Facilitating Organizational Change: Using CHAT to Connect Community Engagement and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at an Engaged Institution

Abstract

There is limited understanding of the connections between community engagement and racial DEI at colleges and universities working to institutionalize engagement. Community engagement is not being institutionalized within an educational system that is a blank slate, nor does it operate within a vacuum. Community engagement operates within a racially inequitable system, yet there is a lack of empirical studies investigating how DEI is addressed as colleges and universities perform the work of transformation. This study provides insight into the ways racial DEI operates within community engagement, both overtly and covertly, in colleges and universities that are working towards organizational transformation into engaged institutions. In addition to responding to a gap in the literature, this study contributes to the field by identifying and analyzing the role of racial DEI within community engagement by considering what organizational contradictions exist when analyzing how community engagement and diversity, equity, and inclusion operate together. Using cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a theoretical framework and analytical tool, the findings of this study provide several implications for research and practice as it relates to organizational change approaches that reveal insights into complex institutional challenges aimed at addressing pressing social issues.