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GUEST

GUEST EDITORIAL

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The purpose behind this special edition of ENGAGE! was to capture perspective, 
understanding, and seminal work that was illuminated at the IU Statewide Community Engagement 
Unconference – Better Together – that was facilitated at IU Indianapolis by faculty, staff, and 
students from all IU campuses on March 22, 2024. Although a broad aspect of community engaged 
scholarship is presented, I think it is all contained under the larger picture of—we are better together. 
The power of relationships, trust, and transformative partnerships facilitate creativity, innovation, 
cultural humility, civic engagement, and impactful work. Articles within this special edition are 
expansive and range from models and best practices to the importance of community engagement as 
well as civic engagement to other articles that are reflective in nature. These are important and each 
piece, a fabric if you will, are woven into a beautiful tapestry of mosaics and gradations showing the 
intricacies, patience, and collectiveness of an underlying unified vision of community engagement 
encompassing research, creative activity, service, and teaching. 

For some, community engagement is a calling. For others, maybe, it’s an expectation. Either 
way, it’s deeply rooted in collaboration, trust, authenticity, and wanting to serve something larger 
than oneself. In one of the articles in this special edition, Rafael Alamilla reflects on a statement by 
his undergraduate research mentor, Dr Jason Ng, who once stated “People who work at universities 
are servants to their communities.” This statement epitomizes, but also grounds, our cohort of 
community engaged faculty, staff, and students. Our work is about collectiveness: the sharing of 
expertise and resources with the goal of reducing obstacles and increasing opportunities for Indiana 
residents across the state. Hopefully, IU—across its campuses and hierarchy—realizes that who we 
are and what we do contributes to the social, political, economic, and cultural larger footprint of 
serving the state and its people. This work is not transactiona; but is rooted in the concept of 
collaboration, and IU has increasingly embraced this role. 

Over the past few years, I have seen continual growth and a groundswell of interest regarding 
engagement work with communities across Indiana. There is a deep commitment and passion 
regarding community engagement. Community engagement takes many forms, from research to 
creative activity, to teaching, to scholarship, to service. Tenure and non-tenure track faculty, 
professional staff, and undergrad and graduate students constitute the coalition of the willing—the 
community engaged cohort—who are impassioned about working with our communities whether 
they are urban, suburban, or rural. 

Our focus and interest as a coalition of community engaged practitioners aligns and overlays 
across all three pillars of the IU 2030 Strategic Plan: student success, transformative research, and 
service to the state (https://strategicplan.iu.edu/index.html). 

Letter from the Guest Editor
Todd Burkhardt
Director of Campus Partnerships for Indiana University’s Center for Rural Engagement (CRE)
Indiana University Bloomington



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TODD BURKHARDT | GUEST EDITORIAL

Based on the strategic plan, IU faculty and staff 
should institute and facilitate “immersive student 
experiences that elevate students among their peers in 
the workplace and beyond,” have “a commitment to 
the pursuit of discovery, creativity, and innovation 
that improves communities and changes lives,” and 
develop and enable “a commitment to engagement, 
partnership, and collaboration that strengthens the 
vitality of Indiana, the nation, and the world” 
(https://strategicplan.iu.edu/outcomes/index.html). 
Our IU community engaged cohort of faculty, staff, 
and students work diligently across and within all 
three pillars of IU’s 2030 Plan. We create experiential 
learning opportunities and activities for students. We 
leverage networks and interdisciplinary 
collaboration. And we facilitate meaningful and 
impactful community-centric projects and initiatives 
as part of a campus-community collaborative 
partnership. We increase the vitality of Indiana and 
Indiana University through our work. 

As a Center of Rural Engagement (IU 
Bloomington) staff member, I along with many 
others see the importance of further facilitating and 
hopefully even enhancing already established efforts 
by various schools and units across the university 
system by creating and facilitating opportunities for 
this community engaged cohort to grow and expand.

We did this through the orchestration of 
building networks, reducing silos, sharing best 
practices and initiatives, and reducing obstacles and 
barriers among the cohort that does community 
engagement work. There was an intentionality to 
unite our nine campuses around the importance of 
community engaged work in order to share lessons 
learned, highlight student immersive experiences, 
show impact and the importance of translation, as 
well as to highlight the lack of recognition and 
support for this important work by some faculty and 
administrators. This is further highlighted in an 

 

 article penned by Annalise Janke who purports that 
the Unconference not only assuaged the geographical 
distances between campuses, but also reduced silos 
and barriers between faculty and staff on the same 
campus. 

This community engagement coalition has 
met through various mediums: monthly zoom calls 
(cross campus connections), poster sessions, meet 
and greets, celebrations, colloquiums, an urban 
research conference, rural conferences, a research 
and dissemination webinar, unconferences, and the 
ENGAGE! Journal. The Unconference that took place 
this past March 2024 at IU Indianapolis was an 
opportunity to convene representatives from IU’s 
campuses to share best practices in programming and 
models for working collaboratively with 
communities, explore opportunities for future multi-
campus collaborations, and develop and strengthen 
IU networks. Case in point, is a co-written article in 
this edition by Kim Decker, Catherine Sherwood-
Laughlin, and Suzanne Allen who through 
networking at the 2023 Unconference and Rural 
Conference discussed how their units from the 
School of Nursing, School of Public Health, and IU 
Corps could build and grow capacity with the 
implementation and evaluation of substance use 
prevention and mental health programs in rural 
schools. 

 Jennifer Price Mahoney who has contributed 
an article to this special edition points out that a 
striking feature of community engagement is that it 
helps all Hoosiers win, but not only that, Jennifer 
illuminates a salient point about the Unconference. 
“It gave us the opportunity to find our fellows. It was 
lovely to see and hear from others who are doing 
incredible and inspiring things in communities across 
the state.” 

 



 The Unconference attempted to amass IU 
staff, faculty, and students from across the IU 
campuses around key and central topics that resonate, 
but also to continue to build momentum and turn 
ideas into positive action. Another important 
component regarding community engagement is 
developing our students so they are ready when 
handed the torch from the current generation of 
faculty and staff who do community engaged work. 
Karen Banks, who contributes an article on the 
importance of service learning for students, expresses 
the importance of such an endeavor, “because it 
allows students to work with real data, understand 
organizational challenges, and apply their new skills 
and knowledge” which is exponentially important to 
student experience, growth, and learning.

Both Rafael Alamilla and Elizabeth Bennion, 
in different articles, highlight the need for civic skill 
development and why that is so important. For 
Rafael, civically engaged professionals are seminal to 
the success of stakeholder networks and community 
capacity. And for Elizabeth Bennion, she illustrates 
how civic skill development as a part of community 
engagement can be developed across levels, modes, 
and disciplines. Moreover, Alexander Lipsey 
contributes a useful reflective essay on how tools 
such as Mentimeter (https://www.mentimeter.com/) 
can be an incredibly powerful for not only collecting 
important demographic information, but also 
important feedback on thoughts, questions, and 
inspirations that can be easily captured and shared in 
real time through visualizations, charts, and word 
clouds. 

To highlight some of the ideas and 
conversations that transpired, we believed that a 
special edition of ENGAGE! could be realized to 
capture this important work by ways of reflection, 
collaboration, models, and best practices.

It was a way to fundamentally capture 
information and share it. For example, Rebecca 
Mueller’s work is highlighted in her article, 

“Technical Assistance: A High-Touch, High-Impact 
Community Engagement Model” which 
demonstrates and shows that success is grounded in 
long-term relationships throughout the whole process 
from asset-based inventories to implementation to 
sustainability planning.

Of important note regarding the articles in 
this special edition is that they are all diverse and 
distinct from each other which I think is indicative of 
the nature of community engagement and the broad 
framework of disciplines, units, staff, faculty, 
students, and the communities that they work with. 
Jeremy Price who authors an article in this edition, 
coined this consortium of articles as pluralism or 
multiplicity. I couldn’t agree more. The many facets, 
layers, and dimensions of this endeavor—community 
engaged work—are varied and diverse. It’s the real 
world. It takes time. It’s messy. It’s complicated. But 
it’s also beautiful. Jeremy in his work goes on to say, 
“Community engaged research prioritizes honoring 
community knowledge and capital, accepts diverse 
outputs, and values transformative goals,” whereas 
this is not always the case in traditional research.

What do we—a non-land grant, Big Ten 
university—owe to the people beyond our campus 
boundaries? I would say a lot. Indiana University has 
a steeped tradition in research combined with a 
spectrum of doctoral programs in innovation and 
research.

Although this is incredibly important, this 
image doesn’t paint the full picture of what Indiana 
University brings to the table. For many faculty, staff, 
and students it’s about journeying off the campus and 
into communities across the state to meet people 
where they are and collaborate on opportunities and 
initiatives that make a difference.I hope that you 
enjoy this special edition. One thing is for sure. Our 
coalition of community engaged practitioners have 
been engaging in scholarly interdisciplinary work, 
establishing meaningful student immersive 
experiences, and serving our community partners and 
the state for decades. 

TODD BURKHARDT | GUEST EDITORIAL

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