Kellogg Award
2026 W. K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Awards
Recipients of the 2026 W. K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award
and
Finalists for the 2026 C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award
Michigan State University
Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health in Flint, Michigan: A Partnership Between the Flint Community and Michigan
The partnership between the Flint community and Michigan State University has produced measurable public health, workforce, and scholarly impact. Through community-guided public health initiatives, the department has reached more than 30,000 individuals with evidence-based suicide prevention care, supported the creation of more than 300 jobs, and generated more than 850 scholarly article authorships. Faculty and community partners have also advanced responses to the Flint water crisis, expanded maternal health initiatives, supported youth public health leadership, and helped inform policy changes related to public health and social determinants of health.
Those outcomes stem from an unusual model of shared leadership. In 2011, Flint community leaders, health systems, community organizations, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation approached Michigan State University with a vision for a public health department rooted in local priorities. Together, community members and university representatives conducted more than 2,000 surveys and 100 interviews to help design what would become the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health. Today, community members continue to share decision-making authority in hiring, strategic planning, and departmental governance.
The partnership has institutionalized community co-governance through formal structures including the Community Co-Governance Council and community representation in leadership searches and departmental decision-making. By embedding community leadership into the structure of an academic department, the Flint community and Michigan State University have created more than a department; they have built a platform for improving health outcomes, advancing scholarship, and sharing power with the community the department serves.
University of Colorado – Boulder
Youth Violence Prevention Center – Denver
For more than a decade, University of Colorado – Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence has partnered with residents, youth, schools, community organizations, health-care providers, and local government in Northeast Denver to reduce youth violence and promote healthy youth development. The partnership has served more than 25,000 youth and community members, and between 2016 and 2021, youth arrest rates in Northeast Park Hill declined by 75%.
Working alongside community partners, university researchers contribute data systems, evaluation support, and training in evidence-based violence prevention strategies, while residents, youth, schools, and local organizations bring deep contextual knowledge, lived experience, and leadership. Community coalitions help identify priorities, select and tailor strategies, shape evaluation, and guide decisions affecting their neighborhoods.
The partnership has strengthened local capacity by aligning schools, community organizations, health-care providers, and local government around shared goals. Youth leaders have been paid for contributions to program design, outreach, and creative initiatives, and community members have been recognized as trusted experts in shaping the work. Lessons from the partnership have been documented through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, public reports, online briefs, media coverage, and policy dissemination efforts, including integration into Denver’s Youth Violence Prevention Plan. Together, the work offers a model for how universities and communities can build lasting systems change in communities facing high burdens of youth violence.
University of Louisville
Trauma Resilient Communities Project
The University of Louisville’s Trauma Resilient Communities (TRC) Project has helped more than 56 organizations strengthen their ability to respond to trauma, violence, and inequity, creating lasting change across community-serving systems in Louisville. What began as a community-campus partnership has grown into a model for organizational transformation, contributing to the creation of a dedicated TRC Department within Louisville Metro Government.
Led by the university's Kent School of Social Work and Family Science and developed alongside community partners, TRC brings together local organizations, government agencies, health-care providers, schools, and community groups to address the long-term effects of trauma on both individuals and the systems that serve them.
Community partners help identify priorities, guide implementation, and shape ongoing evaluation, ensuring that solutions reflect local needs and lived experiences. The partnership has strengthened workforce well-being, expanded access to trauma-responsive services, and helped organizations build more supportive and effective environments for the people they serve. Beyond its community impact, TRC has advanced the field of community-engaged scholarship through more than 30 scholarly publications and presentations and a growing body of research on trauma-informed organizational change. By combining community leadership, applied research, and sustained collaboration, the project demonstrates how universities and communities can work together to create healthier, more resilient systems.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Translating Impact: The Virginia Tech Helmet Lab Model for Public Safety
For more than 15 years, the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab has helped millions of athletes, families, schools, and teams make safer decisions by translating complex injury science into clear, public guidance. Its widely used five-star rating system has reshaped how consumers evaluate protective equipment across football, soccer, cycling, equestrian sports, snow sports, hockey, and whitewater, moving conversations beyond marketing claims and minimum safety standards toward independent, evidence-based information.
The lab recently applied that same community-engaged model to one of the nation’s most dangerous workplaces: construction. Working alongside the John R. Gentille Foundation, ELECTRI International, the American Society of Concrete Contractors, and The Association of Union Constructors, researchers and industry partners developed the first publicly available construction helmet ratings. Community partners helped define the problem, contributed worker experiences and field data, and shaped how results would be communicated to contractors, workers, and safety leaders.
The partnership found that modern Type II helmets significantly reduce the risk of severe head injury compared with traditional hard hats. Since the study’s release, several major construction companies have required Type II helmets on their job sites. The Helmet Ratings website now receives millions of page views annually, extending the reach of the work far beyond its original partners. By combining scientific independence, community partnership, and public-facing scholarship, the Helmet Lab demonstrates how university research can influence real-world decisions, improve safety practices, and protect lives.
Exemplary Projects
Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota Extension Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (RSDP) were established in 1997 through a collaboration among rural Minnesota farmers, educators, legislators, citizens, and university faculty and staff. Together, they created a legislatively funded, community-driven model of engaged scholarship that integrates local knowledge with university expertise to advance sustainability in rural communities. The initiative’s guiding principles include building community-university partnerships, empowering citizen leadership, and advancing rural sustainability. Today, RSDP serves Greater Minnesota through five regions that connect residents, Tribal nations, local governments, nonprofits, and businesses with the university to co-create solutions that support community vitality, environmental stewardship, and economic resilience.
Each year, the RSDP program issues a Call for Ideas, inviting rural communities to propose projects addressing key priorities such as climate adaptation, clean energy, food systems, and rural placemaking. Projects produce tangible outcomes, such as farmers markets or nature trails, while also generating research shared through reports, toolkits, case studies, curriculum, and public events.
Over nearly three decades, more than 2,000 RSDP projects have strengthened community-university connections, demonstrating how a university can serve as a trusted partner in advancing community‑defined goals while also generating scholarship that is place-based, broadly shared, and measurably impactful.
NCAT C.A.R.E.S. 2.0 (Community-Aligned Research, Education and Service) Mobile Health Unit – A Community Engaged Platform for Health Literacy, Research, and Workforce Development
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
NCAT C.A.R.E.S. 2.0 (Community-Aligned Research, Education, and Service) grew from what community partners told us they needed most: prevention that is close, understandable, and connected to next steps in the health-care process. North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University responded by launching the NCAT Mobile Health Unit with the Center of Excellence for Integrative Health Disparities and Equity Research, creating a welcoming “front porch” for health equity that brings screening, learning, and connection directly into community gathering places. The partnership includes YMCA branches, NC Cooperative Extension, Triad Adult & Pediatric Medicine, faith communities, Sisters Network of Greensboro, and K–12 partners; together, they decide where the MHU goes, who it serves, and what topics matter most.
Every deployment incorporates community-engaged scholarship through screening logs, community needs assessments, and feedback tools that capture understanding, barriers, and support needs. Findings are reviewed with partners and used to jointly design solutions, such as Wellness Wednesdays, community health fairs, and an AI-Powered Multilingual Health Literacy Initiative that translates screening results into plain-language action steps.
NCAT C.A.R.E.S. 2.0 is a community-led, university-supported program that uses evidence and community ideas to improve health, learning, and opportunity across the Piedmont Triad and rural North Carolina.
Tenant Power Toolkit
University of California – Los Angeles
In California, landlords evict half a million tenants each year, most of whom never exercise their legal right to defend themselves. Consequently, thousands of tenants end up on the streets from potentially defensible evictions. To address this, UCLA researchers and community partners—from law firms to tenant and debtors’ unions—developed the Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT), an online application that helps tenants navigate the eviction defense process.
The TPT improves access to justice through simplification, translation, automatic filing, workshops, and hotlines. Its development required intensive collaborative research to map California’s 580 jurisdictions, translate legal requirements into clear questions, and test the platform for accessibility and accuracy in multiple languages.
Since its 2022 launch, the TPT has been used in over 16% of eviction cases in Los Angeles County and has benefited 60,000 tenants (one-third of them children). With user consent, the TPT generates an eviction database that enables research on structural drivers, demographic inequalities, and geographic patterns. Now part of a randomized control trial with Stanford University and the Los Angeles Superior Court, the TPT seeks to make eviction defense a free public good while generating data to transform the political economy of housing.