Primary Investigators:

Lana Rakow and Diana Nastasia, University of North Dakota

Partnering Organization:

Center for Community Engagement 

The Center for Community Engagement (CCE) at the University of North Dakota is an advocacy coalition formed of community members; representative community groups from eastern and western parts of North Dakota – urban and rural; and an interdisciplinary group of University faculty, students, and administrators. Since its foundation in 2004, the Center has linked academic resources with community needs, hosting two main programs: Public Scholarship and Service Learning. The “Community Connect” project, sponsored by a grant from the SSRC, will organize a physical and virtual community forum in rural North Dakota, with contributions from across the state. Here, citizens can meet regularly to generate and share civic knowledge and participate in community planning and organizing. 

CCE will launch an open call for discussion topics, gather a community collective to evaluate submissions and configure sessions, and invite and facilitate citizen participation. The forum will be accessible through a website, with blog content and audio and video streams. “Community Connect” seeks to document how participants create community content and analyze the implications for civic participation, broadly disseminating the study results. The project provides an on-going mechanism for civic communication and can serve as a research model for others. Organizations will be able to use this case study -- its new theoretical model, innovative methodological development, and research findings -- to replicate strategies for generating civic participation and content for other public media projects.