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Abstract
This study explored how a campus and community team enacted diverse community engagement initiatives, improved stakeholders’ sense of organizational identity, and formalized a campus–community engagement system anchoring the identity of a regional campus. Through collaborative inquiry, this team built a community of practice that fostered the development of boundary-spanning skills needed to grow partnerships, created opportunities for leadership development, and reestablished the campus’s identity beyond its borders.I collaborated with faculty, staff, middle- and senior-level college administrators, and community stakeholders to design and implement a series of interventions for advancing the college’s identity through a community engagement plan. The team sought to determine (a) how campus and community members enact community engagement interventions to enhance stakeholders’ sense of organizational identity; (b) how an action research team enacts boundary spanners’ behaviors or functions in their community engagement processes; and (c) how communities of practice enhance/support faculty and community members’ roles as boundary spanners.
Through this study, campus and community members learned how organizational identity devolves and can be reestablished using an integrated community engagement model. The findings revealed that an interdisciplinary model of community engagement supports the enhancement of organizational identity. The study also highlighted the time needed for organizational identity development to occur is a process that is incremental and requires trust and relationship building. Additionally, the findings showed that the collaboration between campus and community partners enhances organizational identity development while also creating a supportive environment in which middle-level members of an organization can learn and practice their boundary-spanning skills for improving collaboration among internal and external stakeholders. Furthermore, the shared leadership and co-creation of interventions enhanced trust among stakeholders in the implementation of this action research study.
Conclusions drawn from this study suggest that the development of an organizational identity during a period of change in a 2-year college is incremental and fluid. The most critical skills for implementing collaborative community-engaged initiatives include listening, communication, and trust building. Lastly, the study findings indicated that a community of practice can effectuate change using action research methodology.