Office of Community-Engaged Learning

Mission

The Office of Community-Engaged Learning (OCEL) is dedicated to supporting the University’s mission of deepening community impact.  The office does this by forging mutually beneficial partnerships between university and community through curricular and aligned co-curricular opportunities.

We at OCEL connect the University to community partners for engaged coursework, research, and service. Our work is prioritized into 3 main buckets: 

• Supporting Student Success and Retention
• Supporting Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Service
• Increasing Community Voice and OCEL’s Visibility on Campus

We achieve this by:

Educating students and faculty on best practices of community engagement, such as classroom workshops and consulting;

Supporting community-engaged academic experiences, such as stewarding the proliferation of CC and CE course attributes;

Building capacity for community engaged faculty scholarship and grant acquisition, through efforts like our annual seed grant program;

Institutionalizing community-engagement on campus, through efforts like maintaining Carnegie Engaged Campus Classification; and

Including community voice in campus decision making, such as hosting a community advisory board and regularly surveying and debriefing with partners.

Vision

Institutionalizing community engagement on campus by valuing the input and experiences of community partners.

The Office of Community-Engaged Learning will be operating university business on a hybrid basis.

Our in person office hours vary, so please email [email protected] with questions or [email protected] if you need to make an appointment. 

We acknowledge that the University of Michigan resides on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg – The Three Fire Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations, as well as the Wyandot Nation. In particular, the university resides on land gifted by the three Nations and the Wyandot Nation, along with many other Indigenous Nations, in the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs. We acknowledge the language of "gift" in the original treaty entails mutual relationships between treaty parties, respect, and obligation on the part of the settlers. We advocate for Indigenous struggles against ongoing settler-colonization and strive for a decolonized future.