Making Your Community Engagement Count as Scholarship in Nursing Education

Introduction: Getting Your Community Engagement Scholarship Recognized

In July 2026, nurse educator Sheila Grigsby was inducted into the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES), a national honor recognizing faculty whose community partnerships generate new knowledge.¹ Community engagement scholarship is not volunteerism; it is rigorous, documented work that advances both academia and public health.

Formal recognition for such work is expanding in nursing education, yet many nurse educators remain unsure how to position their community-based projects as scholarship worthy of awards and promotion. As promotion guidelines increasingly reward real-world impact, learning to document and present community engagement is becoming a career-defining skill.

What Is Community Engagement Scholarship in Nursing?

Community engagement in nursing can take two forms: routine service to the community, or rigorous scholarship that advances the field. The difference lies not in the nature of the work itself, but in how it is designed, documented, and shared. When you volunteer at a health fair or serve on a local board, you are providing valuable service. When you systematically assess community needs, co-create an intervention with partners, evaluate the outcomes, and publish the results for peer review, you are engaging in scholarship.¹

Defining Scholarship Through Boyer's Model

Ernest Boyer's Boyer's model of scholarship expanded the traditional view beyond discovery of new knowledge. It includes four forms: discovery, integration, application, and teaching and learning. The scholarship of application, or engagement, applies expertise to community problems with partners. In nursing education, this means that work rooted in community priorities, conducted through genuine partnership, and disseminated publicly can be counted as scholarship. Key elements include true collaboration, parity of theory and practice, and a direct benefit to the community first, with academic outputs following.

What Separates Scholarship from Service

To elevate community work to scholarship, it must meet specific community-engaged scholarship criteria: the effort needs to be significant, creative, documented, replicable, and peer-reviewed. More specifically, it must address community-identified needs, involve co-planning and co-implementation, and result in shared benefits. Traditional service activities like committee membership, one-time volunteering, or un-evaluated consultations do not meet this bar. In contrast, scholarly work produces outputs that are publicly disseminated and critiqued, such as published community-based research articles, peer-reviewed presentations, practice improvement reports, or innovative curricular designs.

Examples of Recognizable Scholarship

Concrete examples in nursing education include: - Curriculum Innovation: Designing and evaluating a community-based clinical placement program that is later adopted by other schools, through effective clinical partnerships in nursing education. - Research Publications: Co-authoring a peer-reviewed article with community partners on reducing healthcare disparities. - Dissemination: Presenting findings at a national conference with a documented impact assessment. - Collaborative Reports: Producing a white paper or policy brief in partnership with a community organization that is used to guide local health policy.

Each of these requires systematic methods, a grounding in existing literature, and a transparent process that invites peer scrutiny. Without documentation and dissemination, even the most impactful community work remains service, not scholarship.

Examples of Recognized Community Engagement in Nursing Education

Nursing education is shifting from a hospital-centric model toward deep, sustained community partnerships, and the scholarly work emerging from these partnerships is gaining formal recognition.

UMSL’s Community-Based Clinical Education: A Curricular Model

Sheila Grigsby’s Community-Based Clinical Education (CBCE) program at the University of Missouri, St. Louis illustrates this shift. Launched in 2021, the program embeds 120 hours of community clinical placements across every semester of the traditional BSN curriculum, not just as a final capstone³. By 2026, the initiative includes 40 community-based clinical sites, ranging from school health offices to neighborhood nonprofits³. This integration allows students to work alongside experienced community health nurses and build relationships over multiple semesters, an example of innovative teaching strategies in nursing education.

The program’s scholarly output demonstrates how practice fuels academic recognition. Grigsby co-authored a 2023 *Harm Reduction Journal* article that used community engagement strategies to identify drivers of rising opioid overdose deaths among Black men in North St. Louis². This peer-reviewed publication, coupled with her service-learning program at two local elementary schools serving 48 students each semester⁴, contributed to her 2026 induction into the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES)¹.

Broader Impact on Students and Community

• Soft skills: Students develop communication, advocacy, and cultural competence by working outside acute care settings.
• Social determinants: Placements in schools, churches, and housing agencies immerse students in the upstream factors shaping health.
• Career paths: Exposure to community health roles broadens graduates’ employment options and addresses workforce shortages in public health nursing.

Recognition Beyond UMSL: A National Example

Across the country, similar work earns scholarly recognition. At the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, a team of nurse educators built a community-based clinical pipeline with local health departments and housing authorities. Their program, which integrates undergraduate clinical hours within municipalities’ health promotion efforts, produced three published studies on vaccine equity and chronic disease management in underserved neighborhoods. In 2025, the program’s lead faculty member received an ACES induction and a campus-wide research award, affirming the academic value of community engagement.

From Practice to Publishable Scholarship

Both examples underscore a practical pathway: design a partnership that meets community-identified needs, document outcomes rigorously, and disseminate findings through presentations, white papers, and journal articles. Programs that embed students consistently across the curriculum generate richer data, stronger ties, and more citable scholarship than one-semester projects. Nurse educators aiming for nurse educator recognition should view community sites as laboratories for inquiry, collecting pre- and post-intervention data, writing case studies, and co-authoring with community partners. As Grigsby’s work shows, a well-structured community clinical program can yield both improved student learning and a publication record that strengthens promotion and tenure applications.

The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES) and Its Role

The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES) is a national honorary academy that recognizes faculty, administrators, and community leaders who integrate community engagement into their scholarly work.¹ Its mission is to develop policy-focused studies and analyses addressing major social, economic, and environmental issues through collaborative scholarship.¹

What ACES Recognizes

ACES membership honors scholars who demonstrate excellence in community engagement scholarship and collaborative work with societal impact. Recognized forms of scholarship include creative work, discovery, and research, all disseminated through peer-reviewed publications or other outlets that benefit both the community and the university. The academy evaluates nominees on three dimensions: excellence in scholarship, collaborative societal impact, and capacity to contribute to the ACES mission.¹

Nomination Process

Membership is awarded annually through a confidential, peer-nominated process. Each nomination requires two co-nominators and a detailed packet that documents the nominee's portfolio of engagement scholarship and evidence of impact. The packet is distributed only to ACES members and supporting institutions, ensuring a rigorous and confidential review.¹ Eligible individuals include university faculty, staff, administrators, nonprofit leaders, foundation administrators, government personnel, industry professionals, and engaged citizens.

A Nursing Educator Example: Sheila Grigsby

In 2026, Sheila Grigsby, associate professor and PhD program coordinator at the University of Missouri-St. Louis College of Nursing, was among 24 new members inducted into ACES. Her nomination, championed by Patricia Zahn (a 2025 ACES inductee), highlighted Grigsby's extensive community engagement, from developing a 40-site community-based clinical education program to co-authoring harm reduction research with community partners. Her work exemplifies how nurses as educators can build a recognized scholarship of engagement that bridges academia and local health needs.

Benefits for Nurse Educators

ACES membership provides national recognition and peer validation, strengthening promotion and tenure cases along the nurse educator career path. For nurse educators, it signals that their community-focused scholarship meets rigorous standards and directly addresses social determinants of health. Being part of ACES also opens doors to collaborative networks, policy influence, and leadership opportunities in community engagement scholarship.

Questions to Ask Yourself

How to Document and Submit Your Community Engagement for Recognition

Documenting community engagement as scholarship is not about listing volunteer hours; it is about presenting a coherent academic argument that your community work generates new knowledge, advances nursing education, and improves health outcomes.

Assembling Your Portfolio

Start by gathering diverse evidence that tells the full story of your partnership. Include initial partnership agreements or memoranda of understanding that defined shared goals. Collect meeting notes, work plans, and correspondence that show sustained collaboration. For outcomes, secure documentation of community health indicators you influenced, such as immunization rates, screening compliance, or reduced emergency visits. Pair these with data on student learning outcomes: reflective essays, preceptor evaluations, and clinical competency assessments that demonstrate how the experience shaped their practice readiness.

Aligning with Evaluation Frameworks

Reviewers will assess your work against established rubrics. The Glassick Framework, adopted by Campus Compact and many universities, evaluates scholarly work on six standards: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective dissemination, and reflective critique. For each project, write a concise paragraph showing how you met each standard. Campus Compact's review guide expands on these with indicators like “reciprocity” and “sustainability,” urging you to document how the community benefited and how the partnership will endure. The American Sociological Association’s guidelines similarly emphasize quality, impact, and transparency. When assembling your portfolio, mirror these categories: explicitly label sections with the framework’s criteria so promotion committees can easily cross-reference your evidence.

Evidence That Speaks to Promotion Committees

Translate community work into academic currency. Published articles in journals like the *Harm Reduction Journal* or *Public Health Nursing* stand as concrete dissemination evidence. Conference presentations, policy briefings, and invited talks show you reached practitioner and academic audiences. Community partner letters, ideally co-authored to reflect equal voice, attest to mutual benefit. Grant reports and internal data briefs show rigorous methods. Student reflection data, anonymized and themed, can illustrate transformational learning. For example, aggregate quotes showing how students moved from “I didn’t realize diabetes management was so tied to food access” to articulating specific community-engaged interventions.

Framing Your Impact for Recognition

Do not just list outputs; connect them to significance. Use language familiar to tenure committees: “This partnership reduced health disparities among low-income elders by X%,” or “Our model of community-based clinical education increased BSN graduates’ career interest in public health from 12% to 34%.” When submitting to bodies like the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES), link your narrative to broader movements, such as embedding community health across the entire curriculum, not just a capstone, to show visionary scholarship. Many inductees have worked with mentors who previously earned recognition; seek those champions early to review your narrative for clarity and impact.

Promotion, Tenure, and Career Advancement: Why Recognition Matters

How does formally recognized community engagement scholarship affect promotion and tenure decisions in nursing? The answer is transformative. As nursing departments increasingly value real-world impact, systematically documenting your community-engaged work as scholarship can directly support your advancement through the academic ranks. Schools are revising promotion and tenure (P&T) guidelines to include this work, recognizing that solving community health problems is as rigorous as traditional research.

Nursing Schools Leading the Shift

A growing number of nursing programs explicitly recognize community-engaged scholarship in their promotion criteria. Purdue University School of Nursing added clear language in 2025¹, and UCLA School of Nursing defined specific benchmarks for appraising community-engaged work². The University of Tennessee College of Nursing³ and the University of Montevallo⁴ updated their guidelines, while Nevada State University⁵, East Tennessee State University⁶, and Saint Louis University⁷ now explicitly value community partnerships and impact alongside grants and publications. At the University of Iowa, candidates submit a community-engaged scholarship statement and letters from community partners⁸. The University of Pittsburgh now requires a holistic review system and external reviewers who are themselves community-engaged scholars⁹. These changes signal a profession-wide recognition that scholarship extends beyond the lab.

Career Benefits Beyond Tenure

Formal recognition unlocks doors that go beyond a single promotion decision, opening pathways to broader nurse educator career advancement. Faculty with a robust record of community-engaged scholarship are often preferred for leadership roles in community outreach, diversity initiatives, and interprofessional education. Granting agencies increasingly seek evidence of community impact, making your documented work a competitive advantage. Recognized scholars are also invited to serve on national committees, editorial boards, and advisory groups, amplifying your professional network and reputation. Being able to frame your community work as scholarship positions you as a thought leader in the field.

Advocating for Institutional Change

If your home institution has not yet updated its P&T guidelines, you can be a catalyst for change. Form a faculty learning community around community-engaged scholarship to share resources and develop common language. Work with your department chair or dean to propose revisions to the promotion criteria, drawing on examples from peer schools. With 79% of Carnegie-classified community engagement institutions revising their guidelines¹⁰, your advocacy is part of a broad movement. By articulating how community partnership generates knowledge, not just service, you help build a research culture in nursing schools.

Comparing Community Engagement Awards and Scholarships in Nursing

Selecting the right award to validate your community engagement work isn't just about prestige, it's about finding alignment between your scholarship, the award's focus, and the recognition your institution values most. A strategic choice can amplify your impact in promotion and tenure reviews while a mismatch may leave your contributions underappreciated.

National Academies vs. One-Time Awards

The landscape splits between two fundamental recognition models: lifelong induction into a scholarly academy and time-limited awards. The Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES) exemplifies the academy model, induction signals sustained excellence and opens a network of like-minded scholars. As a peer-nominated honor, it requires a robust portfolio of collaborative, reciprocal community partnerships. In contrast, organizations like the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) offer annual awards that spotlight a specific project or sustained body of work over a defined period. The AACN Sustainability of Excellence in Access, Connection, and Engagement in Academic Nursing Award, for instance, recognizes member schools demonstrating long-term commitment to these values, while the Exemplary Academic-Practice Partnership Award honors one-time or ongoing partnerships that often include community-facing nursing work. Both require formal submissions by May 15 each year.¹

Focus Areas and Eligibility

Nurse educators must match their work to each award's specific lens. ACES accepts a broad scope of community-engaged scholarship, including teaching, research, and service, provided it demonstrates deep community collaboration. The AACN awards are institutional, faculty can only benefit if their school applies. The American Nurses Association (ANA) Public Health Service Award targets individual public health nurses who show leadership and professional contributions in community settings.² For nurses specializing in hospice or palliative care, the HPNA Champion Award, selected by the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association, recognizes significant impact through advocacy or community involvement.³ Additionally, niche awards like the Annual Award of Excellence in Nursing from Indigenous Services Canada honor exceptional care for First Nations and Inuit clients, though geographic eligibility applies.⁴ Most awards require nomination by peers or supervisors, except where open applications are accepted.

Choosing the Right Opportunity for Your Work

Consider three factors when deciding where to invest your effort. First, assess the arc of your engagement: a multi-year, foundational program like Sheila Grigsby’s community-based clinical education model at UMSL may be best suited for academy induction, while a single innovative project could shine through an AACN partnership award. Second, evaluate institutional support, some universities weigh academy memberships more heavily in promotion than national awards. Finally, align the award’s focus with your scholarship’s health equity or population health dimension. A public health nurse leading HIV/AIDS surveillance might target the ANA award, whereas a parish nurse coordinating faith-community partnerships could find stronger resonance with ACES. By mapping your work to the award’s criteria, you transform recognition from a symbolic gesture into a strategic career milestone.

Next Steps: Building Your Community Engaged Scholarship Portfolio

Building a community engaged scholarship portfolio means intentionally documenting and advancing work that connects academic expertise with community needs, turning outreach into recognized scholarly contributions. Wherever you are in your career, deliberate steps can transform one-off projects into a sustained, promotion-ready record.

Starting Out: A First-Year Checklist for Early-Career Faculty

If you’re new to community engaged scholarship, focus on embedding evaluation and mentorship into every project. Your first 12 months might look like this:

• Month 1, 3: Identify one existing community partnership. Meet with your department chair to align it with scholarship expectations. Find a mentor who has successfully earned recognition for similar work.
• Month 4, 6: Design an evaluation plan for your project, think pre- and post-surveys, focus groups, or service-utilization data. This turns your service into measurable outcomes.
• Month 7, 9: Write up a short case study or program description for a peer-reviewed outlet. Even a regional nursing journal or an education-focused publication counts.
• Month 10, 12: Present the work at a conference and submit an updated CV with a clear “Community Engaged Scholarship” section to your promotion committee.

Scaling Impact: Pathways for Mid-Career Faculty

Once you have a few publications, deepen and broaden your work. Expand partnerships beyond your initial site, and seek external funding to demonstrate the value of your scholarship. Target national honors like the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES) induction, the 2026 class, for example, included nursing professors whose community-based clinical education models spanned 40 placements across a nursing curriculum. Apply for small grants first, then build toward larger awards. Co-author with community partners to highlight their expertise and your collaborative rigor.

Leading Change: Roles for Senior Faculty

Seasoned scholars can reshape institutional culture. Serve on promotion and tenure committees to advocate for community engaged criteria. Mentor junior faculty through the documentation process you once navigated. Lead task forces that revise faculty handbooks to explicitly recognize engaged scholarship. By championing these changes, you ensure that the pipeline of community-focused nursing scholarship remains strong long after your own portfolio is complete.

Ensuring Sustainability: From First Steps to a Lasting Career

Treat community engaged scholarship as a continuous cycle, not a series of isolated projects. Maintain an active advisory board of community stakeholders who help shape future directions. Document outcomes annually so you’re always ready for promotion cycles. Encourage your department to create a repository of partnership agreements and evaluation tools, so new faculty don’t start from scratch. With a systematic approach, your portfolio becomes a living record of impact, one that grows in value for your career and for the communities you serve.

Related Articles

Community engagement scholarship is no longer a side path in academic nursing: it is a fully recognized, promotion-worthy track with clear documentation frameworks and prestigious national awards like the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship.¹ The model pioneered by Sheila Grigsby at UMSL, embedding community health across the entire BSN curriculum, demonstrates how this work can transform education and earn national recognition.¹

Nurse educators who define their community work as scholarship, carefully document outcomes, and submit to ACES or institutional honors are aligning with a growing movement that values real-world impact. Now is the time to advocate for updated tenure guidelines at your school and build a portfolio that tells the story of your contribution.