Dr. Lina Dostilio, noted scholar, author and vice chancellor of engagement and community affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses the evolving role of the community engagement professional in higher education.
Lina Dostilio, Vice Chancellor of Engagement and Community Affairs
University of Pittsburgh Office of Engagement and Community Affairs
Link to Dr. Dostilio's books through Campus Compact
Links to Dr. Dostilio's books (on Amazon):
The Community Engagement Professional in Higher Education: A Competency Model for An Emerging Field
A favorite quote of Dr. Dostilio's:
“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Reference to research by Bringle & Clayton mentioned by Dr. Dostilio during the interview:
Clayton, P., Bringle, R., Senor, B., Huq, J., & Morrison, M. (2010). Differentiating and assessing relationships in service-learning and civic engagement: Exploitative, transactional, or transformational. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Volume 16, Spring 2010. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mjcsl/3239521.0016.201?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Transcript
The Engagement Ring, Episode 15: Elevating and Celebrating Community Engagement -- A Conversation with Dr. Lina Dostilio
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from her interview with Dr. Lina Dostilio.]
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Welcome to the Engagement Ring, your connection to an ever widening network of higher education professionals, scholars, and community partners, working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast…
LINA DOSTILIO:
I think it's so important that institutions recognize that this is in fact a body of work. There's competence involved with it. There's a set of dispositions and skills and knowledge that go into this.
MARY HUNT:
I'll talk with Dr. Lina Dostilio, vice chancellor of engagement and community affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, about the evolving role of the community engagement professional in higher education.
LINA DOSTILIO:
We are the supports, resources, trusted advisors. Our orientation to the work ends up being transmitted and becomes the orientation to many other people at a particular institution of higher education. Our competence, our skill, our ability to have productive dialogue and deal with conflict -- it all influences how community-facing work happens.
MARY HUNT:
Here's my conversation with Dr. Lina Dostilio…
[Program introduction ends, and interview begins]
MARY HUNT:
Welcome to the podcast, Lena.
LINA DOSTILIO:
Well, thank you so much for having me, I'm very excited to be in a conversation with you.
MARY HUNT:
I am too! I read your book recently. And we'll talk a little bit more about that shortly. I was really inspired by it. And I got great ideas from it. So first of all, thank you for that. That was a great resource for all of us in this profession.
LINA DOSTILIO:
I’m delighted to hear that, you know, that book was the labor of many people. And it's a highlight of my career, I think, to this point, certainly. But I have a feeling that it's going to be for many more years to come. And so when I hear that it's useful, or that people have felt like it's illuminated an area of our practice. It just it's a joyful moment for me. So thanks for acknowledging that.
MARY HUNT:
It's my pleasure. One of the things that I wanted to talk about right off the bat was just this idea of what is community engagement. One of the hardest things about talking about community engagement I find sometimes on our campus -- because there's people who are engaged to various degrees in this -- is helping them to understand exactly what we're talking about. We're often talking about different things. People frequently confuse community service with community engagement. How would you define community engagement?
LINA DOSTILIO:
So it's a great question. I think frequently we fall back on the Carnegie Foundation's definition for community engagement that's included in the community engagement classification for institutions of higher education. And the gem there for me is that there's a mutually beneficial partnership at the heart of the work. But honestly, it can be many different things to people. And so at the University of Pittsburgh, our office, the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs, has responsibility for advocating for and strategizing and championing all kinds of community-facing work. Some of that work is community outreach. So it's pretty unidirectional. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. There are some programs and services that the university offers that are community benefiting, that are transformative, frankly, in terms of educational attainment or workforce development. But we may not necessarily be developing those in partnership with another, whether that's a community-based organization or a governmental group or, you know, some other group of stakeholders. Then, of course, we've got our more community affairs work. And so that's really relationship tending and making sure that we're in right relationship and close relationship with the communities and people that we impact. And so that really is about building relationships, tending to those, being thoughtful points of connection and response. But again, doesn't necessarily have that partnership, or that co-development or that co-design in the front of it. And then we get into more of our community engaged work -- our community engaged teaching, our community engaged research. And that's where you do find this idea that when we come together, university individuals, people from our broader communities or broader publics -- co-designing, co-developing-- that together, we produce something that's really unique. There's ideally mutual benefit in it. There's reciprocity present. In other words, there's the opportunity that as you are growing and developing, we are growing and developing. And it's contextually specific to what's of value to you, and what's of value to me, and to the people who we need to impact. And so that's really how we make that distinction. We are looking for the opportunity to be in partnership when we're thinking about engagement.
MARY HUNT:
Why is this relationship between the university and its community or communities, because we know we can have various communities… there can be neighborhoods, it can be a regional community, it certainly can be a global community that our scholars work with both. Why is this relationship between community and university so critical?
LINA DOSTILIO:
You know, it's interesting. I love this question, because there was some work done some while ago, if I'm not mistaken, it was Bob Bringle and Patty Clayton were two of the authors. There were a number there on the study. But it, it was looking at transformative relationships. And if I'm not mistaken, it was it really produced something called the trees scale, the TRES Scale. It was a new way of looking at different relationships in this work. And one of the points that the article makes is that we often don't examine who is involved in partnerships. And there's a richness there if we uncover it, if we really look at it. So sometimes it's about a faculty member having a relationship with a staff person within a community based organization and carrying out a program or a project. Sometimes it's about a unit within a university or college having relationship with an entity, a public entity, whether that's a community organization, or let's say a governmental agency. Sometimes it really is about a community-to-university relationship. But that's rare. In my experience, that's rare. We've done that work, though, at the University of Pittsburgh. We've actually developed neighborhood commitments which prioritize long term mutually beneficial, really thoughtful and intentional relationships at the community and university level. And we have those with four neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh. And it creates a very different set of conditions for our community work. It creates the opportunity to advance both community goals and university goals that are across the institution here at Pitt that are multidisciplinary. It allows us to have accountability. It allows us to think because of the long-term frame that we're in, think about how we grow together over a long period of time -- 25 years or more -- versus what happens in this project in this program. And it carries with it different resource needs, right. Different energy, different commitment, different people involved in that work. So I love the question because it really illuminates for us there's lots of different partnerships. And, and being very concrete about that, when we're embarking on the work is important, because it helps to, I think, set the stage for what our expectations are of each other. Okay, so is this Lina partnership or is this a Mary partnership? What is this? The University of Pittsburgh partnership? Or is this the Office of Engagement Community Affairs partnership? And that's really, I think, a very helpful exercise at the very beginning of one of these.
MARY HUNT:
Regardless of the type of partnership, are there common elements to a good relationship?
LINA DOSTILIO:
So one thing I think it has to be contextually relevant to what the people involved need to get out of it. So I think there's a level of honesty and maybe authenticity that's required. We need to know what purpose is this serving you and what purpose is this serving me. And because of that how we operate together will probably look different than the next partnership down the line because that has to serve a different set of goals and ends. So let me give you an example. In our field, in our literature, we talk a lot about transformation as being important. It's you know, to have impact, you want to be transformational, and that sometimes we get concerned about transactional work. And I don't necessarily disagree. I think, you know, if what we're doing is entirely limited to transactional interactions that can be pretty shallow. However, there are times where we need a transaction between us to serve the goals that we have. And sometimes having a transaction between us builds a little bit of trust with each other. And maybe if we have a couple of those transactions, now we trust each other even more.
MARY HUNT:
Very interesting.
LINA DOSTILIO:
And now we've unfolded a relationship. Right now we're actually in a place where you can say we have a history together. And I trust you. You said you were going to do something. You delivered on that thing. What does it look like if we were to move into a transformational space? Right. And my guess is that if you and I had put built that history together, when the opportunity for transformation comes, I might be one of your first phone calls or you mine. And that's I think part of a good partnership is that it unfolds over time, and it allows us to deepen our relationship together.
MARY HUNT:
I read something you said I thought was very interesting and so true. You said, “Community engagement is most successful when we recognize the self determination of our community partners.” Can you take a moment to explain what you meant by that?
LINA DOSTILIO:
Sure. So, universities and communities aren't separate and apart from each other. Sometimes we do a disservice in this field of positioning things as in-group out-group, one organization versus another organization. And there is some truth to that, especially if the university is in somewhat of a geographic remove from the community that it's engaging with, or if it's a group of individuals who maybe don't see themselves and the university very well. But a lot of the time, we are of one another, right. However, even if we are of one another, the people with whom we are developing a partnership, the people with whom we are developing a relationship have goals, and agendas, assets and resources that need to be taken into account and they need to be respected. It doesn't mean that we check the university goals and agendas at the door. In fact, what I think we need to do is be really transparent about those. Here's a couple of things that we probably need to get done here. For me to be in this relationship as an educator I need to teach my students or for me to be in this relationship as a researcher, I need to conduct an inquiry. But if we ignore the resources and the assets and the goals and the agenda of the communities with which we are engaging, specifically the people that are part of that partnership, then I think it becomes very one-sided.
MARY HUNT:
What kind of things are Pitt’s partners looking to partner on now? Are there issues that are foremost in your partners’ minds, do you think? Or does it really run the gamut?
LINA DOSTILIO:
Well, the University of Pittsburgh is I would say a research, education and economic powerhouse. We're an asset in this region. And we really believe that we are a partner in this region's progress. So many times the folks who are coming to us are looking for us to develop relationship with them around some area of expertise. So perhaps it's a long standing community coalition, having worked on the frontlines, about an important issue to them. And that can range anywhere from environmental sustainability to gun violence, food security, you name it. And they are looking for analysis, data science, research partnership. Sometimes they come to us because they're looking for person power, right. So they want to tap our students in, maybe as extra sets of hands or new and innovative thinkers. Sometimes they're coming to us because they're looking for us to be a full-fledged problem solver, a thought partner in the approach to an important issue that they're facing. And sometimes it's a little more granular, right, they're trying to get a project or a program done. And they believe that there's some collaborator here, that has a piece of what it is that they're looking for what they need. So we get requests that are issued-based, I would say activity based, like the kind of activity that we're going to do together, relationship-based, hey, we really want you at the table for this, we want you to be in it with us. And that does, as you said, it runs the gamut, in many ways. But you know, Pittsburgh, and the southwestern Pennsylvania region, our relationships, even across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they're multifaceted. And so we consider the communities with whom we engage to be really quite diverse. Those could be communities of geography or shared interest, identity, right. And so you can imagine those sorts of requests come to us in many different fashions.
MARY HUNT:
What is placed-based community engagement? And can you talk about the different kinds of spaces that are associated it?
LINA DOSTILIO:
Yeah, so you know, we do quite a bit of place-based community engagement at the University of Pittsburgh. And really, it means that you've taken a very keen eye to what is your geographic place. What are the histories of that place? What are the social and economic context of that place? What is the cultural context of that place? What is the previous development, current development, future development? What are those concerns and issues? What are the agendas? What are the assets? And in having that very well defined sense of place it means that you rally the institution to be thoughtful about how it might approach being a valued partner there, right. How can we be a collaborator? What do we have at our disposal? What is the range of engagement assets that we could pull on? So we do some of that work at a very hyperlocal level. And by hyperlocal, I mean, that which is a smaller geographic area than its larger city or metropolitan region. So I mentioned earlier our neighborhood commitments, that is an example of hyperlocal community engagement, you know, 25-year, quarter-century or more commitments to a specific neighborhood, really thoughtful about all of those conditions and aspects that I just listed. Then we have a real keen understanding of the city of Pittsburgh and that is absolutely part of our place. And then we also understand our role in the 10-county southwestern Pennsylvania region. And so those are three different levels of place, if you will, all involved in place-based engagement. There are different strategies and approaches, partners and assets that we tap for each of those. But that's all part of it.
MARY HUNT:
Your unit overseas Pitt’s community engagement agenda. So I take that to mean engaged scholarship, community affairs. How do you and your team regularly interact with other units at Pitt? Whether it's colleges, schools, departments, units who are also involved in community engagement? This is this is a challenge I think a lot of institutions face. There might be a central office for community engagement, but it's happening throughout the university. How do you stay on top of what's happening? How do you interact with those units to sort of drive ideas and drive projects? Just curious, what kind of collaboration do you have with those units? In some ways, community engagement needs to be decentralized, but that's a curse, and it's a blessing. So how do you manage that?
LINA DOSTILIO:
You know, I, I love this question. And I love it, because it's asked all of the time, right. We're asking our peers this question. You're asking me this question. What's interesting is we don't ever really ask centers for teaching and learning, “How do you get your arms around all the teaching happening at this institution?” We just assume teaching is the core mission of higher education. It should be happening in every school at the institution. It should be happening in informal ways in student affairs. It should be happening in formal ways in our undergraduate and graduate curriculums. It should be… we don't ever say, “Do you know, everything that's getting taught, and how do you really puta a lid on that?” But instead, we say, “Let's hope it's happening in all the spaces, all the time, because that is the core mission.” And part of that is community work is the core mission of higher education as well where we… every institution has a civic mission. So I'm with you, Mary. It has to happen all over the place, right, it needs to be happening authentically as part of all of our endeavors and I think it is. And that's really the beautiful part about it. So our job in my office is to create an understanding about community-facing work that provides, I would say elevates and celebrates, the many different forms that community-facing work comes into and honors those. We certainly do protect, I would say, a standard of quality and an ethical position. We're relationship-oriented, we're asset-oriented as well. But as long as it fits that, it's great, and we want to celebrate it and we want to elevate it. So then it gets to us to have some structures in place so that we can best show up as a resource and a trusted adviser to the many different areas across the campus that are looking to do this kind of work and doing it quite well. So we have a number of those kinds of structures. So for our neighborhood commitments and the community engagement centers that are part of those, we have an internal advisory council. So there's a dean-appointed representative from each school at the institution and some auxiliary units that sits on that. We also have an engagement community of practice. This is an opt-in, self-selected learning community, if you will, for people who see as part of their formal role with the university some level of responsibility for supporting community engagement. And that has been tremendously successful. We have just about 200 people that participate in that engagement community of practice. And we bring them together once a term to share some of their work, share best practices, do some joint learning. It's a wonderfully powerful motivator. We have an engagement map at the University of Pittsburgh and on this our outreach and engagement activities. It really just allows us to understand where Pitt’s doing its work, with whom, why, to what impact. We also have an annual forum. It's our community engaged scholarship forum. And so this is a place where we can really bring out most of the engaged scholarship happening at the university and have that presented and have that discussed. There are many community partners that participate in that, many different people across the institution. And then finally, we have some regular touchpoints with key offices across the campus. So I meet frequently with the deans. We are in constant communication with our provost’s office, of course. We're located in University Relations, which is a part of our Chancellor's Office. We have regular conversations with Pitt Research, which is our research arm. And by that I don't mean sort of happenstance conversations, but we set these up, right, sort of check-in discussions. What are you doing? What are you working on? What are your strategic agendas? These are what our strategic agendas are. This is what's going on in our area. We also do that with a few of our external partners as well as peer institutions. And so having that kind of routinized structured set of contact points allows us to celebrate and to populate really great information. It does not mean though, that we know everything by any stretch of the imagination. Right. And that's, that's okay. I mean, as long as we're all just sort of trying to row in the in the right direction.
MARY HUNT:
Let's talk about the book. You are the editor and a major contributor to the Community Engaged Professional in Higher Education, a Competency Model for an Emerging Field. What was the impetus for this book? What were you and your contributors… or your collaborators, excuse me, trying to achieve? What need were you trying to fill?
LINA DOSTILIO:
Yeah. Well, it started a long time ago, I was a center director, I was a director of an engagement center and I was doing my doctoral studies. And I really was interested in the role of staff. I thought, you know, we had so much written about faculty, students, partnerships themselves, executive leadership, but we didn't have much written on this idea of staff. And as a staff person, I thought, you know, there's a lot there; I want to investigate that. And to be really honest with you, Mary, I went out and I was told… and this wasn't in the institution that I was studying, but instead at the field level, there's no there there. I thought, really, that's fascinating. I think that's not accurate. But I didn't necessarily have a venue to do that work. It wasn't something that was available to me. In fact, my dissertation focused on multisector, democratic partnerships, right. So I looked at partnerships. But pretty soon thereafter, I got this amazing opportunity to work through Campus Compact, and at that time, the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement, to think about what is the role of these intermediaries on our campuses. And it turns out we actually play quite a large role in the nature of community-facing work in higher education because if you think about it, we are the supports, resources, trusted advisors, our orientation to the work ends up being transmitted and becomes the orientation to many other people at a particular institution of higher education. Our competence, our skill, our ability to have productive dialogue and deal with conflict -- it all influences how community facing work happens. And so it was really the opportunity for us to dive deeply into this idea of the staff person. And we broadened that language out to community engagement professionals because we came to realize that staff isn't necessarily an inclusive term. So you can have all different manner of people that are involved, but really, the goal here is that they have responsibility for administering -- for supporting -- community engagement. And then it took off from there, right, by making visible the role and really digging into how the work gets done and what capacities those people need to provide. It then unfolded for us the idea that there are certain competencies that we can develop. And it was really a just an amazing opportunity. And I'll say one last thing about this, Mary, I was blown away by the number of people that came to me as we were doing the study, as we were writing the book, and now once the book was published, and said, “I feel validated, it feels finally, like I have a body of work, and a group of peers with whom now we have a name, and we know what we're doing.” And that wasn't to say that that wasn't happening before. It just wasn't as visible. And so that's tremendously rewarding.
MARY HUNT:
You talk about in the book a continuum of community engagement professionals. Can you help us visualize that? You talked about first generation community engagement staff versus second generation community engagement practitioners. What did you mean by that?
LINA DOSTILIO:
Yeah. So, I think if we look historically at the kinds of people who were doing this work, I mean, there was a real sort of, and the idea is that this goes back to first generation and second generation change, right? So it's an organizational change framework. First-generation change really is that which is on the surface; it's those things that are easily rearranged, tasks done. Second generation is about changing the actual focus, agenda and strategy behind the work. Right. So first generation professionals when we look back, you know, I think maybe in the book, we referenced this, right. You could see them, they were organizing transportation, they were just sort of slotting students into service learning hours, right? There's this sort of administrative or I don't want to say clerical function, but in some ways it was that. And we weren't fully explaining or maximizing the relationships that many of these individuals had in real civic change agendas in their communities. But that changed, and it changed not because some, you know, somehow higher education recognized that there was this unrealized potential, but it was from the professionals themselves. They were really called into being partners with community audiences, faculty audiences, student audiences, by the institution itself and able to say, you know, actually, we need to rethink the role of our civic mission. The role of this work within higher education. And so now in the second generation you're seeing that very deep strategic agenda-setting work. And of course, the body of work changes over time. So even since we've developed the book, I think there's some areas of practice that maybe weren't included in that past or maybe are evolving and becoming more relevant now. But that's really what we meant by this first generation-second generation.
MARY HUNT:
Do you envision a third generation? What can you say about how you envision the next generation of practitioners working? What their needs are? What skills they'll be developing, or if they'll be working differently than the second generation?
LINA DOSTILIO:
Well, I think it's interesting that we've had so many of these positions proliferate in higher education. And with that comes the opportunity to have more specialization. So I think it's less the case these days, although I'm sure it's still happening, that you would have a singular person on a campus responsible for community engagement. So now you start to see more robust offices, because there's far more integration across the teaching and research and capacity-building missions of higher ed. And so we're starting to see different functionality come underneath these umbrellas, whether it's within an office structure, so you might have an office of, as ours is, one that handles community engagement, community outreach and community affairs, right. That was not as common before. Maybe you're seeing that or functionality that's grouped, even outside of a community engagement focus. So we're starting to see far more infrastructure around diversity, equity, inclusion and engagement. And so that's interesting to me. I think we're going to start to see more of this grouping together of those functionalities that have shared interest, shared motivation within higher education, and then within those entities seeing more specialization, which, you know, we'll see. That's a prediction; we'll see where that goes. But it tends to be what I'm seeing on college campuses today.
MARY HUNT:
What do community engagement professionals need from their institutions in order to be successful as community engagement professionals and also to be successful partners? What can the institution give them? Or how can we support them in their work?
LINA DOSTILIO:
I think it's so important that institutions recognize that this is, in fact, a body of work, that it's not something that just anybody can do. I certainly feel that most people could learn how to facilitate community engagement, but the idea here is it's not interchangeable with just any other job functionality, right? It's a body of work. There's competence involved with it. There's a set of dispositions and skills and knowledge that go into this. And so recognizing that it is, in fact, a body, that means then that there needs to be space created for that, right. And I'm not talking about elaborate infrastructural designs or budgetary. I think that's immaterial to this. What I'm talking about is the respect and the excitement about the potential of having someone or people on a campus help to marshal an engagement agenda for that campus. So then you also asked me what community engagement professionals need to do in order to position themselves as partners. So I go back to the idea that we need to, and I'll use that phrase... it was my colleague Jamilah Ducar that really hammers this phrase, and I love it… we need to “elevate and celebrate” the work happening on our campuses. Community engagement professionals themselves do not engage communities. We operate with this whole orchestra of people who do that work. And so we need to be resource partners, trusted advisors, cheerleaders, sometimes accountability partners. And I think if we do that, if we show up in the spirit of wanting to advance this multifaceted set of work, then we become great partners. And how do we need to show up externally? I think we do need to have civic selves. I think it's very hard to be a community engagement professional and not be really integrated with the life of a community, if not multiple communities. We have to be present where community is being built. We have to be present where community issues are being discussed and can be solved and addressed. I think we need to have this sort of civic mindset that draws us to that. And because we're in those spaces in those places, that's when we become those designated listeners, those bridges, those problem solvers, the connectors, which is so much a part of our functionality.
MARY HUNT:
I have one more question, but I hesitate to ask it because you've already answered it. It’s what I call the “gem of the day.” Since this is The Engagement Ring, I have to ask you for some sort of tidbit, piece of advice, wisdom, knowledge, quote, story -- anything you’d like to offer that you think someone listening to the podcast would be richer for because of it. But I feel as though you've just offered back-to-back-to-back gens all through this conversation, so I don't want to put you on the spot but…
LINA DOSTILIO:
Thanks. Um, you know, I will say this, to both explain the interview to this point and also explain the gem. There's nothin’ new under the sun. So the things I'm sharing today are the things that I was taught by my mentors. And when I was in my doctoral program, one of our faculty used to hammer this quote. And it's a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. And it's, “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” And it became such an important way… It's an important part of my thinking. I think there's a lot of this work that's complex. I think there's a lot of complexity in what's going on in our communities. I think there's complexity in what's going on in higher education. And sometimes it's maybe because we are insecure and trying to present things simply, and just at a very pragmatic level. Or perhaps it's because we're still dealing with the complexity ourselves and we haven't gotten through the forest just yet. But we make it too hard. Right, we gotta, we gotta work through it, work through the complexity, come out the other side, and be as simple and relatable and focused as possible. And I, that was a really hard lesson for me to learn. If you watch my writing over time you can see how my language has changed. It used to be very complex and it's not anymore. And that's because I was a first gen kid. And I really wanted to sound smart, and I was smart. And I wrote with everybody else's framework in mind. But you got to just write simply at the end of the day, and it also goes for program design. And it also goes for relationships. And it doesn't mean that we can shortcut it though, right? You can't just be simple. You actually have to do the work of getting through the complex, and really considering all the issues at hand…
[Theme music begins to play under Janine’s comments]
LINA DOSTILIO:
...and doing the hard work of relationship building, and then you come out the other side, and you say, okay, I know what the nugget is. I know that if we take care of these couple of things, if we can make just these couple of things, that's when we're going to see impact. So that's the gem that was given to me and I like to pass it along. When I teach, I pass it along. When I work with my team, I pass it along, and thought it might be relevant here.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, that was a great gem! Thank you, Lina. That was wonderful. And such a great conversation. I've learned a lot and I look forward to learning much more from you in the future. And I hope I'll get a chance to talk with you again soon. Thanks for being my guest.
LINA DOSTILIO:
Mary, it's been really nice to spend this time with you.
ANNOUNCER:
Dr. Lina Dostilio is vice chancellor of engagement and community affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, and an associate professor of practice within the Department of Educational Foundations, Organizations and Policy at Pitt’s School of Education. Dr.Dostilio’s research explores the community engagement professional in higher education and hyperlocal place- based engagement. She initiated and led Campus Compact’s project on the community engagement professional, a national research project staffed by 19 research fellows across the country that produced the Community Engagement Professional in Higher Education: A Competency model for an Emerging Field from Stylus Publishing, 2017 and the Community Engagement Professional’s Guidebook, also from Stylus Publishing in 2019. For more information, visit the resource page for this episode of The Engagement Ring on Simplecast. The engagement ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany O P E at Albany dot edu.