PSU's Community Engagement Research Academy (CERA) was established to create and share research about engagement practice and impact. 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, partners, and broader communities. CERA 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.