first experience our community partners have in educating medical students. The program’s first intake of students was 2009, so we are now completing the program’s third iteration. Annual evaluations have been administered – seeking feedback from students, community partners, and other academic staff – which have helped to refine the program’s development over that time.
The School is located in Greater Western Sydney, a large and diverse region, which has significant pockets of social disadvantage. For example, a large proportion of refugees settle in this area, which is also home to the largest urban population of Indigenous people in Australia. Social housing estates have been established throughout the region, and as housing costs soar the area’s “urban fringe” has experienced the fastest population growth in the country. The socio-economic and cultural influences on health, and the questions around social justice and social inclusion, are therefore fundamental issues for the MiC program. As an additional outcome the program introduces students to the range and complexity of the local health systems with some reference to comparative international perspectives.
MiC has been developed from the start as an engaged process, drawing on the combined expertise and experience of individuals and representatives from a range of agencies and services. In this way we aim to identify ways to encourage medical students to take a broader perspective on their medical work, and to improve students’ understanding of the importance of social and cultural issues in medicine, thereby complementing the scientific material that underpins all medical programs. As part of the process, we also seek to increase the healthcare workforce in GWS and the help develop new resources for the GWS community sector.
My role also involves managing the School’s community engagement activities more generally, and creating pathways for community participation in the School’s teaching and research programs. For this I have overseen the creation of an Engagement structure which incorporates the curriculum and general School management. Our next task is funding pathways for engaged research. I am also actively involved in the School’s nascent Medical Humanities program, and work to create opportunities for the incorporation of humanities into the general curriculum
Key successes /
  • Creating a network of community partners committed to providing opportunities for medical students to engage with key issues in health care;
  • Helping to create a climate within the School of Medicine which is positive about developing mutually beneficial relationships with the wider community;
  • Participating in the creation of a required community-based course for medical students

Key challenges /
  • Addressing student attitude that non-science programs are outside the scope of medicine;
  • Finding strategies to highlight the relevance of engagement for those courses deemed ‘scientific’;
  • Finding means to recognise and respond to community capacity limitations.

Questions for discussion /
  • What strategies can we adopt to increase resources for the community sector to support educational activities?
  • How can we increase awareness of relevance of / responsibility for community engaged programs for students/colleagues?



Nevin Brown /
Nevin Brown joined Siena Italian Studies as Senior Fellow in May 2010. He is involved in the development of the International Center for Intercultural Exchange (of which Siena Italian Studies is a unit), including organization and implementation of conferences and symposia on intercultural education issues, engagement in proposal development for presentations to other conferences and proposals for funding new initiatives, and overall advice on organizational development and management. He works part-time in Siena, Italy and part-time from a home base in Washington, D.C. (USA).
Among his previous positions, Mr. Brown was president of the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership, a New York-based organization that provided academic and community service study-abroad opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in ten nations worldwide. Prior to moving to New York in 2003, Mr. Brown was for eleven years a principal partner with the Education Trust; there he worked particularly closely with community-based school-university collaborative initiatives through the Trust’s K-16 and Community Compacts for Student Success initiatives, directed for six years the Trust’s annual national conferences, and was the communications officer for the Quality in Undergraduate Education initiative, through which two- and four-year postsecondary institutions developed standards for academic achievement in five core disciplines.
Brown also worked for eleven years for the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, where he headed its Division of Urban Affairs. He has also worked for shorter periods of time for the District of Columbia Public Schools, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, Achieve, the University of Houston, and the Southern Regional Council’s Southern Governmental Monitoring Project.
An historian by academic training, Brown has spent most of his professional career working in the areas of urban policy and higher education/community engagement. Among his professional affiliations, Brown has been a member of the governing boards of the Urban Affairs Association, the National History Education Network, and the Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion . He has also served as a review panelist for the National Science Foundation, Innovations in American Government Awards, and National History Day, and as a member of the editorial boards of several professional journals. He also co-chaired the European Links Committee for UAA from 1995-2003 (with Robin Hambleton from the University of the West of England), through which he was involved in the creation of the European Urban Research Association.
Brown received a B.A. with highest honors in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972 and an M.A. in history from the University of Virginia the following year. In 2001 he received the Urban Hero Award of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
Siena Italian Studies (SIS) provides immersion study-abroad opportunities in Siena, Italy for undergraduate and graduate students seeking both to learn in-depth a second language (Italian) and a second culture (that of Italy). Our primary focus is on an educational approach, “Full Immersion: Culture, Content and Service” or FICCS, that combines intensive language instruction, coursework on historical and contemporary Italian topics linked to a significant service assignment in the local community (service-learning), placement in a homestay family in the host community, and reflective writing throughout the duration of the program designed to help the student “connect the dots” between academic study, service and immersion in Siena. Most students participate in fall or winter/spring semester programs (based on the U.S. academic calendar); SIS also offers four-, six- and eight-week summer programs, some of which are tailored to the needs of science and engineering students for whom longer study-abroad programs are less available.
The work with immersion intercultural education has led the SIS staff more recently to establish an International Center for Intercultural Exchange, to provide a means both for broader dissemination of our work beyond traditional “sending” institutions in the U.S. and to support the development of conferences, symposia and publications on larger topics of intercultural education and communication. The Center has organized two international conferences in Siena (April 2008 and May 2011), with two more conferences scheduled for October 2012 (New York, USA) and May 2013 (Siena); the Center is also developing new intercultural education programs with partner institutions elsewhere in Europe, South America and Asia. The Center also works closely with the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership (IPSL), the Association of American College and University Programs in Italy (AACUPI), the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE), and the Italian chapter of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR).
Although they work closely with a number of universities, particularly in the US, Siena Italian Studies and the International Center are third-sector organizations—that is, not formally a part of a university either in Italy or elsewhere. Nonetheless, the organizations focus primarily on issues in postsecondary education, and particularly on issues of engagement with larger communities that form the basis for the Engage 2011 conference.