The Community Engagement Research Academy (CERA) is the intellectual home for Portland State University’s community engagement work. CERA was established to create and share research about the practice and impact of community engagement. It builds upon the long-standing scholarship of engagement activity at PSU and advances the field of university-community engagement and partnership nationally.
CERA’s mission is to serve as a learning hub for faculty, staff and partners with a focus on theory building and testing—identifying effective and promising practices for university engagement. CERA works to create and sustain a community of scholars and scholarship concerned with how engagement can be delivered, assessed and scaled most effectively for the betterment of colleges and universities (e.g., students, faculty, staff), partners, and broader communities—local, national and international. The Academy seeks to create and use evidence as a means to ascertain the true and lasting impact of community-university engagement in order to guide better practice.
CERA actively supports the scholarly investigation of community engagement and partnerships and shares that understanding through discussions convened on campus, in the local community, nationally, and internationally, as well as through various forms of published work.
CERA Productivity
Portland State students and faculty have been engaged in hundreds of research projects that have helped advance our understanding of the power of partnerships between communities and universities. Engagement research activities focus on a range of topics, including:
- Student Retention, Learning, and Graduation: University-community engagement helps students stay in school, learn more academic content, increase critical thinking skills, and graduate at higher rates. Moreover, students from first-generation and under-represented populations demonstrate exponentially positive increases on each of these indicators.
- Community Enhancement: Reciprocity of interests and efforts with businesses, government, and the non-profit sectors are realized in community enhancement across educational, economic, and environmental outcomes.
- University Mission: Community engagement provides a unifying vision and purpose for PSU goals, processes, policies, and programs.
- Scholarly Teaching: CERA projects enhance our understanding of the impact of community engagement and partnerships on teaching and learning outcomes.