From Outreach to Inreach [President’s Message

Abstract

At my university, University of California, Irvine (UCI), we have started talking about “inreach” as a companion to the established notion of “outreach.” This small change in narrative has led to a surprisingly powerful set of changes in how we operate as an academic unit. As part of this “President’s Message,” I am including a recent article, coauthored with Marvin Maldonado, the director for inreach, equity, and student retention at the Samueli School of Engineering at UCI, to illustrate what this conceptual shift entails on a college campus. The short version is that outreach is focused outside of the organization in order to recruit, inspire, and educate surrounding communities, while inreach focuses on supporting people inside of the organization.