Since 2011, the Shakespeare and Violence Prevention program has reached 140,000 Colorado students, where they improve their Shakespeare literacy while learning violence intervention strategies to take action in their communities.
Fiske Planetarium, meanwhile, reaches more than 75,000 people annually, including thousands of K-12 students.
From 2023 to 2024, the University of Colorado Boulder invested $17.5 million in community engagement-focused units while faculty and staff secured more than $4.5 million in external support related to outreach and community engagement.
“These aren’t just statistics,” Senior Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives Ann Schmiesing said. “They represent real impact in real communities — the kind of excellence that defines who we are.”
Community Engagement Week
From Tuesday through Thursday, CU Boulder held its first Community Engagement Week. David Meens, the executive director of the Office for Public and Community‑Engaged Scholarship, said the week was about recognizing CU’s past engagement with the state and thinking about what future engagement will look like.
The Office for Public and Community‑Engaged Scholarship is a unit on campus that supports public-engaged work across all departments and institutes on campus. That could range from contemporary dance residencies in rural Colorado elementary schools to air and water quality testing in cities at risk. The university has always found ways for students to train and develop skills while making a positive impact by addressing issues in Colorado, Meens said.
One example is The Literacy Practicum, an outreach program sponsored by CU Boulder’s Linguistics Department that collaborates with Boulder partners to support language and literacy development for people who need it. Students help elementary school children, immigrant and refugee-background adults and international students while developing their own skills. Their partners are the Family Learning Center, University Hill Elementary, Boulder Public Library, Reading Partners Colorado, the African Community Center and the International English Center.
“Every Coloradan should have a sense of ownership and of interest in what’s going on at CU Boulder, and this type of work — getting off of campus and getting out of the classroom and hearing from folks about what they’re interested in — that’s another benefit of it,” Meens said.
Faculty also sometimes will take their research in a slightly different direction after being influenced by the community and its needs, Meens said.
“I think that university community engagement is a two-way street, and it often influences the kinds of knowledge … that our world-class experts have at CU Boulder,” Meens said. “Colorado and Colorado communities end up shaping (CU Boulder’s) world-class work through engagement with our faculty in these places where they meet.”
‘Community engagement rebuilds trust’
CU Boulder was founded the same year the state of Colorado was established, in 1876, and the university’s charter is embedded in the state’s constitution.
During much of the 1900s the university, through a program called CU Extension, helped start the Colorado Municipal League, multiple chambers of commerce, health clinics and Colorado’s community college system. In 1970, CU Extension was renamed CU Continuing Education. Three years later, state funding for CU Boulder outreach ended. CU Boulder developed into a major research university, and in the 2000s, campus leaders started making plans for ways the university could renew its public service work.
That work has expanded in the decades since, culminating thus far when CU Boulder earned the 2026 Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement on Jan. 12. The classification, awarded by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, highlights the university’s commitment to community engagement. In the 2026 cycle, 237 institutions were recognized, joining a total of 277 institutions with the classification.
“This isn’t just another award,” Schmiesing said. “It confirms that excellence in community engagement is central to who we are. We’re living public university values through genuine partnerships. Partnerships that honor community wisdom and build trust statewide.”
The classification process also identified challenges for the university to work on. CU Boulder’s decentralized structure can create problems when partners don’t know who to reach, Schmiesing said, and the university doesn’t systematically gather feedback about how community partners are doing and what they need.
“Too many programs run on soft money,” Schmiesing said. “When grants end, programs end. Communities can lose trust. Especially communities already skeptical of large institutions.”
Faculty also worry that public engagement won’t count for tenure, she said, and more work can be done to include communities in rural Colorado, especially the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.
Moving forward, the university is working on creating an Executive Advisory Council for Outreach and Engagement to bring public engagement together on campus, Schmiesing said. It will also launch new recognition programs and awards, invest in professional development and build an inventory of all engagement activities.
“Community engagement rebuilds trust,” Schmiesing said. “When rural communities see faculty helping main streets thrive, when parents watch children light up at Fiske presentations, when businesses solve problems with our students, the university becomes real. It becomes theirs.”
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