Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 82 Toward a Research and Practice Agenda for Evaluation in Community-Campus Partnerships Paul J. Kuttner,1 Lisa Rawlings, 2 and Marcie R. Washington3 1 University Neighborhood Partners, Associate Director, University of Utah, 2 Office of Community Engagement, Director UMB Workforce Initiatives, University of Maryland, Baltimore, and 3 Department of Politics and International Relations, Associate Teaching Professor, Florida International University Cite as: Kuttner, P.J., Rawlings, L., & Washington, M.R. (2023). Toward a Research and Practice Agenda for Evaluation in Community-Campus Partnerships. Metropolitan Universities, 34(4), 82-88. DOI: 10.18060/26786 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. Guest Editors: Rochelle Smarr, Ed.D. and Chris Nayve, J.D. Editor: Valerie L. Holton, Ph.D. Abstract Evaluation of community-campus partnerships is a contested topic and, in many ways, is still at an early stage of development. With growing momentum behind community-university collaboration and increased pressure to document the positive impact of universities, there is a pressing need for research and innovation in this area. Many community engagement professionals are looking for new and creative approaches to evaluating partnership work — approaches that capture the work's depth, complexity, and values and can be used to foster learning, community accountability, collaboration, and systems change. This article proposes six promising directions for research and practice related to evaluating campus-community partnerships. They emerged as themes from an interactive CUMU Community Engagement Evaluation Huddle session at the annual CUMU conference. Drawing on the collective knowledge of Huddle participants, we identified the following directions: 1. evaluating systemic racism, 2. community-driven evaluation, 3. community impact and benefit, 4. evaluating relationships, 5. alignment of stakeholders, and 6. blended approaches. We offer these directions, key questions, and examples from the field as a first step toward a field-wide agenda for advancing evaluation in a critical, participatory, community-based spirit. Keywords: community-campus partnerships, community engagement, assessment and evaluation, anti-racism, participatory evaluation http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 83 Introduction Evaluation is a contested concept within the field of community-campus partnerships. Evaluation is a largely unquestioned good for some community engagement professionals (CEPs). They see it as a critical ingredient in collective learning and data-driven decision-making that improves the work and ensures accountability to community and university stakeholders. For others, evaluation is, at best, a necessary evil. It is an external mandate that burdens partners, diverts limited resources, and imposes irrelevant or harmful conceptualizations of measurement and accountability. Many CEPs find themselves somewhere in the middle. They may see the potential value of evaluation but are frustrated or disappointed with how it has traditionally been carried out. Few would disagree that it is helpful to understand how partnerships are going, what has been accomplished, and how things could be improved. Tensions arise when you dig deeper into questions such as: Who decides what is measured and assessed? What kinds of outcomes are privileged over others? Through what lenses are the data analyzed? How are the results framed and shared? Questions like these are important because evaluation sits in the liminal space where community partnerships meet the larger social, economic, and political systems that shape higher education and urban life. Evaluation is put to work in efforts to attract and retain funders, to make a case for engagement to administrators and politicians, to burnish the university’s reputation and rankings, and to make decisions about resource allocations. These goals can conflict with using evaluation to foster dialogue, learning, reflection, and accountability within partnerships, particularly when metrics are defined externally. It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate evaluation from higher education’s historical links to colonization and white supremacy, the slow public disinvestment from higher education, increased skepticism about the value of postsecondary education, and the decades-long neoliberal movement that has reshaped the discourse of accountability (Brackmann, 2015; Harris et al., 2019; Lee & Ahtone, 2020; Tatone, 2021). Evaluation of community-campus partnerships is still at a nascent stage (Plummer et al., 2021), though, over the past two decades, there has been significant progress in some areas. For example, evaluating student civic outcomes through community-engaged learning now has a substantial history and an array of available tools (e.g., Liu et al., 2018; Moely et al., 2002; Rhodes, 2008). Several widely used methods of evaluating a university’s institutional commitment to community engagement exist, such as the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement and the National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement (Driscoll, 2008; Sienna College Research Institute, n.d.). Other areas are far less developed, such as the evaluation of community or societal impact (Borron et al., 2019). Existing research on Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 84 impact tends to be qualitative, focused on individual partnerships, and often conducted by partners (Janke et al., 2022). Given the growing momentum behind community-university collaboration and the ever-increasing pressure to document and demonstrate the “societal impact” of universities, there is a pressing need and many possibilities for research and innovation in this area. The CUMU Community Engagement Evaluation Huddle In this context, the Coalition for Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) launched a professional learning community focused on evaluating community-campus partnerships. The group began meeting virtually in late 2020, every other month, to explore best and next practices (Prahalad, 2010) in evaluation through guest speakers and dialogues. In 2021, CUMU reorganized its virtual offerings, relaunching the learning community as one of four topic- specific “huddles” and reaching a larger group of members. In both incarnations, the group was co-facilitated by Paul Kuttner and CUMU’s successive directors of programming, Paul Davidson and Anthony Medina. It is now being led by Dr. Emily Janke from UNC Greensboro. After two years of online dialogues, the huddle held an in-person session at the 2022 CUMU Conference in San Diego, CA. Upwards of 30 people attended from institutions across the U.S. and Canada. The group was composed of faculty, staff, administrators, a few community partners, and a few graduate students. The session was designed using the tools of Open Space Technology (Owen, 2008) and World Café (Brown & Isaacs, 2005). Participants began by individually writing down discussion questions relevant to them and posting them along the back wall. Notably, all but five of the questions proposed by participants began with the word how. Participants asked questions like, “How does one evaluate/measure relationship/trust building?” “How have others evaluated university-wide initiatives in the formative stages?” and “How will evaluation help partnerships in strategic planning?” This emphasis on the practice of evaluation is strongly reflected in the themes we explore below. The group read the questions during a “gallery walk” along the back wall. Then, individuals were encouraged to select one they wanted to discuss — their own or someone else’s — and place it on a table. Once six people had done so, the rest of the group chose one of the six tables to join, where they would discuss that question. Participants were free to get up and switch tables when they felt inspired. Notepads and pens were available on each table, and participants were asked to take notes on interesting ideas or resources they learned about during the discussions. After 30 minutes, five new questions were selected, and there was another round of dialogues. At the end, there was a full group discussion in which participants shared some of the key themes, Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 85 learnings, and ideas they would take away with them from the session. These were recorded visually on the wall (See Figure 1). Through this two-hour process, the group identified and explored key challenges and possibilities in the work of community engagement evaluation. In this article, we — the facilitator and two participants in the session — present the outcomes of these dialogues as a research and practice agenda for advancing evaluation across community-campus partnerships. These six “promising directions” were developed primarily based on the themes identified by participants, along with session notes and the full list of participant questions, many of which are woven through this article. The themes have been further fleshed out with information from previous huddle meetings and the existing literature. Participants’ comments during the dialogue illustrated that evaluating community-campus partnerships is extremely complex and multi-layered. As participants noted, partnership types vary widely, with an array of goals such as promoting community-led initiatives, improving academic research, increasing student learning, and enhancing community partner capacity. In addition, partnerships can be evaluated at multiple levels. For example, we can look at the impact of an individual partnership, a collection of partnerships across an academic unit, or an institution-wide community engagement strategy. Outcomes and impacts are likewise multi- layered and include individual impacts like student civic development, organizational impacts like increased organizational capacity, institutional impacts on the University, and community impacts beyond the specific community partners. While the sections below may lean toward one level of evaluation or another — for example, the section on evaluating systemic racism is heavily focused on institution-level evaluation — we believe all six are relevant across levels of implementation and impact. FIGURE 1. Visual notes from the 2022 CUMU conference huddle. Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 86 Promising Directions Below, we outline six promising directions for research and practice that would enhance the work of evaluating campus-community partnerships. These are not meant to be exhaustive but to be added to and further developed by others. When relevant, we have linked discussion themes to existing tools and research. Promising Direction 1: Evaluating System Racism Amid increased discussions about what it means to engage in anti-racist and decolonizing community-campus partnerships (Hall et al., 2021; Levkoe & Kepkiewicz, 2016), conference huddle members identified a need for metrics to document and track changes in indicators of systemic racism. This discussion echoes a recent call by Smith, Medlin, and Wendling (2022) in the pages of this journal. Through dialogues with 250 participants about the intersection between engagement and anti-racism, the authors identified a pressing need for qualitative and quantitative measures “that can be used to better understand and assess anti-racist community engagement…Assessment, as it relates to anti-racist community engagement can no longer be an afterthought. We must develop formative and summative assessments so we can determine how we are doing and how we can improve” (Smith, Medlin, & Wendling, 2022, p. 122). Huddle members noted the inherent difficulty of evaluating the true breadth and depth of systemic racism embedded in the very foundations of higher education (Harris et al., 2019; Wilder, 2013). At the same time, they spoke about the possibilities of using evaluation tools to interrogate systems and how they sustain and center white supremacy. This includes using data to document racialized inequities, institutional cultures, tenure and promotion policies, and the systemic structural and cultural violence that takes place on and off our campuses. Members also discussed how disaggregating data can increase clarity and ensure that what is being measured is meaningful. This can help limit false results and reveal how what looks like a positive impact can hide racist outcomes. For example, student and faculty recruitment efforts can increase the number of BIPOC students and faculty while obscuring a failure to retain, support, and promote those already at the institution. In recent years, several rubrics and questionnaires have been designed for institutions to self- assess the extent of systemic racism at their institution and progress toward diversity, inclusion, and anti-racist goals (Griffin et al., 2020; National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2022; New England Resource Center for Higher Education, n.d.). Of particular relevance to this conversation is the work of the Badger Anti-Racist Coalition at the University of Wisconsin- Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 87 Madison. This collaborative of CEPs developed an in-depth anti-racist rubric for units, including funding, staffing, responses to student activism, and community accountability (https://barcuw.wordpress.com/). Meanwhile, Smith, Medlin, and Wendling (2022) are building on their research to develop an anti-racist community engagement scorecard with a mixed- methods design. Promising Direction 2: Community-Driven Evaluation In their classic article, Different Worlds and Common Ground: Community Partner Perspectives on Campus-Community Partnerships, Sandy and Holland (2006) confronted the dearth of community partner voices in the field-wide discourse around engagement. Over fifteen years later, this continues to be a major concern, as several of our members pointed out. They asked questions about how to engage community partners in evaluation and center community- defined goals and measurements. This approach has the potential to make evaluation more rigorous and relevant and to align evaluation practices with the principles and goals of community-campus partnerships. Related calls have been made by others in the field. In the report Principles of Community Engagement, Sufian and colleagues (2011) point the field toward two approaches to evaluation that include stakeholders: participatory evaluation, which engages key stakeholders in designing, carrying out, acting on, and building capacity through the evaluation process (Burke, 1998; Patton, 2008) and empowerment evaluation, which supports stakeholders in building their capacity to conduct their evaluations (Fetterman, 1994). Relatedly, Borron and colleagues (2019) argue that social impacts are usually measured in an outside-in model in which metrics are based on a program’s predefined goals. They propose an inside-out model that starts with what is happening in the community and fosters interactions between communities and institutions. Since Sandy and Holland (2006) published their article, there has been an increase in efforts to listen to and gather feedback from community partners, as evidenced by the proliferation of community partner surveys and questionnaires (e.g., Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, n.d.; Waters et al., 2014). In addition, CEPs have developed tools that bring community and campus-based partners together to reflect on partnerships and their impacts collaboratively. For example, at one virtual huddle, Gavin Luter of the UniverCity Alliance at UW-Madison presented on ripple effect mapping (Chazdon et al., 2017), a method from the University of Minnesota in which partners visually map their partnerships and the impacts that ripple out from them, like a pebble in a pond. At the conference huddle, Susan Mide Kiss, Vice President for Community Engagement at the University of the Fraser Valley, shared her experiences implementing the REAP approach at the University of Calgary. Developed by the Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 88 University of Bradford, REAP — an acronym for Reciprocity, Externalities, Access, and Partnership — is a framework for guiding community and university partners through an ongoing process of “self-assessment, planning, monitoring and reviewing of community engagement activities” (Pearce et al., 2008). Other collaborative methods can be found in the literature, such as outcome harvesting (Better Evaluation, n.d.). There is still much work to do to understand the best ways to truly co-create evaluation systems with communities, as some of our huddle members called for. For example, how can universities collaborate on evaluation with formal organizational partners and non-affiliated residents and neighbors in impacted communities? What kinds of capacity-building efforts would assist in ensuring that collaboration is accessible and beneficial to participants? How can we take our evaluation work “on the road” to where communities are at? How do we compensate community residents and partners for their valuable work to define and track impact? Many forces inside and outside our institutions discourage efforts to fully center the community in evaluation. We could benefit from Imagining America's Democratically Engaged Assessment to keep ourselves focused on this and other evaluation goals. This rubric evaluates an evaluation tool on, among other things, participation, and co-creation (Bandy et al., 2018). Promising Direction 3: Community Impact and Benefit One of the less developed areas in community-campus partnership evaluation is the measurement of community impacts (Borron et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2019). How do we know that partnerships have a desired impact beyond student learning and research? What is the overall impact of multiple partnerships on a particular community, geographic area, or issue? What kinds of community impacts are meaningful to community partners, and how do we work together to track them consistently over time? While many are working on this, they face significant challenges — not the least of which is that partnerships work on a large array of social issues and an even more staggering number of goals. In the past, the question of community impact was largely left to community partners. If a partner saw the partnership as beneficial to their mission, that was good enough. But many CEPs are looking to do more to hold partnerships accountable to, as one huddle member put it, “what impact means to our community partners.” At the same time, there is increasing pressure from legislatures and political leaders to demonstrate the collective results of multiple engagement and anchor initiatives across the institution in the name of demonstrating public value. This level of inquiry can be useful in documenting both the positive and negative impacts that anchor institutions have on the communities around them, offering a broader lens to understand what ethical community engagement looks like (Baldwin, 2021; Ehlenz, 2016). Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 89 Ensuring that evaluation metrics align with community priorities is critical because what is measured shapes what is valued, funded, and supported (Rossi & Rosli, 2015; Wanjiru & Xiaoguang, 2021). But research into such indicators is still in its infancy (Wanjiru & Xiaoguang, 2021). During our virtual and in-person huddle sessions, members shared some of the tools that helped them identify community impact indicators. One resource is the community capitals framework, a tool to analyze partnership impacts from a systems perspective, looking at a change in different “capitals” such as human capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and built capital (Beaulieu, 2014). Another is the Urban Institute’s Outcomes Indicators project, a comprehensive set of tools created for nonprofit organizations to assess outcomes on an array of issues, from health risk reduction and employment training to affordable housing and youth mentoring (Urban Institute, n.d.). As discussed above, huddle members feel it is critical to identify community impacts in collaboration with the communities impacted, suggesting we combine impact frameworks with the participatory processes described above. For example, ripple effects mapping utilizes the community capitals framework, while the REAP tool facilitates a collaborative process of identifying partnership “externalities” — impacts of partnership work beyond the partners themselves that “contribute to building social trust and social networks …and through these to enhanced sustainability, well-being and local cohesion, and ultimately to contribute to the building of a learning- and knowledge-based society” (Pearce et al., 2008, p. 82). This, again, raises new questions about how universities can offer financial and capacity-building support for community partners to track community outcomes. Promising Direction 4: Evaluating Relationships Relationships are widely understood as being core to all aspects of campus-community partnerships. At the same time, their ubiquity can make them slippery and difficult things to measure. In a traditional logic model, relationships can be understood as an input, an activity, a short-term outcome, and a long-term impact. Conference huddle participants raised questions about what it looks like to assess the strengths of relationships between university and community partners, and particularly the concept of trust. As participants noted, trust is often judged by what is “not seen” — the absence of distrust and division — and is challenging to quantify. However, the impact of trust or its lack is material. In one example discussed in the huddle, participants noted vaccination rates are a barometer of trust in communities with real consequences. Recent research has found “trust in public institutions involved in vaccine production and distribution” is a major factor in vaccine refusal and Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 90 hesitancy (Bagasra et al., 2021, p. 1). When American Indians controlled vaccine distribution in their communities, they used established cultural customs, including respect for elders and a “community first” ethos. The existing intra-community trust likely led to the Native Americans and Alaskan Natives having higher vaccination rates than other demographic groups — 47.5% of American Indians and Alaska Natives vs. 41.8% for Asians, 37.8% for white Americans, and 29.9% of African Americans (Silberner, 2021). Recent years have seen the dissemination of several tools for assessing the quality or health of relationships between university and community-based partners. These include the Characteristics of Effective Partnerships (McNall et al., 2009), the Loyola Community Partnerships Rubric (Brotzman et al., 2014), and the Rhode Island Partnerships for Success (2014) Partnership Rubric, among others. The Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale (TRES), now in its second iteration, is being used by several institutions to assess partnerships on a scale from exploitative to transactional to transformational (Kniffin et al., 2020). The TRES tool stands out for its use of the SOFAR model of relationships, which breaks down the simplified community-university binary by attending to the multi-directional relationships among community organizations, community residents, administrators, faculty, and students (Kniffin et al., 2020). A less developed but promising area for evaluating relationships is social network analysis (Sufian et al., 2011). Mapping relational networks can serve many purposes, from critically analyzing the makeup of partnerships to documenting the impact of partnerships on collective social capital. Trotter and colleagues (2015) describe the benefits of using social network analysis to map the structure of a partnership focused on Native American cancer prevention. Mary Price and colleagues (2016) at IUPUI developed Collaborative Relationships Mapping (ColRM), which engages partners in a participatory process of graphical mapping and evaluating relationships within a partnership. University Neighborhood Partners at the University of Utah has for several years used the online Kumu platform to map the size and density of its network of partners and partnerships (Kuttner et al., 2021), and the University of Washington—Tacoma created a custom network map using data from Collaboratory software (see below for more on Collaboratory) (UW-Tacoma, n.d.). Promising Direction 5: Alignment of Stakeholders How do we foster stronger alignment among stakeholders regarding how we talk about, evaluate, and use data for community engagement? This umbrella question covers a range of questions from huddle members, such as: How can we prepare faculty and staff to practice evaluation in their programs and courses that align with broader institutional/community goals? How can we Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 91 build stronger alignment in discussing and leveraging data, particularly between our community- facing staff, community partners, and university assessment/eval teams? How do we present community engagement work in a way that fosters greater collaboration between stakeholders? What do administrators and funders care about, and where are the spots where their priorities and community engagement overlap? These questions indicate that evaluation sits at the intersection of multiple stakeholders, each bringing different lenses, values, priorities, and accountability pressures. This makes alignment challenging. At the same time, as these questions suggest, evaluation can be a tool for aligning stakeholders around shared language, goals, and values. Conference huddle members noted that University-based CEPs are well suited to this work because of their experience convening diverse partners to work toward shared priorities. They also discussed some key issues to address in the process of stakeholder alignment, such as: ● Engaging community members beyond traditional public and nonprofit partners, including politicians, pastors, advocates, community elders, and residents. ● Educating funders and administrators who are not engaged in the work to understand “what impact looks like” in campus-community partnerships. ● Creating training and capacity-building opportunities for non-affiliated residents to support their engagement, i.e., “train the neighbors as key stakeholders.” ● Be attentive to power relationships because large-scale goal-setting at a university can easily shunt aside or overshadow the goals of community partners. ● Recognize that there are divisions within neighborhoods and communities that need to be bridged, alongside divisions between communities and higher education. An increasing number of institutions appear to be moving in this direction — engaging diverse stakeholders in developing high-level strategic plans for community engagement that transcend individual partnerships or units and that situate evaluation benchmarks within a long-term strategy. This was the goal, for example, of Campus Compact’s (2015) push for institutions to develop civic action plans. Several huddle members have shared their institutions’ high-level strategic efforts. For example, Jamilah Ducar presented to the huddle about the University of Pittsburgh’s process for developing its campus-wide community engagement agenda. Rooted in the “our purpose” section of the university’s strategic plan, this agenda encompasses “place- based engagement efforts, engaged scholarship, strategic partnership development, and community affairs” (University of Pittsburgh, 2022) with an impact framework that attends the cross-university outcomes related to economy, people, place, and equity. In another presentation at the 2022 CUMU conference, presenters from the University of Utah shared their multi-year effort to engage all stakeholders — especially residents — in the process of establishing a new hospital, campus, and anchor strategy, including the development of resident-defined key Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 92 performance indicators (Clouse et al., 2022). There is much to be learned from studying, evaluating, and reflecting on these efforts to see what works where, how, and for whom. Promising Direction 6: Blended Approaches Participants asked several questions about which evaluation tools and approaches are best suited to evaluating community engagement and how to combine them effectively. Participants noted that surveys, perhaps the most common data collection tool in the field, are not always the right instruments. Their overuse has led to survey fatigue in many communities. There are a growing number of evaluation tools in the community engagement literature and many more in the evaluation literature writ large. The difficulty comes from the need to adapt evaluation to a wide range of institutional contexts (e.g., urban, rural, suburban), audiences (e.g., administrators, communities, funders), partner types (e.g., schools, community-based organizations, agencies), and stages of partnership (e.g., emerging, established, finished). This led participants to discuss blended approaches that combine methods to assess different facets of a partnership. For example, combining formative evaluation to support the development of partnerships, process evaluation to document partnership progress, and summative and impact evaluations to look at the end goals of partnerships (CDC, 2012). At the conference huddle, participants remarked on the importance of including narrative evaluation methods alongside more traditional quantitative metrics. “Telling the story” was discussed as a valuable qualitative way to document the importance and impact of community- university partnerships. Two examples were discussed. Lisa Rawlings from University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), talked about their use of Collaboratory, a platform developed by the Institute for Community and Economic Engagement at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Its software allows for capturing the narrative content relevant to a specific community engagement activity and tracking and collecting quantitative data. This tracking feature is especially relevant to Brian Sturdivant, Director of Strategic Initiatives and Community Partnerships at UMB, who has been using Collaboratory for about a year. Per Sturdivant, “Collaboratory enables us to develop partnerships with the knowledge of who else on our campus might be pursuing the same partners so we can be better coordinated.” CUMU and Collaboratory recently announced a collaboration to advance research on community partnerships using Collaboratory’s dataset of over 5,000 community engagement and public service activities from 43 institutions across the United States, opening up exciting avenues for further research. Similarly, Susan Mide Kiss shared how the University of Calgary’s Knowledge Engagement Impact Assessment Toolkit — based, as explained above, on the REAP tool — incorporates Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 93 narrative. Quantitative metrics are coupled with an exploration of the story of the activity, initiative, or program. Their guide leads the assessors through an exploration of the reciprocity, externalities, access, and partnership stories, emphasizing which stakeholders, partners, influencers, and others have been impacted. The University’s website boasts that its approach offers “data and storytelling rolled into one toolkit.” Participants also spoke of the need to evaluate across different time spans, the short-term and the long-term or, as one put it, “quick vs. important.” As this quote suggests, participants see much of the value of engagement coming from its “long, slow, deep work,” suggesting a need for more longitudinal analysis. However, timelines for showing impact to stakeholders are often shorter. So, as one participant asked, how do we evaluate this long-term work in the short term? This tension was fleshed out a bit as it relates to measuring the impact of service learning on students. Faculty have long integrated course-specific goals into their class assessments, and there are a number of published scales, questionnaires, and rubrics for assessing intellectual, personal, and civic development (Bandy et al., 2018). However, this work is usually short-term, often based on pre-and post-semester outcomes (Pak, 2020). Huddle participants raised questions about how to expand this work to track long-term impacts on students. There are many intriguing questions to explore, such as do students engaged in partnerships show higher levels of retention and graduation? To what extent do students continue to demonstrate impacts throughout their higher education experience? To what extent do these experiences lead to further engagement after graduation? Questions like this have begun to be studied more over the past decade, and results are mixed, pointing us toward more nuanced questions about which types of partnerships carried out with which students in which ways lead to which kinds of student impacts (Smith et al., 2019)? Conclusion Whether we are excited, reluctant, or ambivalent about the increasing focus on the evaluation and measurement of community engagement’s impact, it is happening. If we are going to avoid externally imposed, neoliberal metrics that over-simplify, over-quantify, and are ill-suited to the messy human work of partnerships, then we would do well to get ahead of it. We, as a field, can take the lead in defining what evaluation can and should look like, as many CEPs across our countries are already doing. This article suggests six areas where more research and innovation are needed. We also highlight a number of rubrics, scorecards, frameworks, tools, and platforms that support CEPs’ evaluation practice in ways relevant to the six areas (See Table 1). We wrap up our discussion by noting a few cross-cutting ideas. Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 82 TABLE 1. Community engagement evaluation tools Promising Direction Name of the Tool Website Developer 1. Evaluating Systemic Racism An Anti-Racist Rubric for Our Campus Units https://barcuw.wordpress.com/ The Badger Anti-Racist Coalition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Anti-racist Community Engagement Scorecard In development Prairie View A&M University and Collaboratory 2. Community- Driven Evaluation Ripple Effects Mapping https://extension.umn.edu/community- development/ripple-effect-mapping University of Minnesota Knowledge Engagement Impact Assessment Toolkit https://research.ucalgary.ca/engage- research/knowledge-engagement/ke- toolkit University of Calgary using framework developed by University of Bradford Democratically Engaged Assessment Rubric https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/ handle/1805/17756/DEA- AI_PreConHandoutsREV.pdf?sequence= 1&isAllowed=y Imagining America’s Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship Research Group 3. Community Impact & Benefit Community Capitals Framework https://mediaspace.itap.purdue.edu/media /USDA+RD+Training+Series- Webinar+5+Community+Capitals+Fram ework/0_f5it0d9l/32400731 Purdue University Outcomes Indicators Project https://www.urban.org/policy- centers/cross-center- initiatives/performance-management- Urban Institute https://barcuw.wordpress.com/ https://extension.umn.edu/community-development/ripple-effect-mapping https://extension.umn.edu/community-development/ripple-effect-mapping https://research.ucalgary.ca/engage-research/knowledge-engagement/ke-toolkit https://research.ucalgary.ca/engage-research/knowledge-engagement/ke-toolkit https://research.ucalgary.ca/engage-research/knowledge-engagement/ke-toolkit https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/17756/DEA-AI_PreConHandoutsREV.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/17756/DEA-AI_PreConHandoutsREV.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/17756/DEA-AI_PreConHandoutsREV.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/17756/DEA-AI_PreConHandoutsREV.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://mediaspace.itap.purdue.edu/media/USDA+RD+Training+Series-Webinar+5+Community+Capitals+Framework/0_f5it0d9l/32400731 https://mediaspace.itap.purdue.edu/media/USDA+RD+Training+Series-Webinar+5+Community+Capitals+Framework/0_f5it0d9l/32400731 https://mediaspace.itap.purdue.edu/media/USDA+RD+Training+Series-Webinar+5+Community+Capitals+Framework/0_f5it0d9l/32400731 https://mediaspace.itap.purdue.edu/media/USDA+RD+Training+Series-Webinar+5+Community+Capitals+Framework/0_f5it0d9l/32400731 https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 83 TABLE 1. Community engagement evaluation tools Promising Direction Name of the Tool Website Developer measurement/projects/nonprofit- organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit- organizations/outcome-indicators-project 4. Evaluating Relationships Community Engagement Partnership Rubric https://www.aals.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/Heather-Mack- CP-Rubric-Final-2015.pdf Loyola University New Orleans Characteristics of Effective Partnerships See article McNall et al., 2009 Partnership Rubric https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/c gi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context =mu Rhode Island Partnerships for Success Collaborative Relationships Mapping https://csl.iupui.edu/teaching- research/curriculum/community- planning/colrm/index.html Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale See article Kniffin et al., 2020 Kumu Mapping Platform https://kumu.io/ Kumu, Inc. Collaboratory https://cecollaboratory.com/ Collaboratory https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project https://www.aals.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Heather-Mack-CP-Rubric-Final-2015.pdf https://www.aals.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Heather-Mack-CP-Rubric-Final-2015.pdf https://www.aals.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Heather-Mack-CP-Rubric-Final-2015.pdf https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=mu https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=mu https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=mu https://csl.iupui.edu/teaching-research/curriculum/community-planning/colrm/index.html https://csl.iupui.edu/teaching-research/curriculum/community-planning/colrm/index.html https://csl.iupui.edu/teaching-research/curriculum/community-planning/colrm/index.html https://kumu.io/ https://cecollaboratory.com/ Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 84 TABLE 1. Community engagement evaluation tools Promising Direction Name of the Tool Website Developer 6. Blended Approaches Knowledge Engagement Impact Assessment Toolkit https://research.ucalgary.ca/engage- research/knowledge-engagement/ke- toolkit University of Calgary using framework developed by University of Bradford Collaboratory https://cecollaboratory.com/ Collaboratory https://cecollaboratory.com/ Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 82 First, it was clear in our discussion that meaningful evaluation starts with the sustained commitment of the university to community-engaged work. All six promising directions — from evaluating systemic racism to incorporating narrative feedback — rely on consistent, mutually beneficial engagement by the university with community stakeholders. This continues to be a key area of focus — one that, in turn, is strengthened by improving how we assess, evaluate, and tell stories about partnership work. When university commitment and evaluation are worked on simultaneously, they can be mutually reinforcing. Second, huddle members’ insights suggest a cumulative, value-added effect using multiple high-impact practices for evaluating community- campus partnerships. One of the reasons the conversation jumped across different levels of evaluation — from individual to institution, from community to university — is that they are inherently intertwined. The strongest approaches to evaluation, participants suggest, align efforts across levels. Finally, while tools and approaches developed elsewhere can be helpful, it was clear from the discussion that effective evaluation is rooted in a local context. This means that a robust evaluation of partnership work requires all stakeholders to be involved in the process. Evaluation must be a partnership that incorporates equal participation in decision-making, regular communication, and mutual accountability. Determining the indicators and measures that are most relevant to assess performance and accountability will come from a combination of campus and community perspectives rather than a top-down approach. In the context of such collaborative, locally-rooted efforts, with university investment and a multi-layered approach, we hope the directions highlighted in this article support and perhaps even inspire others to move our knowledge and practice forward in a critical, participatory, community-based spirit. Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 83 References Bagasra, A. B., Doan, S., & Allen, C. T. (2021). Racial differences in institutional trust and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal. BMC Public Health, 21(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12195-5 Baldwin, D. L. (2021). In the shadow of the ivory tower: How universities are plundering our cities. Bold Type Books. Bandy, J., Price, M. F., Clayton, P. H., Metzker, J., Nigro, G., Stanlick, S., Etheridge Woodson, S., Bartel, A., & Gale, S. (2018). Democratically engaged assessment: Reimagining the purposes and practices of assessment in community engagement. Imagining America. https://imaginingamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/DEA- WhitePaper_FINAL.pdf Beaulieu, L. J. (2014). Promoting community vitality and sustainability: The community capitals framework. Purdue University Center for Regional Development. https://pcrd.purdue.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Community-Capitals-Framework- Writeup-Oct-2014.pdf Borron, A., Lamm, K., Darbisi, C., & Randall, N. (2019). Social impact assessment in the cooperative extension system: Revitalizing the community capitals framework in measurement and approach. Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education, 26(2), 75–88. https://doi.org/10.5191/jiaee.2019.26206 Brackmann, S. M. (2015). Community engagement in a neoliberal paradigm. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 19(4), 115–146. Brotzman, K., Deegan, J., & Mack, H. (2014). Community Engagement Partnership Rubric. Loyola University New Orleans. https://www.aals.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/Heather-Mack-CP-Rubric-Final-2015.pdf Brown, J., & Isaacs, D. (2005). The World Café: Shaping our futures through conversations that matter. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Burke, B. (1998). Evaluating for a change: reflections on participatory methodology. New Directions for Evaluation, 1998(80), 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1002/ev.1116 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12195-5 https://www.aals.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Heather-Mack-CP-Rubric-Final-2015.pdf https://www.aals.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Heather-Mack-CP-Rubric-Final-2015.pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/ev.1116 Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 84 Campus Compact. (2015). Action Statement of Presidents and Chancellors. https://compact.org/current-programs/civic-action-planning/action-statement-of- presidents-chancellors#statement Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (n.d.). 2024 community partner survey. https://carnegieelectiveclassifications.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2024-Community- Engagement-Classification-Partnership-Survey.pdf Centers for Disease Control. (2012). Program Evaluation for Public Health Programs: A Self- Study Guide. https://www.cdc.gov/evaluation/guide/index.htm Chazdon, S., Emery, M., Hansen, D., Higgins, L., & Sero, R. (2017). A field guide to ripple effects mapping. University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. https://hdl.handle.net/11299/190639 Clouse, E., Kuttner, P. J., Betham, S., Wright, C., and Curtis, R. (October, 2022). How a University Partners with a Community for Locally-Driven Health, Opportunity, and Impact. Presentation at the Coalition for Urban and Metropolitan Universities, San Diego, CA. Driscoll, A. (2008). Carnegie's community-engagement classification: Intentions and insights. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 40(1), 38–41. https://doi.org/10.3200/CHNG.40.1.38-41 Ehlenz, M. M. (2016). Neighborhood revitalization and the anchor institution: Assessing the impact of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia initiatives on University City. Urban Affairs Review, 52(5), 714–750. https://doi.org/10.1177/107808741560122 Fetterman, D. M. (1994). Steps of empowerment evaluation: From California to Cape Town. Evaluation and Program Planning, 17(3), 305–313. https://doi.org/10.1016/0149- 7189(94)90010-8 Griffin, K.A., Mabe, A., Bennett, J. & APLU INCLUDES Faculty Diversity Taskforce. (2020). A guidebook for a campus self-assessment of successes and challenges in STEM faculty diversity and inclusion. Washington, DC: Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Retrieved from https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/stem- education/aplu-aspire/aplu-includes.html https://compact.org/current-programs/civic-action-planning/action-statement-of-presidents-chancellors#statement https://compact.org/current-programs/civic-action-planning/action-statement-of-presidents-chancellors#statement https://carnegieelectiveclassifications.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2024-Community-Engagement-Classification-Partnership-Survey.pdf https://carnegieelectiveclassifications.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2024-Community-Engagement-Classification-Partnership-Survey.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/evaluation/guide/index.htm https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/stem-education/aplu-aspire/aplu-includes.html https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/stem-education/aplu-aspire/aplu-includes.html Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 85 Hall, R., Ansley, L., Connolly, P., Loonat, S., Patel, K., & Whitham, B. (2021). Struggling for the anti-racist university: learning from an institution-wide response to curriculum decolonisation. Teaching in Higher Education, 26(7–8), 902–919. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1911987 Harris, L. M., Campbell, J. T., & Brophy, A. L. (Eds.). (2019). Slavery and the university: Histories and legacies. University of Georgia Press. Kniffin, L. E., Camo-Biogradlija, J., Price, M. F., Kohl, E., Williams, J., Dickovick, A. D. C., Goodwin, J., Johnson, K. V., Clayton, P. Hb, & Bringle, R. G. (2020). Relationships and partnerships in community–campus engagement: Evolving inquiry and practice. International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, 8(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.18586 Kuttner, P. J., Rodriguez, L., Betham, S., Barbaar, A., Mayer-Glenn, J., (2021). University Neighborhood Partners Network Evaluation 2020–2021. University Neighborhood Partners Lee, R. & Ahtone, T. (2020, March 30). Land-grab universities. High Country News. https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities Levkoe, C., & Kepkiewicz, L. (2016). Toward decolonizing community campus partnerships. Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement. https://carleton.ca/communityfirst/wp-content/uploads/Decolonizing-CCE-Working- Paper_March-2016.pdf Liu, O. L., Roohr, K. C., & Rios, J. A. (2018). Assessing civic and intercultural competency in higher education: the ETS HEIghten® approach. ETS Research Report Series, 2018(1), 1–18. McNall, M., Reed, C. S., Brown, R., & Allen, A. (2009). Brokering community–university engagement. Innovative Higher Education, 33(5), 317–331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-008-9086-8 Moely, B. E., Mercer, S. H., Ilustre, V., Miron, D., & McFarland, M. (2002). Psychometric properties and correlates of the Civic Attitudes and Skills Questionnaire (CASQ): A measure of students' attitudes related to service-learning. Michigan Journal of https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1911987 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-008-9086-8 Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 86 Community Service Learning, 8(2), 15–26. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3239521.0008.202 National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2022). Diversity & inclusion self-assessment. https://www.naceweb.org/diversity-equity-and-inclusion/resources/diversity-and- inclusion-self-assessment/ New England Resource Center for Higher Education. (n.d.). NERCHE Self Assessment Rubric for the Institutionalization of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Higher Education. https://rengaconsulting.com/project-inclusion/project-inclusion-new-hampshire/nerche- self-assessment-rubric/ Owen, H. (2008). Open space technology: A user's guide (3rd ed). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Pak, C. S. (2020). Exploring the Long-term Impact of Service-Learning. Hispania, 103(1), 67– 86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27025493 Patton, M. Q. (2008). Utilization focused evaluation (4th ed.) Sage. Pearce, J., Pearson, M., & Cameron, S. (2008). The ivory tower and beyond: Bradford University at the heart of its communities. Participatory learning and action, 58(1), 82–86. Plummer, R., Witkowski, S., Smits, A., & Dale, G. (2021). The issue of performance in higher education institution-community partnerships: A Canadian perspective. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 43(5), 537–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2020.1858386 Prahalad, C. K. (2010, April). Column: Best practices get you only so far. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2010/04/column-best-practices-get-you-only-so-far Rhode Island Partnerships for Success. (2014). Rhode Island Partnerships for Success Partnership Rubric. Rhode Island Campus Compact Rhodes, T. L. (2008). VALUE: Valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education. New Directions for Institutional Research, 2008(S1), 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.262 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3239521.0008.202 https://www.naceweb.org/diversity-equity-and-inclusion/resources/diversity-and-inclusion-self-assessment/ https://www.naceweb.org/diversity-equity-and-inclusion/resources/diversity-and-inclusion-self-assessment/ https://rengaconsulting.com/project-inclusion/project-inclusion-new-hampshire/nerche-self-assessment-rubric/ https://rengaconsulting.com/project-inclusion/project-inclusion-new-hampshire/nerche-self-assessment-rubric/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/27025493 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2020.1858386 https://hbr.org/2010/04/column-best-practices-get-you-only-so-far Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 87 Rossi, F., & Rosli, A. (2015). Indicators of university–industry knowledge transfer performance and their implications for universities: evidence from the United Kingdom. Studies in Higher Education, 40(10), 1970–1991. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.914914 Sandy, M., & Holland, B. A. (2006). Different worlds and common ground: Community partner perspectives on campus-community partnerships. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 13(1), 30–43. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3239521.0013.103 Sienna College Research Institute. (n.d.). National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement. https://nasce.siena.edu/ Silberner J. (2021). Covid-19: How Native Americans led the way in the U.S. vaccination effort BMJ, 374(2168). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2168 Smith, S., Medlin, K., & Wendling, L. (2022). Operationalizing Anti-racism in Higher Education Community Engagement. Metropolitan Universities, 33(2), 109–128. https://doi.org/10.18060/25333 Sufian, M., Grunbaum, J. A., Akintobi, T. H., Dozier, A., Eder, M., Jones, S., Mullan, P., Weir, C. R., & White-Cooper, S. (2011). Chapter 7: Program Evaluation and Evaluating Community Engagement. In Clinical and Translational Science Awards Consortium (Eds.), Principles of Community Engagement. National Institutes of Health. Tatone, K. L. (2021). Avoiding the threat of neoliberalism in outcome-based assessment. Developments, 1(Winter). https://developments.myacpa.org/avoiding-the-threat-of- neoliberalism-in-outcome-based-assessment/ Trotter II, R. T., Laurila, K., Alberts, D., & Huenneke, L. F. (2015). A diagnostic evaluation model for complex research partnerships with community engagement: The partnership for Native American Cancer Prevention (NACP) model. Evaluation and Program Planning, 48, 10–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2014.09.001 University of Pittsburgh. (2020). University of Pittsburgh Community Engagement. https://www.community.pitt.edu/ U.W. Tacoma. (n.d.). Community Partnership Data. https://www.tacoma.uw.edu/community- partnerships/community-partnership-data https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.914914 https://nasce.siena.edu/ https://doi.org/10.18060/25333 https://developments.myacpa.org/avoiding-the-threat-of-neoliberalism-in-outcome-based-assessment/ https://developments.myacpa.org/avoiding-the-threat-of-neoliberalism-in-outcome-based-assessment/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2014.09.001 https://www.community.pitt.edu/ https://www.tacoma.uw.edu/community-partnerships/community-partnership-data https://www.tacoma.uw.edu/community-partnerships/community-partnership-data Original Research © The Author 2023. Published by the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. www.cumuonline.org Metropolitan Universities | DOI 10.18060/26786 | July 2, 2023 88 Urban Institute. (n.d.) Outcome indicators project. https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross- center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit- organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project Wanjiru, I. R., & Xiaoguang, L. (2021). Evaluating university-community engagement through a community-based lens: What indicators are suitable?. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 25(4), 133–151. https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/jheoe/article/view/1495 Waters, S. E., & Brigden, J. J. C. (2013). Assessing the community partner in academic service- learning: A strategy for capacity-building. PRISM: A Journal of Regional Engagement, 2(2), 99–116. https://encompass.eku.edu/prism/vol2/iss2/1 Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America's universities. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/performance-management-measurement/projects/nonprofit-organizations/projects-focused-nonprofit-organizations/outcome-indicators-project Paul J. Kuttner,1 Lisa Rawlings, 2 and Marcie R. Washington3 Abstract Introduction The CUMU Community Engagement Evaluation Huddle Promising Directions Promising Direction 1: Evaluating System Racism Promising Direction 2: Community-Driven Evaluation Promising Direction 3: Community Impact and Benefit Promising Direction 4: Evaluating Relationships Promising Direction 5: Alignment of Stakeholders Promising Direction 6: Blended Approaches Conclusion References