Outreach and Community Engagement
The Office of Outreach and Community Engagement at Texas Tech Health El Paso focuses on expanding outreach and promoting bilateral engagement between our university's students, faculty and staff, and our Borderplex community. From pairing community needs with campus expertise to promoting a culture of service, our office is among the university's central resources for community partnership.
An engaged university is one that produces research of significance that benefits the society and educates students for productive roles in a modern and diverse world by a) maintaining high standards for scholarship and b) partnering with individuals and organizations outside of the academia for the mutual beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources.
Community Engagement describes the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity. (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2006).
Engagement occurs when a faculty, staff, or student's research, teaching, or service activities significantly engages their scholarly expertise with communities outside of the university with the direct goal of improving outcomes for those who live and work in them.
Engagement between members of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso and its borderland communities can take many forms ranging from one-directional outreach to engaged scholarship.
Outreach typically involves a one-way relationship between members of the university and members of the community - with the university providing educational, health care, networking or other services and the community being the recipient.
Engagement, on the other hand, involves mutually beneficial, reciprocal partnerships between members of the university and members of the borderland community. It reflects a two-way relationship that leverages university knowledge and resources with the knowledge and experiences of the community. In an ideal scenario, the process helps create new knowledge that benefits both the university and the community or the general public.