25 Campuses Selected to Participate in new Civic Health Initiative

Twenty-five colleges and universities have been selected to participate in the Campus & Community Civic Health Initiative, a newly created effort to measure and improve campus and community civic health, will serve as a signature program of the 10th anniversary of the American Democracy Project (ADP). ADP’s Campus & Community Civic Health Initiative is intended to engage American colleges and universities in two efforts:

First, we want ADP campuses to devise measures and metrics for assessing the civic health of their campus as well as their community;

Second, we hope our ADP campuses, having conducted the assessment, will find a measure of civic health that needs improvement, and devise a program to respond to that concern.

The Campus & Community Civic Health Initiative is informed by the critical work of the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) – our convening partner organization – on America’s civic health, by national thought leaders, and by research centers and projects on civic issues (e.g., CIRCLE).

Goals

This two-year initiative with the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) is designed to identify and develop campus and community civic health assessments and tools, as well as action plans that respond to the findings. Participating institutions will work together to study the civic health of our campuses and communities. We want to discover how our campuses support and facilitate civic health. Our goal is to provide insights into and strategies for measuring civic health on campus and off campus.

This initiative launches today, Thursday, June 7, 2012, with an inaugural Campus & Community Civic Health Initiative Summit – a pre-conference workshop – at the American Democracy Project national meeting on June 7, 2012 in San Antonio, Texas.

Core Activities

Develop tools for assessing the civic health of campuses and communities;

Expand our understanding of the current state of civic health on college campuses and in local communities;

Identify and share ways that a college or university – in partnership with a local community – can improve the civic health of the campus and/or community; and

Explore the interplay between campus and community civic health.

Opportunity to measure actual student voter turnout for 2008, 2010 and 2012 elections via partnership with CIRCLE

Opportunity to partner with NCoC on producing state and city-level Civic Health Index reports

Opportunity to track campus civic work using Lyon Software’s Community Benefit Inventory for Social Accountability for duration of this project

For more details, see the Campus & Community Health Initiative Description.

Convening Partner

National Conference on Citizenship

Partner Organizations

CIRCLE

Lyon Software

The Democracy Commitment

Participants

Buffalo State College (SUNY)

California State University, Chico

California State University, Los Angeles

California State University, Monterey Bay

Central Michigan University

College at Brockport (SUNY)

Dalton State College (Ga.)

Indiana State University Northwest

Lone Star College – Kingwood (Texas)

Macon State College (Ga.)

Metropolitan State College of Denver (Colo.)

Middle Tennessee State University

Missouri Southern State University

Missouri State University

Northeastern Illinois University

Texas A&M University – Commerce

University of Alaska Anchorage

University of Arkansas – Fort Smith

University of Central Oklahoma

University of Missouri – St. Louis

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

University of Wisconsin – La Crosse

Western Kentucky University

Westfield State University (Mass.)

Winona State University (Minn.)