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Good evening, everyone. As we approach ���������� Boulder's 150th anniversary, we're at a transformative moment. Tonight marks the launch of our first-ever Community Engagement Week. It's a perfect time to reflect on where we've been, celebrate where we are, and envision where we're headed. ��

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge the foundation we stand on today—built over decades by faculty, staff, students, and community partners, so many of you in this room, who understood that our university's strength is measured not just by what happens within our campus, but by how we engage and learn alongside the many communities we serve. Your vision, dedication, and relationship-building made tonight possible. Thank you for joining us and for all you've done to bring us to this moment.��

Now, let me share how ���������� Boulder is becoming a next-generation public flagship university. One that demonstrates national prestige and deep local engagement aren't in conflict, that they strengthen each other. And one that advances Chancellor Schwartz's vision that excellence isn't just an aspiration—it's an expectation we should meet through our community partnerships every day.

Part I: Our Legacy of Service

Our story begins in 1876. ���������� was founded through local philanthropy, state support, and federal land grants. The state constitution gave us a clear mandate. We were to serve all Colorado residents through education both practical and liberal, as well as through research and civic responsibility. This was our covenant with Colorado.

But today’s popular histories, which typically focus on competition among Colorado towns to host the university, and the powerful commitment of residents ofBoulder, miss a critical piece of the story. None of this could have been, had not the Enabling Act of 1875 allocated 43,000 acres of federal land to be leased or sold to support the State University. These lands, scattered across the U.S., had been taken from Indigenous peoples. Boulder itself was home to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, and other nations who were forcibly removed. We aren't a Morrill Act land-grant institution like CSU. But we are beneficiaries of federal lands taken through dispossession.

On Thursday evening in the UMC Aspen Rooms, we'll examine this history together. We'll explore our responsibilities to Indigenous peoples and all Coloradans, as well as how these land-grant origins informed the university’s public service mission. This conversation is essential. True engagement frequently requires facing uncomfortable truths. Please join us.

Through much of the 20th century, ���������� Extension did unique work, with a concentration on building civic infrastructure.�� We helped establish the Colorado Municipal League. Our faculty assisted communities with developing governance structures. This work shaped local government throughout the West. We supported chambers of commerce. We assisted health clinics and strengthened schools statewide. The community college system, with its first campuses in Trinidad and Grand Junction, was established with support of ���������� Extension.��

In 1970, ���������� Extension was renamed Continuing Education. ��Three years later, state funding for ���������� Boulder outreach ended.

Meanwhile, in the decades after World War II ���������� Boulder became a major research university. We gained global recognition for breakthrough discoveries and world-changing technologies. But some Colorado communities wondered if we'd forgotten our founding purpose.

By the 2000s, many campus and community leaders concluded that we needed to reconnect. In 2007, the Flagship 2030 Strategic Plan called for renewed public service. In 2018, the Academic Futures plan elevated engaged scholarship as central to our identity. We declared that research excellence and public engagement work together, not against each other. For the past couple of decades, we have labored to create a new model for aligning our excellence as a national research institution with global reach and our responsibility to directly serve the residents of Colorado.��

Part II: Where We Stand Today

This year brought exciting news. We submitted our first application for the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement. It's the gold standard for institutional commitment to community partnership.

Katie Kleinhesselink from the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship, or PACES, and Alicia Adelman from the Research and Innovation Office, referred to as RIO, led the application committee. This group studied how engagement is embedded across campus. The findings were impressive—and they demonstrate how community engagement directly supports our campus priorities of fostering the success of all students, faculty and staff, scaling research and creative work excellence, achieving global leadership in sustainability impact, and aligning our resources and infrastructure with our mission.��

They discovered that community-engaged scholarship is everywhere at ���������� Boulder. Teaching, research, and creative work done for and with communities. Work that’s collaborative, respectful and genuinely useful. In 2023-24, we offered over 450 such courses across 80 of 96 degree-granting units. We invested $17.5 million in engagement-focused units. We have 63 full-time positions dedicated to this work. Faculty and staff secured over $4.5 million in external support.

Let me share what excellence looks like in practice. Physics created PhET Interactive Simulations. It has delivered 1.8 billion science simulations worldwide in 90 languages. That's Colorado innovation solving problems from Kiowa County to Kenya.

The Shakespeare and Violence Prevention program reached 16,500 Colorado K-12 students from 2021-2024, supporting their social and emotional wellness—essential to the student success that Chancellor Schwartz has made our foremost priority. Climate researchers help communities prepare for wildfire while shaping global policy, directly advancing our sustainability goals. Computer Science students work with 35-55 partners each year. Fiske Planetarium reached 15,000 K-12 students, including many in Title 1 schools. Journalism faculty help rural newspapers survive.

PACES-supported projects alone reached 136,000 Coloradans during this period. These aren't just statistics. They represent real impact in real communities—the kind of excellence that defines who we are.

Our students show remarkable engagement in work that prepares them as citizens and leaders. Over 80% voted in 2020, earning the campus a platinum award from the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.��

And while such engagement matters for and is open to all students, research on activities like service-learning has consistently found that such practices benefitstudents from underrepresented backgrounds even more significantly. ��This seems to be true on our campus, as well, as our Carnegie self-study found that 63% of Black students participate in these, compared to 46% of students overall. This isn't just engagement—it's a pathway to the improved retention and graduation rates we're achieving. Our first-year cohort just reached a 91.2% second-fall retention rate for the first time on record. Community engagement is part of that success story.

Part III: Recognition and Responsibilities

This month brought an announcement we'd hoped for. The American Council on Education and Carnegie Foundation awarded us the 2026 Classification for Community Engagement.��

This isn't just another award. It confirms that excellence in community engagement is central to who we are. We're living public university values through genuine partnerships. Partnerships that honor community wisdom and build trust statewide.

Carnegie recognized something important. Modern flagship universities must be grounded locally and connected globally. Thus, local and state-level engagement work aligns with, as well as balances, the global engagement initiative that Chancellor Schwartz has asked me to co-lead with Vice Chancellor D’Andra Mull and Professor Seth Marder. We're working to ensure that international students and scholars are supported, valued, and respected, while expanding opportunities for all our students to engage globally.

We also now host the Carnegie Elective Classification for Sustainability. This dual role positions us to lead on both community engagement and environmental stewardship—two of our core institutional priorities that naturally reinforce each other.

Consider the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering. Students developed water systems with Rwandan communities. Then they applied those innovations in rural Colorado. Knowledge flows from Boulder to Kigali to the San Luis Valley and back. That’s the future of sustainable, globally connected engagement.

Part IV: Honest ���������� Our Challenges

Let’s be candid. Our Carnegie application and Chancellor’s Task Force identified a number of real challenges.

Our decentralized structure creates problems. Partners don't know whom to contact. Different units duplicate work. We have what Carnegie called a “loosely coupled infrastructure.”

Too many programs run on soft money. When grants end, programs end. Communities can lose trust. Especially communities already skeptical of large institutions.

We don't systematically gather partner feedback. We count participants but often fail to measure real impact. We rarely ask, at an institutional level, what ourvarious partners need and how we're doing.

Faculty worry engagement won't count for tenure. Yes, 27 of 43 responding units report that they recognize the engaged scholarship of their faculty. Nevertheless,the perception remains that such work is less valued than traditional research.

While outreach activities are relatively strong in Boulder, Denver, some mountain communities, and the Front Range corridor, this is less the case in rural Colorado, especially the Western Slope and Eastern Plains. Some communities feel overlooked. Others find us inaccessible. Yet as Chancellor Schwartz has made clear: everyone means everyone. All of Colorado, all Coloradans, all our communities.

Part V: Building the Future—Opportunity Through Engagement

Convened during the spring and summer of 2025, the Chancellor's Task Force on Outreach has mapped our path forward. Chancellor Schwartz charged us with making ���������� Boulder "a university for all of Colorado." The CTFO took that charge seriously, and its recommendations have now officially been adopted.

We're moving from scattered efforts to coordinated action. Not centralization—coordination. Academic units keep their autonomy and innovation. But now they'llhave infrastructure support. The new Office of Outreach and Community Engagement serves as the hub. It brings together previously separate functions, including PACES. Partners will have a clear front door. Faculty and students will have better support.

We're guided by clear principles that directly support our institutional priorities. First, a “One University Approach.” We will clarify and operate upon shared values. We'll see our various communities as connected circles of engagement. This means urban, suburban, and rural. From longtime Coloradans to first-generation immigrants to international scholars. Everyone means everyone. This includes Indigenous peoples whose connections to our place and our land-grant origins predate the university.

Second, “Civically Engaged Students.” Students aren't just recipients of outreach. They're co-creators of educational experiences and community solutions. Through civic learning and community partnerships, they develop skills for lifelong impact. Engagement directly supports student success—academically, socially, and emotionally.

Third, “Data-Informed Outreach.” We'll use multiple forms of knowledge—community wisdom, cultural context, qualitative and quantitative data. Communities will help define what success looks like. This ensures that we meet standards of excellence in everything we do.

As David Meens, executive director of PACES has recently noted, we're uniquely positioned to do this work. We're a broad-access institution with an unparalleled research portfolio. We can show that excellence and engagement strengthen each other.

Part VI: Action Steps Underway—Engagement Excellence Every Day

We are at work right now to move this vision forward. Several initiatives are already happening that advance the Chancellor’s four core priorities through community engagement.

We're creating an Executive Advisory Council for Outreach and Engagement. It brings together leaders from across campus, representing engaged scholarship and academic affairs, enrollment management, public partnerships and research development, sustainability, and advancement. This group will help ensure coordination and alignment.

We will soon launch multiple new recognition programs. Engaged Scholar Awards. Staff Awards. Community Advocate Awards. We want to celebrate this work because we know excellence deserves recognition.

We're investing in professional development. Look no further than this week’s activities, for which we’re honored to welcome national experts and trainers Patti Clayton and Diane Doberneck to campus. They're teaching partnership development, engaged research, and promotion strategies for engaged scholars. They'reintroducing tools like the Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale. These help partners reflect on how they share power and make decisions together.

We are at work building a comprehensive inventory of all engagement activities. This inventory maps both Colorado partnerships and global connections andenables us to identify gaps and opportunities. It supports both our local mission and the global impact initiative we're developing.

Taken together, these activities advance our vision of networks linking Colorado communities to global partners; of programs preparing students for both local citizenship and global contribution; and of research addressing Colorado challenges that also have worldwide relevance. We aspire to establish a meaningful presence in every Colorado county through partnerships tailored to each community and developed through equitable collaboration.

Part VII: Why This Matters and How We Move Forward

Why prioritize this now? Higher education faces a daunting near- and mid-term landscape, fraught budget pressures, enrollment challenges, and political complexity. But engagement isn't a distraction from these challenges. It's an essential element of the solution.

Community engagement rebuilds trust. When rural communities see faculty helping main streets thrive, when parents watch children light up at Fiske presentations, when businesses solve problems with our students—the university becomes real. It becomes theirs. This is how we demonstrate that excellence isn't abstract—it'stangible, it's local, it's personal.

Engagement bridges divides. Our work spans Colorado—red and blue, urban and rural, affluent and economically struggling. We can demonstrate, through engagement, that we truly are a resource for everyone. This is opportunity through expanded access and inclusion in action.

Our students crave purpose now, not someday when they’ve graduated and are out in the “real” world. Engagement enables them to contribute immediately through activities that support their academic success and personal growth. It prepares them to be thoughtful, civically engaged leaders. In combination with efforts like the Crown Institute's Student Flourishing initiative, community engaged-learning opportunities demonstrate how we support students holistically—exactly what manyneed to help them succeed.

The local and global are connected, now more than ever. Colorado clean energy startups address climate change worldwide. International students become Colorado ambassadors. They start businesses here. They create jobs. They build lasting connections. This is sustainability and securing the future—economic and ecological benefits existing together.

The work of the Chancellor’s Task Force on Outreach revealed profound commitment and passion for this work, alongside real concerns and persistent frustrations; above all, it surfaced incredible opportunities to deepen our engagement with communities here in Colorado and across the world.

Community Engagement Week comes at the perfect moment. The Carnegie Classification provides external validation. The Task Force gives us a roadmap. But the realization of our vision for engagement requires all of us.

To our faculty: Keep connecting knowledge with community needs. We're working to better recognize and reward this vital work.

To our staff: You make partnerships succeed day by day. Your dedication is essential.

To our students: Your energy and fresh perspectives inspire us. Dive in. Help us expand what's possible.

To alumni and donors: Your support makes this work sustainable. Help us tell these stories.

To community partners: Thank you for your trust, partnership, and patience. Keep telling us what you need and asking what we can do. Hold us accountable.

To all Coloradans: This is your university. We exist to serve you, learn from you, and work alongside you.��

Conclusion

���������� Boulder stands at a pivotal moment. As we approach our 150th anniversary, we're renewing our covenant with Colorado—a covenant built on lands taken from Indigenous peoples, and the trust invested by the people of our state. We acknowledge this history and commit to serving all who call Colorado home.

The Carnegie Classification isn't an endpoint. It's a beginning. It declares that we take our role seriously as Colorado's flagship, connecting our state to the world while solving problems that matter.

We're becoming a next-generation public flagship—deeply rooted in Colorado, contributing globally. We prove that excellence isn't just aspiration but daily practice. That local impact and global reach strengthen each other. That serving Colorado well means both bringing knowledge home and sharing our innovations worldwide.

This path requires humility—entering communities as learners, not just teachers. It demands persistence—maintaining partnerships even when funding is uncertain. It insists on rigor—the same excellence in community work that we bring to everything we do.

This is our moment. Together, we'll build ���������� Boulder as a university for all Colorado and a resource for the world. We'll put knowledge to work. We'll prepare engaged citizens. We'll advance every core priority—student success, sustainability, opportunity, and excellence.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Together, we are ���������� Boulder. We serve Colorado. We engage the world.

Thank you.��