Guide to Community Engagement

• NKU students and student organizations provide thousands of hours of volunteer service to the community each year. May nonprofits build long-term relationships with student organizations and jointly plan their volunteering efforts together. If your organization is new to connecting with NKU, we advise these steps:
• List your volunteer opportunity on the United Way of Greater Cincinnati’s volunteer matching site. We routinely advise students to check for volunteer opportunities on this site. 
• Contact Inspiring Service about profiling your nonprofit. NKU students, classes and organizations watch this site for engagement opportunities.
• Contact NKU’s Office of Student Engagement to discuss your opportunity: Brandi Mulligan, VISTA for Student Engagement and Student Affairs, at mulliganb1@nku.edu.
• Fill out our Connect with NKU form to describe your volunteer opportunity. We’ll forward your information to the appropriate NKU office for consideration.

Internships and co-ops give students real world work experience in their field. Internships can be paid or unpaid (of course, paid internships draw more interest from students). They can include academic credit but often do not. Co-ops typically are arranged with a student’s academic department through the NKU Career Services. Co-op students are paid and receive academic credit.

Some tips:

• You can create an internship tailored to your needs. Keep in mind that the university operates on a semester system. Typically, the length of an internship aligns with the semester. Fall and Spring semesters are 16 weeks. You can find exact dates on the university calendar. 
• Learn more about creating an internship opportunity from NKU’s Career Services.
• Career Services lists co-ops and internships in an online opportunity center for students.
• Fill out our Connect with NKU form to describe your internship or co-op opportunity. We’ll forward your information to the appropriate NKU office for consideration.

Service learning combines service with the classroom. Not all service opportunities are good fit for service learning because the No. 1 requirement is that the opportunity must align with the learning outcomes of the class. Service learning is NOT volunteering. Your agency, for example, may need help stuffing envelopes for an upcoming event or sprucing up a garden or playroom. Those may be great volunteer opportunities. They are unlikely service learning opportunities. Like many universities, NKU has specifically defined service learning as an academic activity.

A good way to think about service learning is to think about it as project-based learning. For example, a class learning photography may be able to take photos at your nonprofit. A class studying local history may be able to research a historic topic for you. A class learning to write grants may be able to help write a grant application for you. A class learning marketing may be able to provide some marketing research.

Some tips:

• Remember that a typical semester is 16 weeks long. While your project may not take the full 16 weeks, it should be sufficiently in-depth to engage a class for a longer period of time.
• Service learning typically involves either a whole class or a team of students. It typically is not a singular effort by one student. Think about projects that require this team approach.
• Fill out our Connect with NKU form to describe your internship or co-op opportunity. We’ll forward your information to the appropriate NKU office for consideration.

One benefit of having NKU in our community is that our faculty—as well as our centers and institutes—offer a wide array of expertise across many academic disciplines, from biology to business, from law to library science, from marketing to management, from chemistry to kinesiology.

Perhaps you would like a speaker. Or just have a question. Let us connect you to an NKU expert.

Some tips:

• The NKU experts application. 
• The NKU directory gives you quick access to contact information for our faculty (hint: fill in just the “department” field to find faculty working in a specific academic discipline).
• Check out our list of centers and institutes to see if one of those can assist you.
• Each academic department has its own website, telling you more about its area of expertise and its faculty. (Hint: Use the A-Z Index hyperlink to find the department you want).
• Fill out our Connect with NKU form to describe your need for an expert. We’ll forward your information to the appropriate NKU office for consideration.

NKU faculty and students are active researchers, and much of their research is with community partners. As with many opportunities, every research idea will not be a “fit” for our faculty and students. But some will. The starting point is to let us know your idea—and we’ll take a look.

• Fill out our Connect with NKU form to describe your need for research. We’ll forward your information to the appropriate NKU office for consideration.

NKU’s Center for Applied Informatics can help with you IT/tech needs. The center uses a virtual co-op model to assign a student team to your project. CAI is a fee-for-service center. CAI can build an app or website, create an online video, set up a dashboard to manage data, and otherwise work with you on IT and tech needs.

• Fill out our Connect with NKU form to describe your IT or tech need. We’ll forward your information to the appropriate NKU office for consideration.

NKU has meeting places available for public use, including small and large rooms. There is a use fee for most facilities. The James C. and Rachel M. Votruba Student Union, for example, has large and small meeting rooms and a rate schedule.

• Fill out our Connect with NKU form to describe your need for space. We’ll forward your information to the appropriate NKU office for consideration.