Widen the Lens: Are We Seeing Our True Campus Impact?

As college and university administrators in charge of civic and community engagement, we sometimes tend to focus on the work, programs and outcomes specific to our own offices or departments. And why not? Our programs have an obvious and direct focus on civic work. We have spent countless hours crafting programs with intentional and deliberate civic impacts. We are the ones who are charged by our institutions to initiate quality efforts in civic engagement. We are also the ones filling out the certifications, applications, and utilizing our stories as examples of how our institutions participate in civic work. However, everyone once in a while, if we take a step back and view our institutions as a whole, we have the ability to see new opportunities for campus civic engagement and, more importantly, high impact practices that are already taking place that, somehow, we have missed. All we have to do wise widen the lens.

There are certain times in our yearly activity when this concept is brought to the forefront. Many of us are asked to collect information for grant applications or for campus certifications and recognitions. For example, many of our campuses have recently participated in the Corporation for National & Community Service’s President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll application process. We are asked to describe several of our high-impact practices. Then the application allows us to pull back and look at the greater statistics of our institutions.

At Washington & Jefferson College, we are very proud of our accomplishments in the area of community engagement, and, for the Honor Roll, if had become quite easy to tell the stories of our strong programs within the Office of Community Engagement. We knew right away that we would be highlighting the Volunteer Community Health Coach Program, our Community Outreach Team and our new partnership with the Greater Washington County Food Bank, Produce to People. However, when we widened the lens, or in this case stepped back and looked at our greater snapshot, we began to ask ourselves, “What are the stories that we aren’t telling?” Through the statistics that we provided, we were able to see the intensive effort of our institution as a whole, and realized that the stories that we were telling were only part of a much greater work.

As we took a step back, we realized that this is what being a CLDE Lead Initiative Institution was all about. The question is, what we doing as a Lead Institution, not a Lead Community Engagement Office! To collect the overall engagement data of our institution, we were connecting with academics, athletics, Greek Life, campus activities and more. Although data was coming from all of these places, when it came to the stories, we remained focused on the efforts of the Office of Community Engagement. In reaching out to these campus partnerships, we began to understand the impact of civic and community work at Washington & Jefferson College was much bigger than we had even realized.

As a Lead Initiative Institution, this has moved to the forefront of our work, and become our primary goal. Although the bigger picture has started to come into view through informal conversations, we realize that without assessment and the formal gathering of this information, we will not fully understand our complete campus impact. If will all take the opportunity to do assess our full campus efforts, we will be able to become stronger advocates for the important civic work that takes place through higher education. Take the opportunity now to widened the lens, and once you do, bring it into focus.