The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES) inducted GWSS professor and director of the Obermann Center Teresa Mangum as a member during an Induction Ceremony at the Engagement Scholarship Consortium Conference. The ceremony was held Wednesday, September 27, 2017 at 3:30 PM, The Birmingham Sheraton, Birmingham., Alabama. 

The mission of the Academy of Engaged Scholarship (ACES) is to provide expertise to policymakers, higher education institutions and organizations, community leaders, and national and international entities interested in addressing complex societal issues through the effective engagement of higher education with community members and organizations. To do so, ACES selects as members persons in communities and higher education institutions who have been recognized by their peers as exceptional in their accomplishments in engagement. Members then draw on that expertise to further the application of engagement for addressing the challenges and issues of community and higher education partners.

Patricia M. Sobrero President of the ACES Board of Directors presented a blown glass engagement trophy to Teresa Mangum recognizing her lifetime commitment to mutually beneficial engagement with communities outside the university. Three ACES members introduced the new members; Katy Campbell, ACES Secretary and Professor and Dean, University of Alberta; Samory Pruitt,  ACES Founder and Board Member, Vice President for Community Affairs at The University of Alabama, President of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium, and Board of Trustee at Stillman University; and Scott Reed, ACES Member and Co-chair of the ACES Finance and Endowment Committee, Oregon State University Vice Provost of University Outreach and Engagement and Director of the Extension Service. 

Founded in 2013, ACES is a consortium of leading community engagement scholars and practitioners who are recognized for advancing scholarship that serves the public good. ACES highlights scholarship that has direct societal impact on complex societal needs and issues.

Community engagement scholarship focuses on ideas and raises issues that are important to communities and higher education institutions. The work is carried out in a mutually beneficial collaborative manner. 

• Achievements include the co-creation of significant, creative, original, and conceptually guided engagement through globally and locally relevant activities that systematically advance practice, teaching, and learning, and/or research and discovery. 
• Community engagement scholarship is documented, publically shared, and reviewed through various mechanisms, including: presentations, publications, professional practice, creative work, and including news and other media. 

ACES, through its members, assesses the current state of community engagement scholarship and provides a critical examination of the ways scholarship can be enhanced to impact complex societal and community issues.It provides recommendations, upon request, to inform local, national and international policy agendas. Itworks to ensure that scholarly activities, and ensuing policies, take into account the needs, voices, and perspectives of the community stakeholders, that there is openness and transparency of the scholarly enterprise, and that shared authority and responsibility for outcomes is as important as academic rigor.

The Academy’s Work

ACES provides a non-partisan, transdisciplinary, research and practice-based voice for community engagement scholarship through its cultivation of partnerships with national and international associations, groups, initiatives that promote high quality community engagement scholarship.   Through its members, ACES leverages the learning, discovery, and engagement capacity of higher education institutions and communities to influence private and public leaders to solve societal problems and recommend innovations needed by society. Communities, institutions and their representatives benefit from ACES through its broader promotion of scholarship that directly impacts communities and addresses society’s most intractable issues.

ACES works to expand access to local, national and global partnerships for funding opportunities on issues that lead to informed public policy on community engagement scholarship. It also offers a forum for publishing best practices on community engagement scholarship and offers leadership on international workshops and think tank opportunities interested in addressing societal issues by linking scholarship and community engagement.

Professor Mangum was nominated for her long-standing commitment to publicly engaged scholarship, teaching, and administration. Among her accomplishments, she is recognized for winning a Humane Society of the U.S. Animal and Society Course Award for Innovation for a service-learning collaboration with the Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center, co-founding the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, nation-wide leadership as a member of the advisory boards of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and the National Humanities Alliance, editorial board service for the journal PUBLIC, scholarly publications and editorial work in the area of publicly engaged scholarship and teaching, co-editorship of the University of Iowa Humanities and Public Life book series, and for programmatic experiments with new forms of scholarship and cross-sectoral collaboration that have won the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies national attention.

The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship inducted twenty members in 2017. Photos of the new members along with information about the academy can be found at the following website  See:  http://academyofces.org after September 30, 2017.