A recently created trend within the past few years is the active involvement of the business community in the development and implementation of various educational programs. Business Community Engagement for Educational Initiatives provides innovative insights into the implementation of educational programs jointly by businesses, schools, teachers, and educational organizations. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as educational travel, internships, and summer school, this publication is designed for educational administrators, teachers, business leaders, academicians, and researchers seeking coverage on topics centered on business-supported educational programs.

There seems to be renewed interest in having universities and other higher education institutions engage with their communities at the local, national, and international levels. But what is community engagement? Even if this interest is genuine and widespread, there are many different concepts of community service, outreach, and engagement. The wide range of activity encompassed by community engagement suggests that a precise definition of the “community mission” is difficult and organizing and coordinating such activities is a complex task. This edited volume includes 18 chapters that explore conceptual understandings of community engagement and higher education reforms and initiatives intended to foster it. Contributors provide empirical research findings, including several case study examples that respond to the following higher educaiton community engagement issues. What is “the community” and what does it need and expect from higher education institutions? Is community engagement a mission of all types of higher education institutions or should it be the mission of specific institutions such as regional or metropolitan universities, technical universities, community colleges, or indigenous institutions while other institutions such as major research universities should concentrate on national and global research agendas and on educating internationally-competent researchers and professionals? How can a university be global and at the same time locally relevant? Is it, or should it be, left to the institutions to determine the scope and mode of their community engagement, or is a state mandate preferable and feasible? If community engagement or “community service” are mandatory, what are the consequences of not complying with the mandate? How effective are policy mandates and university engagement for regional and local economic development? What are the principal features and relationships of regionally-engaged universities? Is community engagement to be left to faculty members and students who are particularly socially engaged and locally embedded or is it, or should it be, made mandatory for both faculty and students? How can community engagement be (better) integrated with the (other) two traditional missions of the university—research and teaching? Cover image: The Towering Four-fold Mission of Higher Education, by Natalie Jacob

This book is a comprehensive guide to community engagement and investment, beginning with a survey of community-related voluntary standards and then turning to strategy and management, community engagement, community investment and reporting and communications on community-related activities. Sustainability is about the long-term wellbeing of society, an issue that encompasses a wide range of aspirational targets including ending poverty and hunger; ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all; ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all; and promoting sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. Clearly the challenges associated with pursuing the goals are daunting and for most businesses it may be difficult for them to see how they can play a meaningful role in address them. While it is common for “society” to be identified as an organizational stakeholder, the reality is that one company cannot, acting on its own, achieve all the goals associated with societal wellbeing. However, every company, regardless of its size, can make a difference in some small, yet meaningful way, in the communities in which they operate, and more and more attention is being focused on the impact that companies have within their communities. Focusing on the community level allows an organization to set meaningful targets and implement programs that fit the scale of its operations and which can provide the most immediate value to the organization and its stakeholders. Societal wellbeing projects and initiatives must ensure that the organization does not compromise, and instead improves, the wellbeing of local communities through its value chain and in society-at-large. This book is a comprehensive guide to community engagement and investment, beginning with a survey of community-related voluntary standards and then turning to strategy and management, community engagement, community investment and reporting and communications on community-related activities.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

"We need to do Community Involvement better – we know we're spending millions each year on charitable causes; how can we find out what is really effective and what people will appreciate us for? Who should we partner with? How can we make a real difference in society and help our business?" Companies around the world are trying to answer these questions. Many are asking the same questions even as, collectively, they continue to spend billions on their communities. How do they know which activities are really worthwhile? Building on the authors' own extensive global experience at Nokia and E.ON, as well as the experience of many other experts in the field, this book offers the first-ever "how to" roadmap for managers on the comprehensive implementation of strategic Community Involvement inside their companies. It is designed to be practical, for those who want to act upon what they have read. It will fill a long-neglected niche as a day-to-day reference guide for practitioners. Corporate Community Involvement demonstrates what to do and how to do it. The advice is backed up by inspiring interviews with best-in-class practitioners from businesses such as Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Ericsson, and Deutsche Bank and leading international Corporate Responsibility and Community Involvement experts. The book highlights proven best-practice approaches, effective methods, and concise tools to help managers "get there faster" and "get it right first time." The core of the book is a step-by-step guide to developing and implementing a comprehensive and successful approach to Corporate Community Involvement. It shows how to: conduct a current state analysis and devise a strategy, organize staffing and budgets, integrate Corporate Community Involvement throughout the business and create high-profile programs, partner across sectors, measure and evaluate results, communicate successful activities, and overcome challenges. Corporate Community Involvement has an international perspective: the models and principles advocated are adaptable anywhere in the world. Also, it is designed to have as much relevance to a small or medium-sized enterprise as to a multinational. The book outlines the history and future of Corporate Community Involvement, explaining the business context and why companies need to manage their programs strategically. It also distinguishes between the growing lexicon of terminologies and provides clear definitions of terms such as "philanthropy", "sponsorship", "Corporate Citizenship", "Corporate Responsibility" and "Sustainability", advising when they are appropriate and how each can add value to corporate activities. This will be an indispensible resource for those working at the interface between business and the community. New or developing practitioners will learn from both the successes and failures of those before them. Representatives from other sectors, notably government, international agencies, NGOs, and academia, will come to understand companies' internal requirements for cross-sector collaboration programs in the community better. And students interested in this field will be better equipped to start careers.

This book charts the development of a whole-institution approach to university-community engagement at a modern Australian university, highlighting the pivotal role that curriculum renewal can play in organizational transformation. It describes how Macquarie University’s PACE (Professional and Community Engagement) program developed and fostered a culture of learning that has been at the center of academic renewal, differentiation, and institutional change. It details the development of the PACE pedagogical model, the establishment of the network of stakeholder relationships which underpin it, and the embedding of the model across the whole institution. Authored by those directly involved in the change project, this book tells the story of PACE, its achievements, challenges, success factors and future directions. A series of dovetailing contributions by leading international scholars of university-community engagement set the PACE story in its global context. This book adds to the scholarship of learning through community engagement, provides international perspectives on trends and issues in university-community engagement, contributes to a broader understanding of the practice and pedagogy of community engagement, and discusses the challenges and opportunities of implementing and sustaining change in the higher education sector.

Thirty-six of the best thinkers on family and community engagement were assembled to produce this Handbook, and they come to the task with varied backgrounds and lines of endeavor. Each could write volumes on the topics they address in the Handbook, and quite a few have. The authors tell us what they know in plain language, succinctly presented in short chapters with practical suggestions for states, districts, and schools. The vignettes in the Handbook give us vivid pictures of the real life of parents, teachers, and kids. In all, their portrayal is one of optimism and celebration of the goodness that encompasses the diversity of families, schools, and communities across our nation.