Building urban community resilience through university extension: community engagement and the politics of knowledge

Abstract

Many land-grant universities are examining approaches to community engagement to better align with the US land-grant mission of knowledge democratization. With a growing majority of the United States’ population living in urbanized spaces, it is a societal imperative for university engagement initiatives to devise strategies for engaging people on the complexity of urban issues central to individual and community wellbeing. Effective urban engagement demands collaboration and strong relationships with urban organizations and residents to co-create approaches to urban concerns. Through narrative-based inquiry, we explore urban engagements within Penn State Extension (PSE) across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (USA). PSE, located administratively in the College of Agricultural Sciences, is charged with carrying out Penn State’s land-grant commitment to serve Pennsylvania’s citizens through community engagement and nonformal education in the agricultural and food, human, and social sciences. We examine extension educator and faculty practices, program development, community engagements, and experiences, and those of community stakeholders. This work draws upon democratic methods to uncover the undergirding philosophies of engagement within PSE and how communities experience those engagements. This project offers an entry-point to longer-term applied research to develop a broadly applicable theory and praxis of translational research, engagement, and change privileging urban community resilience.

Understanding How Community Wellbeing is Affected by Climate Change: Evidence From a Systematic Literature Review

“…Community wellbeing is an “essential asset” to build a resilient community (Valinejad et al 2022 , p. 322). Community resilience is a concept that describes the capacity of a community to absorb and endure the consequences of stressors, confront threats, and adjust to new situations following a disaster by reconfiguring, adapting, or acquiring knowledge and skills to manage the crisis (Lindemann et al 2022 ; Valinejad et al 2022 ). Having high accessibility to resources and their fair distribution are keys to an effective community resilience and how resources are distributed in a community can reveal community’s resilience against a disaster like Covid-19 (Valinejad et al 2022 ).…”

“…Having high accessibility to resources and their fair distribution are keys to an effective community resilience and how resources are distributed in a community can reveal community’s resilience against a disaster like Covid-19 (Valinejad et al 2022 ). Building a resilient community also entail effective management of disasters (Lindemann et al 2022 ). In the 1990s, there was a significant global shift in the way disasters were approached, transitioning from Disaster Management to Disaster Risk Reduction (Bhola et al 2023 ).…”