3
Supporting and Scaling Ecosystems of Engagement

External collaborations—between universities and communities, industries, and other invested partners outside of academia—are essential for universities to achieve their full potential in generating impacts that serve the public interest. Addressing societal challenges will involve a broad, inclusive, and collaborative approach to asking questions, generating knowledge, and solving problems. This cannot be done within the bounds of an individual discipline, program, or project but requires a robust ecosystem of engagement of actors with multiple roles, including those that support the capacity for engagement, relationship building, long-term partnerships, and authentic collaboration.

Ecosystems are defined by relationships; the interactions among various parties within a shared environment make the overall ecosystem a functional unit. To create functioning ecosystems of engagement, intentional steps are needed to support interactions of the parties. Ecosystems of engagement have components at individual campuses, across state university systems, and at the national level. The greatest collective impacts are possible when these ecosystems overlap and interact with one another in ways that are coordinated and mutually reinforcing (Rios and Saco, 2025).

CAMPUS- AND STATE-LEVEL COLLABORATIONS

At the campus level, community engagement and collaborative partnerships are supported and coordinated by various units, such as offices and centers for community engagement, government and community relations, colleges and schools, and research centers and institutes. Despite a general shift toward valuing engagement—with many examples demonstrating the impact of these efforts—within institutions, this work still often happens in parallel efforts with little or no coordination, shared learning, or professional development training in collaborative practice (NASEM, 2025b). Addressing these gaps will be important to build a culture of collaboration and bolster universities’ institutional role in the overall ecosystem.

At the state level, public and land-grant universities are increasingly coordinating efforts across campuses. This takes different forms, including efforts to grow the collective capacity for community engagement in research and teaching; statewide, multisector workforce development partnerships involving industry and government agencies; initiatives focused on statewide goals such as public health or economic development; and amplifying communication around community engagement activities. For example, the University of Missouri System asks each campus to appoint an engagement leader, who works with a system-level coordinator to facilitate collaboration; the system also provides seed funding at both the campus and system levels to support coordinated efforts. Another example is the University of California Community Engagement Network; since its formation in 2020, this network has helped shape merit and promotion policies at four campuses and informed a $100 million statewide research grant program on community partnership engagement (see also Chapter 2).

NATIONAL COLLABORATIONS

At the national level, professional organizations, funders, and some federal agencies are working toward increasing universities’ capacity for community-engaged research and learning. Various national organizations (see Appendix C) have called for institutional transformations to make engagement more central in higher education. Such organizations are supporting the development and exchange of best practices, professional development training, and funding to support institutional reforms.

Joint and Integrated Collaborations

Initiating joint or integrated collaborations across and within organizations could strengthen partnerships; for example, these entities could host activities for faculty and staff at workshops, forums, and professional society meetings. Existing efforts include committees of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities: Experiment Station Committee on Organization and Policy, Extension Committee on Organization and Policy, Academic Programs Committee on Organization and Policy, and the Administrative Heads Section.

The field of collaborative partnerships is growing increasingly robust at the national level. This is evidenced by dedicated funding opportunities for collaborative partnerships and service learning, the establishment of peer-reviewed journals that focus on the scholarship of engagement (see Appendix D), and national conferences.

Dedicated Funding Models

Federal agencies, such as the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, could support collaborations by providing funding through such mechanisms as requests for applications and notices of funding availability. Co-investment models—in which federal, state, and local governments invest concurrently with private funders—are helping to spur collaborations and build out the infrastructure to support ecosystems of engagement (see Box 3-1). Additional examples of these models can be viewed at the National Land-Grant Impacts Database.¹ There is also a growing emphasis on assessment to understand and improve the impact of engagement.

Closing the loop between research and societal impact in a sustained way requires structures that incentivize and enable sustained partnerships. To this end, some groups are seeking to refocus how research is funded. The Impact Funders Forum² launched by the Pew Charitable Trusts with the William T. Grant Foundation and other philanthropic partners in 2020, has examined how funders can contribute to enhancing the public relevance and impact of research. The initiative convenes public and private funders to coordinate around shared priorities, catalyze institutional change, and inform investments to address challenges at the nexus of research, policy, and practice.

One outcome of the Impact Funders Forum is a 2023 scan of efforts to reform or strengthen incentives for promoting the societal impact of science—defined as “[advancing] knowledge with an explicit priority of addressing policy or practice questions”—across the country (Ozer et al., 2023, p. 2). Drawing examples from 13 universities and 10 organizations, the scan highlighted efforts in three main areas: “(a) supporting faculty in generating

___________________

¹ See https://landgrantimpacts.org (accessed July 31, 2025).

² See https://www.pew.org/en/projects/evidence-project/impact-funders-forum (accessed July 8, 2025).

and disseminating societally-impactful research; (b) motivating, reforming, and building capacity for internal and external university evaluation processes; and (c) shaping the broader disciplinary and funding ecosystems to prioritize and support societally-impactful research” (Ozer et al., 2023, p. 2).

Based on lessons learned from these examples, the scan identified opportunities for funders to reduce barriers and strengthen the broader infrastructure for co-creation and social impact. These opportunities include issuing awards for societally impactful research, providing funding to support systematic institutional change and institutional changemakers, supporting cross-learning and networks within universities, and “influencing the broader research ecosystem outside of universities” (Ozer et al., 2023, p. 3). One immediate outcome has been the formation of the Presidents and Chancellors Council on Public Impact Research, which has set out to “develop and disseminate a roadmap for ensuring such work reflects a new paradigm for research initiatives” (Olneck-Brown, 2024, para. 1).

In summarizing recent scans and reports that support sector-wide transformation to enable higher education, Elyse Aurbach identified three levels critical to advancing commitment to public impact: (1) individual (students, faculty, and staff focus on preparing and building capacity to engage effectively), (2) institutional (leaders work to create permissive, supportive structures and environments), and (3) the meta network (funders, publishers, and others advocate for and incentivize engaged approaches). She concludes that interventions at each of these levels are necessary, but interventions and partners will differ at each level. Any institutional transformation strategy, including within and across land-grant universities, will be dependent on both level and institutional context.