More than Just Money: Strategic Allocation of Resources to Support Community-Engaged Scholarship

Community-engaged scholarship, research conducted in partnership with diverse communities outside of academia, is one way that universities can fulfill their public mission to society. Unfortunately, academic institutions are not always well-suited to support this kind of research, leading to recent attention on how universities can strengthen organizational conditions for community-engaged scholarship. Within such efforts, resource allocation plays an important role in creating the needed structures and systems to facilitate community-engaged scholarship. However, effective resource allocation is complex. To advance understandings of strategic resource allocation for community-engaged scholarship, this paper features illustrative cases of three public research universities, identifying and analyzing diverse resource allocation approaches, and employing the theoretical framework of organizational readiness. These examples include both internal and external funding, and span a range of focal areas, such as infrastructure, implementation, and convening. We further draw upon these cases to generate a tool to guide institutional leaders and funders in assessing their approaches to resource allocation. Through illustrating a variety of approaches to strategic resource allocation, we aim to showcase new directions in the academic ecosystem to better support community-engaged scholarship.