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The Office of Community Partnerships is using Community Connect UW (CCUW) to support community-engaged courses and Collaboratory for collecting and aggregating other community partnership activities (e.g. research, projects, publications, etc.). Partnerships take many different forms, they can involve one or more staff members, faculty or students; they can be funded or not. What matters is the nature of engagement and its attention to building a partnership between the university and the community - local, regional, and beyond!
Community Connect UW
Community Connect UW is a database and management platform that allows UW faculty, staff, students and community partners to connect, organize, and understand impacts of collaboration. At UW Tacoma, we are piloting the "academic module", which is designed support faculty that teach community engaged courses. CCUW can be integrated with Canvas to manage the course.
To learn more, contact Layla Taylor at laylat@uw.edu.
The broader aims of Community Connect UW are to:
- Serve as a coordinated hub of activity for UW and community members to explore, connect, communicate, share opportunities and collaborate on projects, courses and other efforts related to civic and community engagement.
- Document, track, visualize, report and assess community-engaged learning, civic engagement, community-based scholarship, and other activities across the three campuses’ students, faculty, partners and units.
- Enable learning across the university as faculty, staff and students understand the larger ecosystem and collaborate more effectively and efficiently.
- Increase transparency and accountability and reduce the barriers for community partners to collaborate with UW.
Join CCUW-Tacoma (UWNetID required)
General Training & Resources
To learn more, contact Layla Taylor at laylat@uw.edu.
Collaboratory
This tool is designed for faculty and staff to share their community engagement or partnership efforts.
Have Partnership Data to Enter?
Collaboratory Frequently Asked Questions
Common Questions from faculty & staff who are entering data in Collaboratory.
Note: If you have outstanding questions, please do not hesitate to contact OCP staff at ocp@uwt.edu
Collaboratory is a relational database that allows UW Tacoma to tell it's engagement narrative.
Community Partnership data is collected by OCP to gain insight into the collective impact that UWT is having in our greater community, local, national and global.
Data is aggregated and used for reporting purposes. Aggregated data is made available through our website and annually through the OCP annual report. Partnership data is used at the institutional level to measure success on UWT's strategic initiatives.
For specific inquiries about data please contact ocp@uw.edu
Collaboratory uses UWNetID. To log into the system go to https://he.cecollaboratory.com/uwt and click "Log In" in the upper left corner.
You will be taken to the UWNetID login page.
The Office of Community Partnerships is collecting data for any activities that involve a UWT personnel (faculty, staff, students) and an external community partner. The activities should be mutually beneficial to both UWT and the community partner.
Partnerships take many shapes and forms and we welcome traditional and non-traditional partnerships. Please feel free to contact ocp@uw.edu if you have further questions.
Some general data about your activity, partners, and overview are made publicly available.
Note that there are some fields that are optionally visible. The icon with an eye indicates that a field can be public or private. Private fields are only available to Collaboratory administrators and are used in aggregate for reporting purposes only.
If you desire your the entirety of your data to be private please contact ocp@uw.edu. Administrators are able to hide your partnership data from public view, we will walk you through the process.
Yes! Collaboratory allows you to save progress on entering your data. When you return to Collaboratory you will be able to edit any existing activities you have entered in the database. You are also able to update activities that are already published.
OCP is happy to work with UWT administrators to generate reports and details about partnership activities specific to an academic unit. We encourage use of this data to promote further introspective analysis of your team.
Please contact ocp@uw.edu to get started generating specific reports.
Questions about entering data:
Common questions about entering data into Collaboratory.
What is your elevator speech? Write a brief paragraph that distinguishes your activity from others at UWT and helps the viewer understand the basic purposes and intentions.
You should include information about the actual activity completed, who was primarily involved (faculty, staff, students), and why the activity was needed. Do not worry so much about including the names of community partners or other collaborators connected to the activity. Collaborators are added in another section.
Often, information that is not entered elsewhere in the system can be added to the description to provide a viewer with more nuanced details about your activity.
When you click on "Add Community Organization" a window appears where you can search for community organizations already in the system. You can use the search feature to find your community organization. Please be sure to check your spelling when searching, as this can often be the reason you cannot find an organization.
If your organization is not listed, you can create the organization in the system. Just click on the text in the upper right corner that says "Don't see it? Add New". This will take you to a new window to provide contact information, location, description, and categorization of the organization. Please complete as thoroughly as possible, especially the description field. A best practice is to pull the organization mission statement from their website and include it in the description field.
Some things to keep in mind are to include generic emails and phone numbers instead of personal contacts, if possible.
For the "Type" field you have a choice of For-profit, Non-profit, Education: K-12, Education: Higher Education, Government, Religious, and Informal.
Lastly, once submitted and approved the email provided will receive a notification that they have been identified as a part of your activity record.
If your activity is ongoing, simply leave the end date field blank.
