One of the cornerstone offices on our liberal arts campus is the Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE). Their mission is to create and sustain meaningful engagement opportunities for the Carleton Community. CCCE organizes many activities for students both on-campus and off-campus, and both curricular- and community-based. Obviously, this is no small organizational task.
This past fall ITS and CCCE partnered to explore how CCCE data is collected and stored across their organization. Our primary goals of this partnership are to 1) make data collection easier and more accurate and 2) to blend the data with other campus data for improved analytic reporting. We researched new software applications, but decided that we could make the necessary improvements using existing campus software. We are nearing the end of the phase that creates new Hub screens for CCCE program directors to log volunteer hours in a simple and accurate way. We have also worked to identify ways to track elements of academic civic engagement courses in collaboration with the Registrar’s office. From there, we will be blending new data with existing campus data to develop reports that help to shape the future of the CCCE program, as well as provide students with real-time access to their own CCCE information.
This effort is supported in part by funding that we have received from Project Pericles through a Teagle grant to institutionalize civic engagement pathways at liberal arts colleges. CCCE staff are very excited to share their learning from this project with other campuses who are also working on improving data gathering connected with civic engagement.
If you would like further information on this project, please contact Adrienne Falcón.