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LETTER FROM THE CHANCELLOR
Chancellor Mark A. Pagano
The Office of Community Partnerships (OCP) is now maturing into a “one-of-a-kind” resource in the U.S. higher education landscape and multiple institutions are using it as an aspirational model for
their campus. I believe OCP’s strategy and values closely reflect what the founders of UW Tacoma intended when they envisioned a campus in downtown Tacoma a little over 30 years ago.
Just after I arrived in 2015, the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU) released a report titled “Anchoring the Community: The Deepening Role of Urban Universities.” The report was based on a survey of the 43-campus USU membership at the time, and UW Tacoma was used as a case study, showing how an urbanserving mission was articulated and institutionalized.
The report reflected positively on much of our work, including our community-engaging campus design, key partnerships with Tacoma Public Schools, Joint Base Lewis McChord, and YMCA of Pierce & Kitsap Counties, and how we socialized community engagement into the daily narratives of our faculty and staff. Overall, the report found that UW Tacoma was having a transformational role in the larger community by serving as a catalyst for change and is key to revitalizing downtown and boosting the social and economic life of our region.
But that was only part of the story. The report also noted that critical infrastructure for sustained success with our urban-serving mission was missing. Resources deployed for community engagement were modest and no real tangible support was made available for faculty and staff engagement initiatives. The scaffolding necessary to deepen our relationships with a growing number of important partners was almost nonexistent. We lacked assessment tools for measuring progress or the effectiveness of the work to further guide resource allocation.
The USU study became the guide for the work we have embraced as a campus over the last six years. Together we have put in place the infrastructure and support to guide and inspire our campus engagement for the coming decades. I believe the results have been remarkable, including receipt of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in 2020. And to be clear, this was not work that anyone carried out alone. It was the entire campus coming together on behalf of this wonderful community which surrounds UW Tacoma.
In particular, I would like to recognize a few key individuals. When I arrived in 2015, Lisa Hoffman was serving as Assistant to the Chancellor for Community Engagement. Although her work had been primarily focused on the partnership with JBLM, Lisa was key in helping shape the goals for broader and deeper engagement and identifying the team that could best lead us there. Linda Ishem stepped into the role of Assistant Chancellor for Community Engagement in 2016, focusing on engaging partners who had not been sufficiently connected to campus through previous efforts. A plan to grow the campus infrastructure for engagement was then carefully worked out during the year-long application process for the Carnegie classification, co-led by Linda Ishem, Lisa Isozaki, and Bonnie Becker. Several outstanding committees were formed and charged with carrying out the detailed work of the various sections required in the application. Unfortunately, the pandemic began shortly after our achievement of the classification was announced, but we will have an opportunity to celebrate the opening of a brand-new Office of Community Partnerships facility soon. Dr. Modarres who currently serves as the leader of OCP and the outstanding staff have been instrumental in the early success of the office. So please enjoy this second annual report and feel free to experience a bit of pride in what you will read.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Pagano UW Tacoma Chancellor
