Kansas City has always been proud of its neighborhoods. The launch of the Urban Mission Task Force prompted hundreds of Kansas City residents to place signs in their yard with the slogan “UMKC kills our homes.” One of the results established a portal for community and campus engagement.
The Center for the City was on the leading edge of community engagement. The goal was to reprioritize UMKC as Kansas City’s university. The Center for the City’s first initiative was a fledgling service-learning program with a handful of faculty and dozens of students.
UMKC created a broad-based task force to conceptualize and design a support structure for service-learning. Faculty from nine of the 11 academic units (Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Business, Arts and Sciences, Conservatory, Law, and Computing and Engineering), administrators, community members and students comprised the task force. Their recommendations for program services included: assistance with administrative burdens of formalizing partnerships for teaching and learning, uniform and university system-supported approach to managing risk and liability, evaluation of service-learning outcomes, brokering of community partnerships, assistance with course and syllabi development and promoting official recognition of service-learning as scholarly activity in the university’s promotion and tenure process. In addition to involving community members on the task force, UMKC held focus groups of representatives of community-based organizations. During these focus groups, representatives from nonprofit organizations reviewed the proposed program model and gave advice based on their expertise and knowledge of community needs. In the fall of 2002, the service-learning program scaled up as Students in the City, supporting faculty and their community partners in implementing service-learning.
In 2003, the Corporation for National and Community Service Learn and Serve America awarded UMKC a three-year grant to formally implement and support service-learning, including staffing and a faculty fellows mini-grant program. This increased capacity to support quality service-learning, catalyzed by the Learn and Serve grant, resulted in tremendous program growth. Service-learning went from supporting approximately 500 students in 2001 to more than 3,000 students in 2006.
To aid in continual program improvement, and as a stipulation of the Learn and Serve America grant, Students in the City conducted an in-depth assessment of students, faculty and community organizations participating in service-learning programming. For three years, UMKC monitored assessment data to inform programmatic practice and policies. This table summarizes the main results for students.
| Benefit | Number/Percent
Listing Benefit (2003-2006) |
| Percent believed that they could become more involved in their community | 90% |
| Percent saw that they had a responsibility to serve in their community | 86.8% |
| Percent noted that the classes gave them an opportunity to discuss their community work and its relationship to the course material | 80.6% |
| Percent believed their service-learning had a moderate effect on their attitude toward community involvement/citizenship. | 80.6% |
| Percent felt that they work they did through the course benefited the community. | 80% |
| Percent reported that the work they did in the community enhanced their ability to learn in a “real world” setting | 62.6% |
| Percent believed that the interactions with the community partners enhanced their learning in this course. | 63.6% |
The evaluation used a control group design to determine the impact of service-learning. These percentages were not nearly as high in the control group survey.
While UMKC service-learning met, and in some instances exceeded, the performance measures agreed upon by the Learn and Serve grant office, the grant was not renewed at the end of three years.
Reciprocity is an important philosophical underpinning of service-learning apparent in its definition scholarship. Quality service-learning engages students in service to the community that meets a real community need. The student evaluation outcomes demonstrate that, through service, students are learning about the discipline they are studying, as well as about others different from themselves. The results of the community evaluation show the importance of mutually beneficial service-learning projects and affirm that students can make a difference. The table summarizes key findings from the community partner evaluation.
| Benefit | Number/Percent
Listing Benefit (2003-2006) |
| Enhanced Offerings of Services | 64.7% |
| Increased Number of Clients Served | 52.9% |
| New Connections with Other Organizations | 41.2% |
| Increased Number of Services Offered | 29.4% |
| Increased Leverage of Financial/Other Resource | 23.5% |
After the retirement of the director of The Center for the City, its urban mission focus and academic service-learning became the charge of the Institute for Human Development. Shuttering the Center for the City, which reported both to the provost and chancellor, and moving service-learning out of a direct report line to the Provost Office reduced service-learning infrastructure and support.
By then, service-learning was already established at UMKC. Faculty who teach service-learning courses are oriented toward helping students see the immediate application of their learning. Even without support infrastructure, faculty members collaborated with Kansas City communities to provide students with an educational experience that brings together campus and community.
UMKC service-learning has earned national recognition on The President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for six consecutive years, and three times with distinction. In 2015, UMKC received recognition as a Carnegie Community Engagement Classification and was one of 83 colleges and universities striving nationwide to receive the honor for the first time. “These are campuses that are improving teaching and learning, producing research that makes a difference in communities, and revitalizing their civic and academic missions,” said John Saltmarsh, director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education. UMKC is honored to have earned this classification. It is a recognition of our university-wide institutional commitment to community engagement.
In 2020, service-learning returned to the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor. We are excited to give service-learning a reboot over the next year. Please join us in bringing together Kansas City — its neighborhoods, nonprofits and schools — with UMKC’s students and faculty for community-based learning.
On this page