Building Sustainable Campus Collaborations
Includes a Live Web Event on 05/08/2026 at 2:45 PM (EDT)
Cathy Copeland
Program Director of Campuswide Immersion
Institute for Citizens and Scholars
Cathy Copeland is the Director of the College Presidents for Civic Preparedness Campuswide Immersion Program at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, where she partners with colleges and universities to build, assess, and strengthen their approaches to civil dialogue, media literacy, and collaborative problem-solving.
Before joining Citizens & Scholars, Cathy served as Director of the American Democracy Project at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and has taught writing, rhetoric, and literature courses at several universities and developed multidisciplinary collaborative problem-solving courses.
Sustainable innovation for civic discourse on campus doesn't happen in isolation. This session explores practical strategies for building long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships between staff, faculty, and institutional leadership. Drawing on examples from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars cohort of 41 institutions, we'll look at how to design programs with shared ownership, clear communication channels, and built-in assessment structures that help initiatives grow rather than fade. Participants will leave with frameworks for cultivating cross-campus alliances, securing administrative support, and embedding evaluation practices that make collaborative work both durable and scalable.