What’s a typical day like for you?
It’s a lot of meetings if I’m not careful! I usually have about 4-5 hours per day of meetings with my community engagement team members, project teams I’m leading or are a part of, college leadership meetings, community partner project planning meetings, new community partnership exploration meetings, etc. This semester we are also trying to build in more time for me to answer emails and follow up on existing projects, and to write proposals and work on new projects. I try to get out into the community as much as possible to meet community partners and to provide whatever service I can to build our relationships and learn what our local community’s needs are.
We’ve entered into a partnership with the College of Social Work. How is it going?
It’s going well. At the beginning of the Fall semester, I cowrote a WT Grant Foundation Institutional Challenge grant with the College of Social Work’s Associate Dean for Research, Doug Coatsworth, and Drs. Parinda Khatri and Eboni Winford from Cherokee Health Systems, as well as a team of other faculty from EHHS and Social Work and across UTK. We made it to the second stage of the grant, which is a huge accomplishment. Regardless of whether this gets funded, pulling the grant together has set in motion a plan to co-develop an implementation science training program with Cherokee Health, as well as a plan to overhaul college bylaws to better reflect the work involved in community engagement. It’s been great to meet the wonderful faculty and staff in Social Work and begin the work of helping these two Colleges accomplish shared goals.
Tell us why it’s important that universities become more involved in their communities.
First, and most importantly, it can be incredibly rewarding work and worth doing for that reason alone. Following on from that, when this work is co-created with the community, they are invested in the outcome and the impacts are more likely to be sustained. This legacy rebounds to the university, as it helps communities to see in a very real way what our higher education institutions can do. This kind of work is directly tied to our mission as a land grant institution and thus demonstrates the value of higher education. These opportunities also give our students chances to engage in “hands-on, real world” training that prepares them well to enter the workforce and to be good citizens. Finally, on a more individual basis, if done well, this collaborative teamwork generates innovative ideas and solutions that can yield the more traditional academic products of papers and grant funding. My most successful phase of my career happened as a result of my doing community engaged work.
Would you share any lessons learned so far?
Communication is key, and it is hard. Managing groups of humans with differing timelines, backgrounds, agendas, and incentives can test your organizational and leadership skills. I cannot overstate the importance of humility, empathy, willingness to listen, and ability to take responsibility and course correct when things get derailed. Also, we often joke that we have to “go slow to go far,” which is a made-up proverb that also happens to be the truth.
What do you like most about your job?
Learning about all of the amazing community engaged projects that are happening across the two colleges and meeting the faculty, staff, and students doing the work. We have four projects that our office has co-sponsored in the past year and we just did our midcycle check-ins. It is so motivating to hear what they are doing; it makes me want to work harder to support more of these projects. I also love connecting community partners with our great people and these seeing those collaborations take off.
What do you do for fun?
Read, hike, make cocktails, paint, do puzzles, and paddleboard in warmer weather. And travel with my husband and grown daughters.