Across all four pillars, several shared priorities define UOE’s vision for the years ahead. These include:

• Strengthening Partnerships and Collaboration: UOE’s role as a connector and convener is foundational. All pillars emphasize the importance of forming, sustaining, and enhancing partnerships—both externally (with communities, schools, and governments) and internally (across MSU units, colleges, and departments).
• Advancing Engaged Scholarship: Each pillar affirms UOE’s commitment to advancing engaged research, creative activity, teaching and learning, and service, and integrating scholarship into practice across disciplines.
• Building Institutional Capacity and Infrastructure: Multiple pillars articulate how UOE will collaborate with MSU partners and work independently to build and strengthen infrastructure that makes community engagement more feasible, visible, and sustainable.
• Coordinating and Aligning Efforts Across Units: Several pillars highlight how UOE, as a backbone organization for engagement at MSU, will foster coherence across units, reduce duplication, and align tools, activities, and language to support a unified institutional approach.

We aspire for UOE to have a coherent internal structure and strong, measurable external impact, supporting and reinforcing MSU’s national leadership in engaged scholarship and community-university partnerships. We envision a university in which all engaged scholars, students, and staff are supported and celebrated, and in which our collaborations with communities are strategic, sustained, and transformative.

We invite you to engage with us in this shared work. Whether you are a faculty member seeking support for community-based research, a partner organization looking to collaborate, a student preparing for lifelong community engagement and scholarship, or a campus leader aiming to embed engagement in your unit’s goals, UOE is here to connect, support, and collaborate. Together, we will demonstrate what it means for a land-grant university to lead with purpose, partnership, and impact.