Community Engaged Scholarship Hub

Welcome to the Dartmouth Health Community Engaged Scholarship Hub. This comprehensive resource is designed to foster effective and consistent community engagement practices within Dartmouth Health and Dartmouth College. This hub addresses the increasing demand for community engagement and aims to standardize, enhance, and support these efforts across our institution.

Our goal is to nurture academic-community partnerships that promote health, health equity, and well-being in our rural communities. The resources provided here offer training, examples, and various tools to reinforce your community engagement activities. We hope these resources will support consistent high-quality engagement processes, common language, and ethical practices creating high-value experiences for our community partners and sustained partnerships for long-term efforts to improve health outcomes in our rural geographies. 

The Community Engaged Scholarship resources will continuously evolve as knowledge, skills, and practices evolve. We strive to continuously learn from our communities and encourage you to share successful practices through the online submission process. In future developments, we will work with community constituents to develop supporting resources for their roles as community experts and community scientists.

Together, we can enhance our engagement efforts, promote health equity, and build stronger, healthier communities. Thank you for your dedication to this important work. We look forward to seeing the positive impact of your engagement initiatives.

To learn more, please refer to the following sections on this page:

Community-engaged scholarship at Dartmouth

Dartmouth’s commitment to community engagement is reflected in its community engaged scholarship. Many faculty members engage in community-based participatory research, collaborating with local and global partners to address pressing issues such as public health, environmental sustainability, and social justice. This research not only advances academic knowledge but also directly benefits the communities involved by providing data-driven insights and evidence-based solutions.

Community Engaged Scholarship at Dartmouth (PDF)

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Community engagement definition, principles, and practices

Community engagement considers the diversity of communities—including culture and race—and aims to create an inclusive and accessible environment. Effective community engagement involves collaborative partnerships where community members actively participate in decision-making and problem-solving. It is characterized by inclusivity and diversity, ensuring representation from various segments of the community. Additionally, community engagement focuses on capacity building, empowering communities through education and resources, and sustainability, developing long-term solutions maintained by the community.

Community Engagement Definition, Principles and Practices (PDF)

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Health equity

Health equity means everyone has the opportunity to be as healthy as possible. Improving health equity requires an understanding of the root causes of disparities including poverty, discrimination, education, structural racism, political determinants, and more. Without changing the conditions that lead to health inequities, we cannot make sustainable improvements. Tackling these conditions will take collective action, bringing together partners who do not often work together and challenging the way we do work.

What is Health and Health Equity? (PDF)

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Geisel model of community service learning

The Geisel model of community service learning is based on ethical principles and processes to continuously engage community voice throughout the project.

Geisel Model of Community Service Learning (PDF)

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Community-engaged research

Involving the community in research design and implementation can increase the relevance of the research, improve how the study is designed and implemented, and increase uptake of research findings. Increasingly, funders expect researchers to incorporate community engagement methods as integral parts of health services research.

Overview of Community Engaged Research (PDF)

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Ethical considerations in community-engaged scholarship

Health-related community-engaged scholarship involves applying academic expertise to address real-world issues in collaboration with community members. It is meaningful collaboration benefitting communities, healthcare systems, and academic partners.

Ethical Considerations in Community Engaged Scholarship (PDF)

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Sources of demographic data and health outcomes

Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire are predominantly rural states with large percentages of land mass designated as rural and a large percent of the population living in rural areas. There are numerous way to define rural and federal agencies use different definitions. The U.S. Census defines the rural populations as those people who do not live in urban areas.

Sources of Demographic Data and Health Outcomes (PDF)

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Finding community partners at Dartmouth

In January 2022, a group of Dartmouth College, Dartmouth Health, and community leaders came together to lay the foundation for the Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity (CARHE).

CARHE was created to:

• Bring researchers, clinicians, and educators together with community experts to work and learn together, to make sure that people in rural areas have the chance to live healthy lives
• Support community-engaged partnerships to advance health and health equity
• Provide support to clinicians, researchers, and student service learners seeking advice about community-based experts in our region and high-quality engagement practices

Finding Community Partners at Dartmouth (PDF)

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Definitions and acronyms

This section provides a glossary of common community-engaged scholarship terms and acronyms.

Definitions and Acronyms (PDF)

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