Faculty for the Engaged Campus: Advancing Community-Engaged Careers in the Academy

Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH) is a national membership organization that promotes health equity and social justice through partnerships between communities and higher education institutions. In response to faculty concerns about the institutional barriers to community-engaged careers in the academy, CCPH embarked on a series of national initiatives centered on a two-pronged change strategy: (1) to support community-engaged faculty members going up for promotion and tenure in a system unlikely to change in time to benefit them, and (2) to work toward longer-term systems change. CCPH's initiative, Faculty for the Engaged Campus, aimed to strengthen community-engaged career paths in the academy by developing innovative competency-based models of faculty development, facilitating peer review and dissemination of products of community-engaged scholarship, and supporting community-engaged faculty members through the promotion and tenure process. In this article, the authors describe these challenges, the approaches taken to address them, lessons learned, and observations for the future. Subsequent articles in this thematic issue of the "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement" report on the design and impact of the initiative's components. (Contains 3 figures.)