Leveraging Meaningful Partnerships

Leveraging community partner expertise to advance CSULB's mission. A woman works in a garden as part of an internship.

Capitalizing on existing partnerships and coordinating cross-disciplinary efforts goes hand-in-hand with efforts to take on a bold CSULB-led Grand Challenge, but understanding the full scope of these resources available on campus first requires a diligent evaluation. 

Developing a centralized database of existing partnerships at The Beach is the focus of a project spearheaded by the Beach 2030 team behind efforts to advance partnerships for the public good. Through this work, we aim to track and advance internal and external partnerships currently benefiting the university, while streamlining entry for new collaborators to forge connections to The Beach.  

This leveraging community partner expertise aims to advance CSULB’s institutional mission and strategic priorities, a crucial objective of the action zone team.  

Working with the Division of Information Technology, and leveraging primary data sources on campus, the action zone team was able to identify more than 1,700 unique partnerships across more than 1,500 entities and total partnership funding exceeding $111 million in Fiscal Year 2021-22. This baseline assessment has helped frame the critical next steps. To that end, a director of university and civic partnerships position has been funded for three years to help university leaders understand the existing level of partnerships at The Beach and assess opportunities and gaps in these collaborations.  

An ambitious but necessary undertaking, the work will entail defining and surveying all partnerships currently in place at CSULB — across all colleges, departments, units, and divisions — and identifying a permanent database tool using information technology expertise, that is most effective for tracking this robust and evolving index.  

Through a coordinated effort to inventory CSULB’s portfolio, the university is in a better position to benefit efficiently from its current collaborators, whose assets, we might find, make them attractive partners for other university initiatives. And by simplifying what can be an overwhelming catalogue of collaborative opportunities, we aim to cultivate exciting new synergies.