Tactical to Transformational: Reclaiming the Strategic Purpose of a Metropolitan Campus

Abstract

In the fall of 2019, our large southeastern metropolitan university launched a campus strategically situated in downtown Orlando. As we all remember, in the spring of 2020, as our campus was starting to build momentum as a student and community-centered hub, the world shut down because of a global pandemic. Our challenges over the last several years have been multifaceted. Our university lost key administrators who championed the efforts of the new campus and we have been trying to reclaim the vision and purpose of this space. We have also had a dearth of faculty engagement at the new campus partly because of so many remote courses and meetings. These challenges impact all stakeholders involved with the downtown campus. To reclaim our purpose, we interviewed key stakeholders (N = 21) connected to the university and/or the community to then use their perspectives on the downtown campus as well as their thoughts on community-engaged scholarship (CES) to create a strategic plan to move forward. We have included our strategic plan and our seven primary goals or objectives that were determined based on stakeholder feedback. Keywords: community-engaged scholarship, university-community partnerships, strategic plan