Over the past few decades, a variety of critics and advocates have urged colleges and universities to become more directly and deeply engaged in the civic life of their communities and states. Despite widespread perceptions that little has been and is being done in response, thousands of community-university engagement initiatives and projects have been organized across the nation.

What are people doing and accomplishing in these initiatives and projects? How and why were they organized and developed? What kinds of challenges have they involved, and how have people dealt with them?  How–if at all–have they contributed to the task of civic renewal, of making democracy work as it should?

Utilizing the under-appreciated craft of storytelling, this new website is a resource for people who wish to explore these and other related questions about higher education’s roles in civic life. Over the next several years we’ll be developing and publishing a set of “practitioner profiles” of people who have been engaged in public work initiatives and projects that feature significant levels of community-university engagement. Practitioner profiles are oral histories of people’s lives, work, and experience that are crafted from the edited transcripts of in-depth interviews. (For samples of practitioner profiles, click here.) The profiles we’ll be developing and publishing on this website will be centered on practice stories of democracy in action at the local community level. In addition to publishing these profiles, we’ll also be offering opportunities for readers to participate in the process of interpreting and making sense of them.

We want your stories! If you have a story to tell about your own community-university engagement work and experience, or if you know of a story that you think others would be interested in hearing, please visit our “Tell Us Your Story” page.

This website is part of an action research initiative on democracy and higher education that is being developed in collaboration with the Kettering Foundation. For an overview of this initiative, click here.

Scott Peters, Cornell University

Ted Alter, Penn State University

Tim Shaffer, Cornell University