Community Based Participatory Research
Serving the Mission of Wake Forest through Public Engagement
Wake Forest University promotes a vibrant scholarly community and integrates academics with community service and extracurricular activities. In the words of President Hatch, “Wake Forest must develop more targeted, consistent efforts in public engagement, encouraging faculty and students to bring their knowledge and skills to bear on pressing contemporary problems (Engaging our local community and world, April 2008). Former Provost, Jill Tiefenthaler used the 2010 Faculty Senate address to underscore the value of community engagement. She stated “through service-learning coursework and opportunities to participate in community-based research, our students can see their liberal arts education in action. With public engagement, we are preparing our students to be imaginative thinkers, civic leaders, and caring individuals who believe in the importance of applying and using knowledge in the service of humanity.”
The Institute for Public Engagement (IPE) is the newest iteration of Wake Forest’s commitment to a campus-wide infrastructure to support community engagement. The IPE serves as a campus-wide coordinating and evaluation office for the university’s community engagement efforts, supporting work by faculty, students, staff and alumni. In its conviction that one’s education is not whole, nor character development complete, without the acquisition of a sense of community responsibility, the University founded the IPE to support and expand community engagement, including service learning courses, community-based research, professional assistance clinics, and volunteer Community Based Participatory Research Initiative activities. The purpose of the IPE is to cultivate habits of reflective thinking in students; to prepare them for lives of leadership and public service in their communities; and to support research projects by faculty members that respond to community defined needs.
The first Engaged Schlarship Symposium was November 9th. Click here for a story on the workshop led by Dr. Thomas A. Arcury.
Teaching, Scholarship and Public Engagement
“Where interdisciplinary research intersects to meet community identified needs.”
The teacher-scholar model is essential to the culture of Wake Forest faculty, and reciprocal relationships between university affiliates and community partners is vital to research and academia. Given that community-based participatory research is a non-traditional, yet dynamic approach to research, the purpose of this initiative is to position the Institute for Public Engagement to serve as a catalyst between faculty and community partners that promotes positive community impact and the teacher-scholar model in a way that yields social change in the community. In accordance to our teacher-scholar model, community partners have the opportunity to contribute to the teaching and scholarship of our university affiliates through IPE’s Community Fellows Fund and upcoming CBPR Initiative. Furthermore, just as the Academic and Community Engagement (ACE) Fellows Program supports faculty who teach service learning courses, the CBPR Initiative supports the research endeavors that work collaboratively with the community by providing faculty development opportunities.
For more on the goals of CBPR, please click here.
