Developing Sustainable Community Engagement by Repositioning Programs into Communities

Community engagement has long been valued as a philosophical framework for education (Benson, Puckett, & Harkavy, 2007) and in recent years has been identified as a high impact practice for uni-versity students by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (Kuh, 2008). Community engagement work is so valued as a means of fostering students’ civic learning, in fact, that institutions of higher education can now receive national recognition for their commitment to community engagement through programs such as the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification and the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.