Mina Silberberg is professor in family medicine and community health and has been at Duke for 23 years. She co-leads the new Duke Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship with Debbie Goldstein, associate vice president/associate vice provost for community-engaged scholarship.
What’s the purpose of the Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship?
The purpose of this center is to promote and support community-engaged scholarship, and, by scholarship, we mean research — any kind of systematic inquiry — but also teaching and learning. By community-engaged, we mean work that is done together with the community, not just for, or on behalf of, or on, but in some way co-created.
There’s a lot of that kind of work that’s been going on at Duke for many years … But what has been missing is something at the institutional level that would identify what exists now and where there are gaps, and then fill those gaps and more efficiently leverage the resources that we have.
The other need that the center fills is to better align the community-engaged scholarship that’s going on with the strategic community impact priorities that Duke’s Office of Community Affairs and our local community have together come up with. We will enthusiastically support any kind of community-engaged scholarship on any topic, anywhere in the world, but we also have a special commitment to support scholarship in the five priority areas.
What kind of work does the center do?
We think of our work as falling into three areas. The first one is facilitation, matchmaking and consultation. The second bucket is training — making sure that folks have the capacity that they need to do a good job at community engagement. And then the third piece is championing community-engaged scholarship, helping people learn about the great work that’s going on here but also making it easier to do that work.
There are a lot of administrative intricacies associated with community-engaged scholarship. We’ve been working with the PERC team, which is Partnering for Effective Research Collaborations, to try to make it easier, and they have actually accomplished some major wins in that regard. I definitely recommend if people are doing this kind of work to connect themselves to PERC.
Another example of championing work would be the community-engaged housing and economic well-being research request for proposals that we recently put out.
How can faculty get involved?
I encourage any faculty, whether you have a specific project that you want to talk about or a specific training need, or you want to brainstorm with us about what kind of work you do and how this might be useful to you, to get in touch.
Or if you have ideas about what we’re trying to accomplish and how we can do it better, we would love to hear from you.
Contact me directly (mina.silberberg@duke.edu) or email the center.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
The interesting thing about the center is that we span Duke Community Affairs and the Provost’s Office. That allows us to fulfill our mission of trying to better align what is happening on the academic front and mobilize our academic resources to amplify the impact of the work being done in Community Affairs, and vice versa.
The upcoming town hall [Tuesday, April 21 at 11:00 a.m., virtual] is an example of something that is being spearheaded by Community Affairs. It’s an opportunity, first of all, to celebrate, because Duke just received its Carnegie classification as a community-engaged institution … this marks 17 years of having been designated as such an institution, which reflects an incredible amount of work. It’s also an opportunity to talk about some of the initiatives that are on the front burner right now and expand awareness of what’s going on at Community Affairs, including at the center.