Community Engagement Setting Pathway to Synergistic Partnership

Abstract

In Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), community engagement uses transdisciplinary faculties and
individuals to nurture symbiotic relationships shaped by a collaborative mission to benefit target
communities. Basically, university-community engagement (UCE) involves the united
identification of problems, the joint planning of strategies, and the combined mobilisation of
resources to transform the socio-economic well-being of target communities in tandem with the
University’s APEX (Accelerated Program of Excellence) agenda to transform and empower the
“Bottom Billion”. UCE synergises community indigenous knowledge and human resource
coupled with the expertise, facilities and knowledge database of the University to achieve
positive social transformation and economic development of the community. Subsequently, the
University obtains a repository of valuable data that will eventually serve as input in the design
of more effective transformational collaborative projects/programmes in the future. The aim of
this paper is to share the USM’s UCE experience in terms of synergistic partnership, altruistic
commitment, and project sustainability allied to the tenets of engagement in true sense;
successively to enhance the much anticipated ideals of humanity and sustainable tomorrow.
These efforts are part of our testimony to ascertain the noble quest of reshaping tertiary
education as an Insaniversiti (humaniversity). Our quest is to set the standards for orchestration
and mobilisation of USM staff and student corps to collaborate in a synergistic partnership and
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