Over the past decade, Steve Dubb has been deeply engaged, as a researcher and a coach, to thinking about how universities might play a more effective role in community economic development.

Steve’s has written extensively on this topic. In 2007, Steve authored Linking Colleges to Communities—which examined the history of universities and community engagement. In 2009, Steve was part of the core team that developed recommendations for the Obama administration to inform federal policy with respect to anchor institutions. In 2012, Steve was co-author (with Rita Axelroth Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads (published by MSU Press). That year, Steve also co-authored a paper with Ted Howard on Leveraging Anchor Institutions for Local Job Creation and Wealth Building.

In 2013, Steve was lead author of The Anchor Dashboard: Aligning Institutional Practice to Meet Low-Income Community Needs, which introduced a framework for hospitals and universities to assess and improve their impact in low- and moderate-income communities. This work became the basis for the Anchor Dashboard Learning Cohort. Launched in 2014, Steve helped develop this project into a partnership involving six universities who are co-creating measures to track and assess their impact in ways that are respectful to community partners. In fall 2016, Steve led workshops at three Campus Compact Civic Action Planning Institutes on how to develop place-based strategies and create evaluation frameworks to measure progress. Steve is available to advise interested campuses on how to effectively address these issues.

Dr. John Reiff earned his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1982. He has worked with civic engagement and service-learning for over 35 years as a college teacher and administrator. From 1992 to 2000 he helped a small college in Tennessee, Tusculum College, focus itself on a mission of the “civic arts”—the knowledge and skills needed by citizens to work collaboratively to build solutions to community and societal problems. He brought service-learning into the curriculum and created and directed the service-learning center.

From 2000 to 2016, Dr. Reiff directed the UMass Amherst office of Civic Engagement and Service-Learning. He worked with about 150 faculty members through a Service-Learning Faculty Fellows program, and he worked with community organizations to leverage university resources for community goals. He taught service-learning courses on leadership, public policy, organizing, and mentoring, and he consulted with colleges and universities across the region to help them develop service-learning programs. In 2013 he was named the first Annual Higher Education Community Service Champion by the Massachusetts Service Alliance.

Since 2015, Dr. Reiff has worked through the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education to help all public colleges and universities in Massachusetts implement a first-in-the-nation policy to make civic learning an “expected outcome” for their undergraduates.

Through his consulting business, Civic Engagement Associates, Dr. Reiff works with colleges and universities across the nation on faculty and curriculum development, program evaluation, and strategic planning for civic learning and engagement. He also teaches courses on civic engagement.