The LAS Office of Public Engagement is committed to strengthening and resourcing our network of collaborators as they work to foster a thriving society. We have compiled the following resources to assist faculty, staff, students, and community members as they develop and implement community-engaged research, teaching, and outreach initiatives.
LAS Public Engagement Resources
Defining Public Engagement
Drawing on the definition used by the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement, alongside other definitions, UIUC defines public engagement as follows:
- Public engagement involves faculty, staff, student, and community members drawing on their expertise to address or respond to societal problems, concerns, issues, or interests to contribute to the public good.
- Public engagement often occurs in collaboration with public or private communities at the local, state, national, or international level.
- It is for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.
- To the extent that they encapsulate the key concepts outlined here, a variety of other terms, civic scholarship, community partnerships, innovation and entrepreneurship engagement, outreach, public-facing scholarship, public service, social innovation, and technology transfer, may be considered public engagement in the context of research, teaching, or service.
LAS Dimensions of Public Engagement
An overview of the college's commitment to publicly engaged work: what we mean by the term, the goals we've set, and the staff and faculty who can help you get started or develop your project. Begin here if you're new to engagement at Illinois or unsure which office can support your work.
Campus Office of Public Engagement
The campus-wide office that coordinates engagement across colleges and units, administers the Campus-Community Compact Grant Program, and convenes campuswide structures such as the Coordinating Council for Public Engagement.
Further Reading: Clearly Defining Your Type of Community-Engaged Scholarship
A resource from Michigan State's University Outreach and Engagement office, drawn from Doberneck, Glass, and Schweitzer's 2010 study in the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. The authors analyzed 173 promotion and tenure forms from successful faculty at a land-grant institution and built a fourteen-category typology spanning engaged research and creative activity, instruction, service, and commercialized activity. Look at this article to find a useful vocabulary when you need to name precisely what kind of engaged work you do, particularly in a dossier or grant narrative.
Publicly Engaged Research
Publicly engaged research is conducted with communities and often produces mutually beneficial outcomes such as public products, policy reports, exhibits, toolkits, websites, alongside traditional scholarship. The resources below focus on campus engaged research policy, examples of engaged research, and faculty development focused on engaged research.
LAS Office of Research
The LAS Office of Research provides comprehensive resources and services to facilitate research endeavors, from grant proposal assistance and compliance guidance to professional development and collaboration opportunities. Here, you will find links to forms and templates, training and professional development materials, and information about the various offices supporting faculty research within the college and across the university.
Provost's Communication #9: Promotion and Tenure- Publicly Engaged Research Option (PERO)
Campus promotion and tenure policy. PERO is described in section II.C.8. PERO is an alternative pathway through promotion and tenure for faculty whose research is substantially publicly engaged. It applies when a significant portion of a candidate's record consists of products such as policy reports, museum exhibits, or websites, whose impact traditional metrics do not adequately capture, and it allows those metrics to be supplemented by measures of societal impact.
PERO faculty vignettes
Since the inception of the University of Illinois, our faculty have been conducting publicly engaged research, and these vignettes of esteemed faculty who conduct publicly engaged research. These faculty showcase the diverse disciplines across our campus who, although different, all conduct important research in partnership with the community.
Community Engaged Research Series
The Community-Engaged Research Series provides in-person and online sessions for Illinois researchers on partnership building, IRB review, funding, and publishing community-engaged work. LAS co-hosts the series alongside the College of Education, the Center for Social and Behavioral Science, and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, and past sessions remain available as recordings.
I-Engage
A day-long traveling seminar that takes new faculty around Champaign-Urbana to meet the people and institutions driving the local economy, including agriculture, government, education, healthcare, social services, and the arts. The point is to give faculty a working understanding of what the community actually wants before they design a project around it, and to let community partners say directly how they would like to be worked with. Past participants have said the most valuable part was hearing that firsthand. Participation is by nomination rather than application: each college and school nominates two assistant professors in their second through fourth year. The call goes out in October or November, invitations follow in January, and the seminar runs in April. If you are eligible and interested, tell your department head before the fall nomination window.
Publicly Engaged Teaching
Community-engaged teaching provides course-based opportunities for students to work directly with community organizations on projects that meet community needs, while students meet the learning goals of the course. The resources below cover course design, partner matching, and other resources for faculty to develop community-engaged courses.
LAS Office of Courses and Curricula
This team provides consultation and assistance at all levels of course and curricula proposal development and review processes. They can assist with developing a new course or revising an existing one, seeking general education certification (or recertification) for courses, creating a new program of study (undergraduate or graduate major, minor, or concentration), proposing an undergraduate or graduate certificate, updating unit's programs in the Academic Catalog, or providing advice on learning outcomes assessment practices.
We CU service-learning support for instructors
We CU works with the Community Learning Lab in the School of Social Work to connect instructors with more than 300 community organizations in Champaign County, then introduces you to partner matches and lets you and the partner set the terms of the project directly. They also provide a comprehensive toolkit that offers resources to help faculty design impactful and equitable service-learning experiences, from setting goals for students' service work to preparation, reflection, and assessment.
Engaging Community: A Toolkit for Reciprocal Teaching and Learning Beyond the Campus
A free, open-access toolkit from the Association of American Colleges and Universities and Campus Compact, organized in six modules that cover community and storytelling, asset-based approaches, critical analysis, reciprocal partnerships, dialogue across difference, and assessing impact. Each module gathers short videos, readings, lesson plans, activities, and reflection prompts that can be used on their own or worked through in sequence. It is built for instructors designing a community-engaged course, as well as for faculty learning communities and professional development groups.
The Alma Project
The goal of the Alma Project is to create, support, and sustain a culture of neighborliness at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through community-engaged learning courses.
Illini GivePulse
GivePulse is an online platform used to list, find, organize, and measure the impact of service-learning, philanthropy, and volunteerism in the community, both on and off campus. With Illini GivePulse, students, faculty, staff and community members will be able to enrich the lives of people here in C-U, the surrounding areas, and beyond through this application of interconnected groups and organizations.
External Resources And Conferences
Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement
An elective designation from the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation, awarded on evidence. Institutions apply, documenting their partnerships, curriculum, and infrastructure, and are classified on what they can demonstrate. UIUC was first classified in 2008, again in 2015, and reclassified in 2026 on the strength of 2023–24 activity. Its definition of community engagement is the one campus adapted at the top of this page.
Engagement Scholarship Consortium (ESC)
The field's professional home for people who treat community engagement as scholarship. It grew out of the National Outreach Scholarship Conference, started in 2001 by Penn State, Ohio State, and UW–Extension. Illinois is a member institution, which makes ESC's grants program, awards, and annual conference (October 7-8, 2026) things you can act on. This source is valuable to keep in mind if you're trying to publish engaged work or need a venue that will take it seriously.
Campus Compact
The oldest and largest higher-education association for civic and community engagement, founded in 1985 by the presidents of Brown, Georgetown, and Stanford with the Education Commission of the States. Illinois is a member and is recognized in TRUCEN, the network of R1 institutions advancing civic engagement and engaged scholarship established in 2008. Most useful day to day knowledge hubs, which are curated reading lists on community-engaged teaching and research, and the communities of practice, which are free to participants.
Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU)
A coalition of institutions anchoring urban and metropolitan communities, since 1989. Illinois joined in 2026. CUMU publishes the Metropolitan Universities journal and runs an annual conference; the 2026 meeting is November 8-11 in Houston.
Contact
If you have questions or need further information about these resources, please contact the LAS Office of Public Engagement: las-publicengagement@illinois.edu.