Community Connect UW
New Online Platform Provides UW Community New Ways to Engage
The Community Engagement and Leadership Education (CELE) Center is proud to support a new online system called Community Connect UW (CCUW) for the Seattle Campus. This system is accessible to UW Community members and partner organizations across all three UW campuses as a part of the tri-campus building capacity for community engagement project.
The Carnegie Community Engagement Classification self-study process in 2020 identified opportunities to improve community engagement infrastructure and reaffirmed the need for a tri-campus management system to document, manage, visualize, and assess a range of engagement efforts with greater transparency, coordination, and accountability. CCUW provides a platform for managing, tracking and analyzing community-engaged learning and scholarship. Institution-wide management will reduce duplication of efforts and inequities across partnerships, streamline resources and enhance collaboration among faculty, staff, and students.
Starting during Summer of 2025, the CELE Center transitioned the management of community-engaged courses onto CCUW. This fall, we have expanded to include 17 courses, 70 community partners, and 700+ students enrolled on the system at the UW Seattle campus. CCUW has streamlined the opportunities for students to connect and engage with local organizations through volunteering as a course objective while also providing a platform for students to track and report their hours of impact.
Throughout Autumn Quarter, we’ll roll out activities and messaging for the Civic Health Scorecard—allowing students to earn points for activities that promote Civic Heatlh through categories like: Democratic Engagement; Environmental and Land Stewardship; Arts and Culture; Civic Dialogue; and Community Well-being. The Civic Health Scorecard will help students document their effort and over time will lead to digital badges that formally acknowledge their engagement and accomplishments.
In 2026 and beyond, we would love to work with you to more fully take advantage of features built into the Community Connect UW platform--expanding the schools, units, and programs that leverage this tool to track student engagement, volunteerism, philanthropy, public events, community-engaged learning and research. If you want to learn more about how CCUW might support your work at the UW, please reach out to Kathryn Pursch Cornforth at celecenter@uw.edu.
