A new report has been released from the project to Build Tri-Campus Capacity for Community Engagement, in partnership with the eScience Institute through its Data Science and AI Accelerator program. Assessing community engagement at the UW: a roadmap, finalized February 2026, provides guidance on how to better assess whether the University of Washington is being a good neighbor and partner to communities that lie beyond its walls, with the recognition that it has not always done this well. The roadmap was co-authored by Afomia Assefa, Community Engagement Analyst with the Community Engagement and Leadership Education (CELE) Center; and Anissa Tanweer, Senior Social Scientist at the eScience Institute, with 40 contributors collaborating on the development of the concepts and the materials.
One of the central priorities of the project to Build Tri-Campus Capacity for Community Engagement is to improve how CE activity is documented, assessed, and understood across the three campuses. This newly released roadmap represents a collaborative, human-centered effort to define what meaningful assessment should look like at the UW and to lay out practical steps for implementing it. Through discussions with faculty, staff, students, and community collaborators, the project identified shared priorities, surfaced key challenges, and proposed both qualitative and quantitative strategies for capturing the shape, impact, and quality of engagement. The result is a framework for moving from fragmented reporting toward a cohesive infrastructure that makes the UW’s engagement efforts more visible, responsive, and accountable to its public mission. The primary audiences for this report are the future entities and persons at the UW who are positioned to act upon the recommendations put forward herein.
The co-authors identified three core purposes of assessing community engagement:
- Accountability: Assessment should help determine whether the university lives up to its commitments as a public institution. It is about ensuring partnerships are mutually beneficial rather than extractive, building and improving relationships, and understanding impact.
- Responsiveness: Assessment should inform and improve practice, not merely document it. It offers opportunities for reflection, course correction, and continuous improvement, enabling programs to adapt to community priorities and changing conditions.
- Visibility: Community engagement work is often invisible within traditional academic structures. Assessment can make this work visible both to decision-makers (supporting prioritization in tenure, promotion, and resource allocation) and to those doing the day-to-day work of community engagement (helping people discover related work and build connections across the university’s siloed structure).
Together, these aims frame assessment not as compliance but as a form of care—a practice that nurtures relationships, sustains ethical collaboration, and demonstrates the university’s civic responsibility.