About the ESC

The Engagement Scholarship Consortium (ESC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization, is composed of higher education member institutions, a mix of public and private colleges and universities. Our goal is to work collaboratively to build strong university-community partnerships anchored in the rigor of scholarship and designed to help build community capacity.

The ESC traces its origins back to 2001 when Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Extension initiated an annual meeting to share knowledge about their community-based programs (the National Outreach Scholarship Conference). Since then, recognizing that multi-institutional efforts could help catalyze some of the changes they wanted for their own institutions, the three began formalizing their relationship and then began inviting other institutions to join them. The ESC has now articulated a broad scholarly agenda that includes:

  • Researching and studying the scholarship of engagement throughout the world.
  • Facilitating international cooperation among individuals interested in promoting conditions that bring about engaged scholarship as a criterion influencing higher education faculty performance evaluations.
  • Encouraging the realization that the scholarship of engagement is a critical aspect of university responsibility.
  • Promoting education, research, and study of the effects of engaged scholarship on community-campus partnerships.
  • Promoting research and study of the impacts of community-campus partnerships.
  • Conducting national and international meetings, workshops, institutes, symposia, conferences, and congresses. 
  • Disseminating research (original, basic, and applied) from a wide variety of disciplines on the impact of campus-community partnerships.
  • Discussing and sharing questions, problems, issues, information, and theories regarding campus-community partnerships.
  • Advancing the study of campus-community partnerships and educating the public on effective programs for community change.
  • Publishing and communicating, through print and electronic media, the proceedings (including abstracts and scientific papers) from workshops, institutes, symposia, conferences, and congresses.
  • Publishing and disseminating, through print and electronic media, research on the scholarship of engagement through newsletters, books, monographs, reports, studies, and periodicals. These will be made available in any language.