Special Section Call for Proposals

MJCSL: Sustainability and Community Engagement


Introduction

The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (MJCSL), is pleased to invite proposals for a special section on sustainability. The section will be guest edited by Drs. Ruth Yow and Kristy Wittman Howell, and will be included in the 33.1 Winter/Spring 2027 issue of MJCSL.

MJCSL is an open-access, peer reviewed journal focusing on research, theory, pedagogy and other matters related to civic engagement, academic service-learning, campus-community partnerships, and engaged/public scholarship in higher education. Learn more about the goals of the journal on our website.


Special Section Context

Many higher education institutions in the United States have worked to advance commitments to improving environmental, economic, social, and cultural outcomes. By the early 2000s, many of these efforts coalesced into the campus sustainability movement, efforts broadly defined as institutional focus on the preservation and improvement of: ecological and human health, racial equity, social justice, and cultural beliefs and practices. Historically, those commitments have led to expanded institutional policy, practice, and staffing (Washington-Ottombre et al, 2018). Even in today’s tumult, the consensus is that universities and their abundance of intellectual, material, and human resources must be accountable to a planet in peril (Kinol et al, 2023).  As more higher education institutions have initiated sustainability and climate programs and commitments over the past twenty years (Dyer and Dyer, 2017), the centrality of engagement with local communities has become strikingly clear. Although college and university-sponsored global sustainability initiatives were and remain popular, the evolution and expansion of place-based community engagement - in student-facing programming, teaching, and research -  has helped transform the scope and ambitions of sustainability initiatives in universities and colleges. The sustainability leaders of the current moment in higher education are also leaders in authentic partnerships, long-term collaborations with regional impacts, and co-developed initiatives that center equity and justice (Sanchez, 2025).

The evolving literature on sustainability and community engagement has shown that the co-creation of a more sustainable community, country, and world lies in nourishing equitable, generative partnerships and creating educational opportunities that deeply connect students, faculty and staff with communities (Rodriguez-Zurita, 2024). A vital component of this work has been efforts to situate and understand institutions as anchors in their communities, formalized through the “anchor institution” designation that recognizes universities, hospitals, and other enterprises that fundamentally transform their local communities (Sladek, 2019). These institutions have profound effects in and on the places they occupy. Fortuitously, around the time that experiential or “transformative” sustainability education began to see substantial traction in the literature and pedagogy (Sipos et al, 2008; Brundiers et al, 2010) anchor institution frameworks gained momentum through the creation of the Anchor Institution Task Force in 2009 and the creation of the Anchor Institution Toolkit (Netter Center, 2008). In the years since, government - academic partnerships focused on local and regional climate action bring to the fore how well an anchor institution framing - “eds and meds” with outsized impact on surrounding neighborhoods - dovetails with a commitment to climate-focused, local engagement (Maurrasse, 2013). Exemplars in anchor institution activities show the rubber meeting the road of community engaged sustainability collaboratives with impressive local and regional results (Allen et al, 2017 Gruber et al, 2017). Both these approaches have their academic roots in the early 1990s, but the shared emphasis on place, equity, and partnerships increasingly permeated the work of leading centers and offices across the country.  

More recent calls for a sustainability agenda focused on justice make the stakes of local engagement all the clearer (Kinol et al, 2023).  As climate- and sustainability-skeptic leaders around the world have begun to embrace positions of retrenchment against two decades’ advances in environmental, social, economic, and cultural sustainability, state and local leaders and community groups are adjusting to rescue projects formerly supported at the federal level (Saks, 2025). These changes in scope offer rich opportunities for higher education institutions and government and community partners to nurture productive relationships deeply imbued with a sense of place, and to build new connections, opportunities we look forward to examining together in this special section.  When read together, our submissions will explore the heart and humanity of campus-community partnerships for sustainability.

We encourage authors to see this section as an opportunity to reveal creative coalition-building with community partners and government partners, community-engaged courses with compelling impacts, and community-engaged research collaborations that strengthen the capacity of communities and anchor institutions to confront sustainability challenges together. In submissions, we want to hear and see the ways that community and sustainability work overlap, where community transformation takes place.


Call for Proposals

We invite submissions that center the voices of all partners in community-engaged work, and that reflect the complexities of our work together. Especially welcome are pieces that reflect the depth and breadth of connections that institutional and community partners, students, and neighbors build in aid of a more sustainable future for us all. Our hope is that with authentic community voices, we can illuminate how institutions, departments, and centers are co-creating visions for sustainable communities in collaboration with local community-based partners through projects, courses, and initiatives.

Given the breadth of sustainability work, the depth of our connections across communities, and the scope of the kinds of work we do together, the editors also encourage hopeful authors to incorporate their work in all the ways it shows up in our communities. We especially look forward to reviewing submissions where community voices lead that call our attention to the different kinds of knowing, expertise, and creativity which combine to make community-engaged sustainability work possible. 

 

Guiding Questions

The special section aims to respond to five central questions:

  1. How does community-engaged teaching, scholarship, and service foster long-term stewardship of resources and sustainability-minded citizenship?
  2. How does an anchor institution framework allow university and community-based advocates who might not always be in conversation with each other to make those connections and to focus on institutional accountability for sustainability?
  3. How have practitioners, scholars, students and partners in the higher education landscape created innovative templates supporting engagement for more sustainable outcomes that others can learn from and adapt?
  4. How can the interconnected webs of community partners, faculty, staff, students, and researchers begin to repair the connections among people and their places? Where and how do they find joy in that work?
  5. Where and how has sustainability provided a cover for large institutions to do work at cross purposes with authentic community engagement and the advancing of community visions? If transformation is possible through identifying those tensions and addressing them, how does it come about? 

 

To Submit

Before submitting, you should thoroughly review MJCSL’s proposal guidelines. The guest editors welcome abstracts via email for informal feedback; please inquire before March 20th. Full proposals for the special section are due April 1st and should be emailed to kwhowell@uncg.edu

 

References

Allen, J. H., Beaudoin, F., & Gilden, B. (2017). Building Powerful Partnerships: Lessons from Portland’s Climate Action Collaborative. Sustainability, 10(5), 276–281. https://doi.org/10.1089/sus.2017.0010

Brundiers, K., Wiek, A., & Redman, C. L. (2010). Real‐world learning opportunities in sustainability: From classroom into the real world. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 11(4), 308–324. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676371011077540

Dyer, G., & Dyer, M. (2017a). Strategic leadership for sustainability by higher education: The American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140, 111–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.08.077

Gruber, J. S., Rhoades, J. L., Simpson, M., Stack, L., Yetka, L., & Wood, R. (2017). Enhancing climate change adaptation: Strategies for community engagement and university-community partnerships. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 7(1), 10–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-015-0232-1

Kinol, A., Miller, E., Axtell, H., Hirschfeld, I., Leggett, S., Si, Y., & Stephens, J. C. (2023). Climate justice in higher education: A proposed paradigm shift towards a transformative role for colleges and universities. Climatic Change, 176(2), 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03486-4

Maurrasse, D. (2013). Strategic Public Private Partnerships: Innovation and Development. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Netter Center. (2008, March). Anchor Institutions Toolkit. https://www.nettercenter.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Anchor_Toolkit6_09.pdf.

Rodríguez-Zurita, D., Jaya-Montalvo, M., Moreira-Arboleda, J., Raya-Diez, E., & Carrión-Mero, P. (2024). Sustainable development through service learning and community engagement in higher education: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 26(1), 158–201. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-10-2023-0461

Saks, J. (2025, May). Issue Brief: States Leading the Way on Climate Adaptation. https://www.georgetownclimate.org/articles/states-leading-the-way-on-climate-adaptation.html.

Sanchez, O. (2025, November 5). Climate change is ‘the new liberal arts.’ The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=93db85ed909c13838ff95ccfa94cebd9.78

Sipos, Y., Battisti, B., & Grimm, K. (2008a). Achieving transformative sustainability learning: Engaging head, hands and heart. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 9(1), 68–86. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676370810842193

Sladek, E. (2019). The Transformative Power of Anchor Institutions. Metropolitan Universities, 30(1), 3–4. https://doi.org/10.18060/22919

Washington-Ottombre, C., Washington, G. L., & Newman, J. (2018). Campus sustainability in the US: Environmental management and social change since 1970. Journal of Cleaner Production, 196, 564–575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.06.012