Community Engaged Scholarship Project Development Cohort

Community engaged scholarship takes time to do well: to develop strong collaborations, to create a strong theory of change, and to identify and enlist the breadth of constituents and resources that need to be involved.

To help give you the time and support you need, we offer the Project Development Cohort.

Over four facilitated sessions, a cohort of project teams work together to refine and advance their project plans to ensure logistic feasibility, community relevance, scholarly rigor and social impact. After completing the Project Development Cohort, each project will have:

• Clearly articulated goals, including what new knowledge and/or practice the project will produce.
• List of key collaborators and project contributors.
• Understanding of the ethical challenges that may be present within the project and plans for addressing ethical challenges.
• Project logic model or theory of change.
• Articulated set of academic and public products that will best disseminate the new knowledge/practice coming from the project.

Project Teams: Community engaged scholarship requires collaboration between community-based and university-based partners. Project teams should have at least one Pitt faculty and at least one member who primarily works in a community-serving program or entity not affiliated with Pitt.  This may include individuals working in non-profit organizations, governmental agencies, on behalf of resident coalitions or civic associations, faith-based organizations, or cultural or P-12 educational institutions. We will limit the 2022-2023 cohort to 6 project teams. Teams may be up to 4 people in size.

Compensation for Non-Pitt Team Members: To encourage full participation by community-based partners, we offer a stipend of $1,200 for attending all four (4) sessions. This stipend recognizes that community-based partners are offering valuable time and expertise and that they may not be otherwise compensated for their time.

Team Selection: To ensure that teams will benefit from the structure and content of the Project Development Cohort, we require teams to apply using a simple, streamlined application that verifies the project is a form of engaged scholarship, the team is comprised of community and university members, and that the project is likely to result in community impact.