The Community Engagement Professional's Guidebook: A Companion to The Community Engagement Professional in Higher Education

This book is a companion guide to Campus Compact’s successful publication The Community Engagement Professional in Higher Education. In the first text, Campus Compact Research Fellows - led by award-winning scholar-practitioner Lina D. Dostilio - identified a core of set of competencies needed by professionals charged with leading community engaged work on college campuses. In this companion guide, Dostilio teams up with Marshall Welch to build on the initial framework by offering guidance for how a community engagement professional (CEP) should conceptualize, understand, and develop their practice in each of the original competency areas.

Over 10 chapters the authors address questions for those “brand new to the role” and interested in how to start a community engagement unit or center, or from people who are considering jobs doing the work on a campus, or from individuals “are trying to navigate the political environment on their campuses to expand and deepen their unit’s reach.”

The Guidebook offers a rich and deep dive, breaking down the essential components of a professional’s work. From mentoring faculty research, leading campaigns to build civic engagement curriculum on campus, to managing the staff who support community engagement units, Dostilio and Welch tackle the breadth of the CEP’s work by drawing on key resources and their own decades of experience in the field. Throughout the book, readers will encounter “Compass Points” that call for personal reflection and engagement with the text. These interactive moments combine with end-of-chapter questions to prompt thinking about a CEP’s critical commitments, to create a powerful and engaging toolkit that will be essential for any person doing community and civic engagement work on campus.

Lina D. Dostilio is a higher education leader who has spent her career connecting universities with their broader communities. Her scholarship has focused on the Community Engagement Professional in Higher Education and Hyperlocal, Place-Based Engagement. She has held a number of administrative and faculty appointments and was previously a Scholar-in-Residence with Campus Compact, a Research Fellow with the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, and is a member of the Academic of Community Engagement Scholarship.

Marshall Welch served as the Assistant Vice Provost for Community Engagement at Saint Mary’s College of California. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Catholic Institute of Lasallian Social Action (CILSA) overseeing service-learning and social justice programs at Saint Mary’s College. Marshall began his work in the field of community engagement by teaching service-learning courses at the University of Utah as a tenured full professor, where he later became the Director of the Lowell Bennion Community Service Center. In 2003 he hosted the third research conference on service-learning and community engagement in Salt Lake City prior to the establishment of International Association of Research on Service-learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) and has served two terms on its board. Marshall also took a leading role with Campus Compact in conceptualizing leadership institutes for new center directors and hosted the first one at the University of Utah. In addition to writing numerous articles and book chapters in the field, he is the author of Engaging Higher Education: Purpose, Platforms, and Programs and the co-author of The Community Engagement Professional published by Campus Compact and Stylus Publishing. His recent work has been researching campus center infrastructure to advance community engagement leading to the creation of the National Inventory of Institutional Infrastructure for Community Engagement (NIIICE). He is now an independent scholar living in the Portland, Oregon area.

Learn more about Marshall Welch on his personal website, www.marshalljwelch.com.