Community and Extended Connections

Primary goal: To build, nurture, and extend connections with diverse internal and external partners to enrich campus life, local neighborhoods, the state, and the surrounding region. To foster innovative problem-solving and responsible entrepreneurship through strategic partnerships with alumni, government agencies, businesses, and community-based organizations to create a sustainable and prosperous future for all.

Supporting material for this focus area can be found here.

Strategic Goals

 1.  Promote a campus-wide culture that recognizes, supports, catalyzes, and celebrates collaboration and partnerships with groups at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels, including the K-12 education system.

 2.  Advance UMBC’s regional reputation as a vital stakeholder in Maryland’s innovation economy.

 3.  Strengthen UMBC’s position as an anchor institution for the greater Baltimore metropolitan region.

Supporting Objectives

 1.1  Adopt a common framework of best practices for developing and maintaining community connections and partnerships that includes ways to recognize and reward community connections and community-engaged scholarship.

Increase the number and quality of community connections.

Increase engaged scholarship and learning.

 1.2  Identify and support an individual or unit in the University that is responsible for maintaining an inventory of community connections and partnerships (including those involving local and regional businesses) as well as facilitating cross-campus communication and collaboration in this area. Identify structures and processes to facilitate the sharing of this information with internal and external audiences.

Create an inventory of community connections and partnerships together with improved communication, information sharing, and collaboration in this area.

 1.3  Strengthen connections between alumni and the on-campus community that foster alumni success and pride while enhancing teaching and learning, the student experience, and community outreach and development.

Increase alumni engagement and giving.

Increase alumni mentoring opportunities and partnerships led by alumni.

 1.4  Document and communicate UMBC’s commitment to community connections and partnerships.

Apply for classification as a 2020 Carnegie Engaged University.

 2.1  Develop a strategic plan for supporting entrepreneurship, social innovation, and technology commercialization efforts on campus, including means for increased collaboration among on-campus organizations sharing those concerns. The plan should also identify strategies that support undergraduate and graduate students’ interests in entrepreneurship, technology transfer, and social venture creation.

Increase activity by faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students related to entrepreneurship, innovation, technology transfer, and commercialization.

 2.2  Strengthen and grow UMBC’s research and technology park, bwtech@UMBC, leveraging UMBC’s strengths and alignment with state needs and opportunities.

Increase existing measures of the economic impact of bwtech@UMBC (e.g., square footage leased, total direct and indirect employment, tax revenue generated, sales).

 2.3  Continue to address novel and important professional development and continuing education needs in Maryland through courses, programs, and services provided by the Division of Professional Studies (DPS) and UMBC Training Centers including UMBC programs offered at Shady Grove.

Increase the number of and enrollment in undergraduate, graduate, and non-credit programs offered by DPS, UMBC Training Centers, UMBC’s main campus, and UMBC at Shady Grove.

 3.1  Establish a community-engagement action team to (a) develop short-term and long-term goals around high-impact issues in the Greater Baltimore region that play to campus strengths and (b) develop, enact, and monitor progress on a community-engagement plan to address the targeted issues.

Develop and establish goals for community engagement in the Greater Baltimore region and a UMBC plan to advance those goals.

 3.2  Identify and maintain presence in strategically selected business and community associations.

Increase UMBC’s involvement and visibility in business and community associations.

 3.3  Pursue with Baltimore County the designation of a Regional Institution Strategic Enterprise (RISE) Zone to support expansion of university-sponsored economic-development activities.

Secure a Baltimore County RISE Zone designation.

 3.4  Use campus facilities (such as the campus event center) to leverage community connections and, where appropriate, to increase revenue.

Increase community connections and, where appropriate, revenue generated by campus facilities.

 3.5  Improve students’, employees’, and visitors’ ability to know about and find campus services and activities of interest to them, using face-to-face, print, electronic, and online resources.

Expand the Campus Information Center and its online complement, the Visitor’s Guide, to create a more comprehensive “Guest Services Center.”