The Role of Civic Institutes on Campus: A Look Inside TCNJ’s Center for Community Engagement

The Center for Community Engagement (CCE) is a vital civic institution at The College of New Jersey. Civic institutes like the CCE promote civic engagement, community involvement, and social responsibility among students, faculty, and staff. In 2015, the CCE received the Carnegie Foundation's Community Engagement Classification, a distinction shared by only 360 other colleges and universities nationwide.

In July 2024, Katherine “Katie” Sheridan stepped into her role as manager of the Center for Community Engagement at The College of New Jersey. This is a new role for the center—she supports several strategic community engagement initiatives.

Sheridan collaborates with faculty to design both introductory- and advanced-level courses that integrate partnerships with community organizations. These courses provide students with hands-on experience addressing real, community-identified needs. She also contributes to grant writing, gathering financial support to fund student-led service on campus.

Sheridan serves as a community partner liaison, connecting nonprofits or community organizations with college volunteers. As a former TCNJ student and Bonner Scholar, she brings both personal and professional insight to her work.

We thank Ms. Sheridan for participating in the following interview, which was conducted via Zoom on August 7, 2025. In it, she discusses the role of the CCE on TCNJ’s campus and its community impacts.

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The Role of Civic Institutions in Higher Education

TABITHA HILLIARD: In your own words, what does it mean for a college to be a “civic institution,” and how does the CCE contribute to that identity at TCNJ?

SHERIDAN: A “civic institution” shares reciprocal relationships with the communities they serve.

For example, we are part of Ewing [township], Mercer [county], and New Jersey. We touch all first-year students with a CEL course requirement. Through this, we share the idea of “civic responsibility” with our students. We also support faculty who are excited about this work. A faculty member might say, “I’m excited about this research. How do I bring this to the community?” We also have a seat at the table of [campus] governance, share a relationship with the Director of Community Relations, Staff Senate, and lots of other campus committees. We push our perspectives on civic institutions, and [The College] supports and encourages this.

Why Civic Engagement Matters

TABITHA HILLIARD: Why do you think it’s important for colleges and universities to have civic institutions like the CCE embedded in campus life?

SHERIDAN: One important reason is that colleges and universities are public institutions, supported by taxpayer dollars. These tax dollars help pay our salaries and keep tuition more reasonable for [in-state] students. In this way, the community is giving to us. This is true for other state colleges and universities. For this reason, I believe we have a civic duty to give back to the community. Colleges, in general, are educating young people and teaching them not only how to be great engineers, doctors, and teachers, but hopefully, they’re also teaching students how to contribute to the communities they’re a part of when they graduate. Our job [at the CCE] is to encourage this from day one.

Key Programs at the CCE

TABITHA HILLIARD: What are some of the key programs or initiatives currently being run by the Center for Community Engagement?

SHERIDAN: We have two institutes. The first, the Community Engaged Learning (CEL) Institute. Through that, we run the first year CEL requirement. This reaches the largest number of people, approximately 1700–2000 new students annually, each of whom are doing learning and committing to service with us every year. Each one of these students takes three days of class and one day of service per week. We have over twenty partners we work with.

The second institute is the Bonner Institute, which houses the Bonner Scholars Program, a highly competitive, needs-based program. Approximately eighty students receive a scholarship in exchange for three hundred hours of community service per year. The Bonner Institute works with over twenty partners each year. To be a Bonner Scholar is a huge commitment; they must commit to fifteen hours of service and learning per week. Students who don’t qualify can still volunteer. We have approximately one hundred students involved with the Bonner Volunteer Program on campus.

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Community Collaboration and Reciprocity

TABITHA HILLIARD: How does the center collaborate with local communities, organizations, or government partners outside the college?

SHERIDAN: We make sure to center our work around community-identified needs. We make sure we aren’t saying, “We will tell you what we think you need and what we want to do.” We always make sure we are balancing community-identified needs with the student learning experience. We make sure students understand that the student experience isn’t just about them. We make sure that the community gets what they are asking for.

Impactful Projects and Student Contributions

TABITHA HILLIARD: Can you share a few examples of past projects that have made a lasting impact, either on campus or in the broader community?

SHERIDAN: We just finished our annual report; our numbers for the first year of civic education learning are impressive, with the number of students we have. Different students are performing different types of service each week.

For example, last year, a student brought several different students each week to engage in service with Mercer Street Friends. Those students packed over six thousand bags of food to be sent home with elementary school students over the weekend. Another project with Dr. Chung, who explores urban wellness in Trenton, has been doing research with UrbanPromise Trenton to identify best practices for working with at-risk youth. They’ve expanded and published multiple times, and continue to do so, based on the partner’s needs.

[Students] are getting an experience that they can then talk about in future graduate school and professional applications. Anyone in the country can look at this published research.

Challenges and Strategic Adaptation

TABITHA HILLIARD: What are some of the biggest challenges the center has faced in advancing civic and community engagement, and how has it adapted?

SHERIDAN: The needs of the community are ever-expanding. For example, food insecurity is on the rise throughout the community. We only have so many students, vans, and faculty who can confront this problem. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming to address all of the social needs that we have around us. One way we address this and adapt is by trying to work on the root causes of these social inequities. For example, first-year Bonner students might be doing more hands-on work like tutoring, working in a soup kitchen, teaching ESL, or teaching citizenship classes, but as they move through the program, they expand to working on building capacity, producing issue briefs, and working with local legislators.

The CCE tries to ask about the identified inequities in the community: “Why is this happening in this area? What are some solutions that have helped resolve some of these inequities in areas throughout the country that we might be able to do here?” The CCE tries to take a bird’s-eye view of communities because if we can see the bigger picture, we can make a larger impact.

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Goals and Growth

TABITHA HILLIARD: Looking ahead, what are some future goals or initiatives the center is excited to pursue?

SHERIDAN: TCNJ has the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification for the CE. This status is on a ten-year cycle, so we just submitted our reapplication for Carnegie’s CE classification. While working on this application, we were able to see how much we have expanded and improved in the last ten years. We want more advanced CEL classes, especially in areas related to hard sciences and engineering. We are looking to expand in these areas because the connections between these areas and inequities are less obvious than in the humanities. We want to expand the Bonner Program more academically. Right now, students take the same first-year seminar, which is about social justice, leadership, and equity. This course helps give students a good foundation. We want to develop a more academic capstone that the student can use to work toward their degree.

Student Outcomes and Civic Identity

TABITHA HILLIARD: What do you hope students take away from engaging with the center — whether in terms of civic responsibility, leadership, or personal growth?

SHERIDAN: All of the above! Ultimately, it depends on the student. There are six learning goals within Community Engaged Learning: Social Knowledge, Diversity of Communities, Application of Knowledge, Systems and Structures, Civic Responsibility, and Civic Identity, all of which we rate on a scale of 0–4, with 0 being least proficient and 4 being most proficient. [See the rubric here.]

Hopefully, after the first year of CEL experience, students have moved from a 1 or 2 to maybe a 3 on some of these outcomes. We don’t expect them to be proficient in all six areas. We want students to have a deeper understanding of these learning outcomes. Students might return to the same partner multiple times, and we love that. Other students, on day one of CEL, learn about Trenton's history, and maybe they’ve never heard of redlining or how historic policies are impacting present-day experiences within the community. Some students might be inspired to take action. We want students to customize their experience, whether it’s on the individual, group, or systems level. CEL doesn’t look the same across the board. If you choose just one way to get involved, you can make an impact. If we pick one area to focus on improving, then we will live in a more just and equitable society.

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