At UNC Greensboro (UNCG), community engagement is woven into how faculty teach and research, how students learn, and how the institution advances its mission.
As the proud founders of Collaboratory, UNCG has a longstanding history of centralizing and amplifying engagement data, leveraging the system to ensure their community-based efforts are visible, connected, and actionable across campus and beyond.
Over the last year, UNCG took that visibility one step further by aligning their Collaboratory data with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Goals, adopted in 2015, are an ambitious set of targets for improving global metrics for the environment, economy, and social conditions worldwide by 2030. The 17 goals include addressing world hunger, conserving habitat, improving world health, and building stronger communities, among many other topics. The result is a shared, easy-to-interpret framework for capturing what’s happening, understanding what it means, and aligning engagement strategy with broader campus sustainability priorities.
Today, UNCG’s Collaboratory activities are linked to one or more SDGs, expanding the institution’s ability to tell coherent, outcomes-oriented stories about engagement, and giving campus leadership a new lens for interpreting the collective reach of UNCG’s partnerships.
As an AASHE STARS-reporting campus, UNCG has long tracked how sustainability is integrated across institutional life (e.g., operations, administration, teaching, research, co-curricular activity). UNCG also has a deep commitment to tracking and articulating our institutional work towards community-engaged research. By aligning the engagement activities data captured in Collaboratory with the SDGs, UNCG has built a bridge between sustainability and community engagement, making their overlap easier to visualize, quantify, and communicate.
Importantly, using the SDGs as a lens for engaged activities in Collaboratory augments UNCG’s existing campus and community priorities, allowing anyone to see the depth of campus-community connections embodied in the campus’ work. The SDGs provide a compact, widely recognized shared language that helps campus and community stakeholders quickly understand:
When activities are captured in Collaboratory and tagged to SDGs, UNCG gains a fuller, more connected picture of their impact. And because Collaboratory is designed to help communicate UNCG’s institutional story and connect faculty, staff, and community partners around shared, community-identified priorities and passions, the SDG layer strengthens the platform’s core purpose by making the interconnectedness of the work easier to surface.
One of the immediate benefits of SDG alignment in Collaboratory is that it makes it easier for UNCG’s different audiences (e.g., faculty, staff, students, campus leadership, and community partners) to see the work and understand how it connects to larger outcomes.
The most powerful shift SDG alignment enables is moving from a list of activities to an integrated understanding of what those activities advance. SDG tagging turns engagement data into strategic insight, not only documenting breadth, but clarifying purpose and collective direction. As the originator of Collaboratory, UNCG is proud to proud to join Arizona State University as the second in the country to track SDGs in the platform. This work shapes how community engagement is captured and communicated nationwide, especially at a moment when higher education is being asked to demonstrate public value with clarity and credibility.
See what's possible when your engagement data is aligned with a shared language for impact.