About the Engaged KU Toolkit

What is Community Engagement? Select to follow link
Community Activity Continuum Select to follow link
About the Carnegie Community Engagement Framework Select to follow link
Carnegie Framework Core Components Select to follow link
Audiences for the Toolkit Select to follow link

What is Community Engagement?

"Community engagement describes collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity."

—The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Elective Classification for Community Engagement.Carnegie Community Engagement Classification

At KU, this definition provides a consistent framework to support faculty, staff, and students across disciplines and areas of work, offering guidelines that foster sustainable, respectful, and impactful partnerships in Kansas and around the world. By adopting the Carnegie Foundation’s definition of community engagement as an institution, KU may establish clarity and shared expectations across the University of Kansas.

Guiding Principles for Institutional Community Engagement

Ensure activities are undertaken with community members
Facilitate reciprocal partnerships that support collaborative community and campus participation in identifying problems, solutions, and shared outcomes of success
Recognize, respect, and value the knowledge, perspectives, and resources of community partners
Serve a public purpose
Build the capacity of individuals, groups, and organizations involved to understand and collaboratively address issues of public concern
Assist campuses in fulfilling their civic purpose through socially useful knowledge creation and dissemination, and through the cultivation of democratic values, skills, and habits - democratic practice.

The Community Activity Continuum

The Carnegie Community Engagement Framework provides clear distinctions across levels of community involvement and helps ensure consistent terminology and practice at KU. Campus partners, including administrators, faculty, staff, researchers, and students, participate in a wide range of community related activities. While all types of community activities have value, not every activity that involves a community is community engaged. Community engagement is a specific approach in which academic and community partners work toward shared goals, grounded in mutual benefit, reciprocity, and shared authority.

To clarify this range of activities, KU uses a Continuum of Community Activities, which supports accurate classification and strengthens planning, communication, and alignment with KU’s institutional definition and the Carnegie framework.

The Continuum of Community Activities is adapted from the University of Iowa’s description of community-based research.

Activities address community issues, priorities, or populations but do not involve direct interaction or collaboration with community members or partners. These activities may be community informed, meaning they draw on community data, publicly available information, or general knowledge about community needs, but the campus partner independently designs, leads, and makes decisions without community participation.

Activities occur in community settings or involve community populations, but community members do not participate in planning, decision-making, or implementation. The activity is designed and led by the campus partner, with the community serving primarily as the location or context.

Activities involve intentional collaboration with community members or partners, but community members or partners are not involved in decision-making. Authority and decision-making remain largely with the campus partner. Community roles are meaningful and valued, but responsibilities, resources, and power are not distributed to those in the community.

Activities demonstrate reciprocal, sustained partnerships with the community. Partnerships are characterized by mutual benefit, co-supported goals, and shared authority in decision-making throughout all stages from issue identification to implementation and evaluation. Community and campus partners jointly determine priorities, co-facilitate activities, and share responsibility, leadership, and outcomes.

About the Carnegie Community Engagement Framework

The Carnegie Community Engagement Framework is a nationally recognized model that defines how higher education institutions partner with communities to advance the public good. It provides a structure for assessing and strengthening institutional commitments to engagement, emphasizing mutual benefit, reciprocity, and shared learning across teaching, research, and service. The framework serves as the foundation for KU’s Office of Community Impact’s approach to engagement.

Standards & Guidelines

The following standards are drawn from the Carnegie Foundation’s 2026 Elective Classification for Community Engagement. As a Carnegie Community Engagement–designated institution, KU uses this framework to shape how engagement is carried out across the university. The standards align with Carnegie Foundation’s requirement for reciprocity, mutual benefit, community voice and representation, access and opportunity, and systematic documentation and assessment across engagement. They also support KU’s APLU Economic Prosperity Designation and Action Framework through the Office of Economic Development. Such standards create a shared foundation for accountable engagement and should be used to guide community engagement efforts across departments and units.

The Association of Public Land-Grant Universities Action Framework on Modernizing Scholarship offers guidance to public research universities on ways that they can support scholars and advance public impact research, Cooperative Extension, civic science, community-engaged research, and other forms of public engagement, with special attention to the ways that diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice are integral to this work.

Carnegie Framework Core Components

The 2026 Carnegie Framework includes nine core components that guide high-quality community engagement. For each component, we summarize the importance of why it matters, key standards for effective practice, illustrative examples, and resources to support implementation.