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ASU Community Connect
When UI was first established at ASU in 2002, we started to hear about all the great projects ASU was doing in collaboration with the community. We heard about professors focusing their research on community issues. We heard about students taking courses that combined service and academic work. We heard about a lot of different initiatives, but it was all anecdotal evidence—there was no list of those programs or courses, there was no place to go to learn more about all of those endeavors at once.
So we started collecting lists. We started filling in the gaps. We made a giant excel spreadsheet.
At the same time, another office, Undergraduate Student Initiatives (USI), had an idea for a web site that tabulated this information. They wanted to create a student involvement database, to be able to track student participation in community projects.
So UI and USI formed a partnership. Together, the two offices built a web site called ASU Experience that allowed searches for programs by zip code and impact area. Programs could enter their own information, via the web, and become a part of the database. Eventually, the site was renamed ASU in the Community, and the Community Camera e-newsletter, which calls attention to one exciting example of a socially embedded program in each issue, was developed.
For a couple of years now the web site has been up and running, and we have gotten a lot of positive feedback from both university personnel and community members who use the database to advance their work. Students comprise half the staff members who run the web site, writing the features for the community camera, liaising with organizations and professors who seek advice about entering their program into the database, and helping to make connections between people and programs.
ASU in the Community web site underwent some major changes in early 2009 and was renamed ASU Community Connect. The beta version is now online as more changes are being made. The software that manages the program data is also being updated, to allow easier data access and data entry. Promotion of the site is ongoing, so that university and community members are aware of this resource and can use it to network with each other and build their endeavors. In the future we hope to see the database and web site keep growing. We hope to see more and more people use them, and to see more and more socially embedded projects arise from the examples and information these resources provide.
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