The Challenges of Putting Community First: Reflections on a University Center’s Process

The purpose of this article is to share tensions experienced by the Center for Community- Based Learning and Engagement (CU Engage) at the University of Colorado Boulder during its attempts to facilitate social justice– oriented community change. These tensions speak to larger questions about the goals of community-campus engagement (CCE) programs, especially regarding the nature of power, interests, and definitions of community and impact. This paper documents CU Engage’s learning process through three illustrative stages: an exploratory community- based project, a qualitative self- study, and a collaboratively generated conceptual framework for public impact. Through this process, CU Engage has begun to develop an approach that applies, extends, and complicates existing frameworks of collective impact and community first. Ten sions that arose highlight three imperatives: (1) integration of participatory processes into CCE programs to supplement organizational partnerships with direct community input, (2) attention to power and structural constraints in community- centered work, and (3) creation of conceptual tools that guide collaborative work.