JMC 415: Writing Assignment 2 | Multimedia Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Miya Whitaker
Public Relations Manager
miyawhitaker4@gmail.com
602-829-1450

The University of Sunnyslope enters partnership with Collaboratory to better community

engagement.

TAMPA, Fla. (September 19, 2022) — On Monday, September 19, Emily Janke, a senior research
advisor and co-founder of Collaboratory will announce a new partnership for the company. The
partnership is with The University of Sunnyslope, a university with more than 180 thousand students and
located in a diverse community with many cultural offerings making it a perfect location to track
community engagement.

Starting Monday, September 19, Collaboratory will move forward with its partnership with The
University of Sunnyslope (US). As a client of Collaboratory, not only will US, named the most innovative
public research universities in the world, benefit from the program, so will the surrounding community.
US is located in Sunnyslope, an area in Phoenix, Arizona that has an established community with a
growing number of residents all from very diverse and unique backgrounds. In addition to the university
Sunnyslope high school is located within the community as well. It enrolls almost 2,000 students and is
continuously listed on U.S. News & World Report’s Best High School Ranking list. With so much going
on with the community it was becoming hard for the university to keep track of engagement. As a client
of Collaboratory the university will no longer feel the stress of trying to track its community's
engagement.

Although the US staff were trying to track the engagement and service, they often ran into challenges of
tracking community engagement in order to produce reports for applications or accreditations and to build
best and impactful practice. Challenges like this were why Collaboratory was originally developed in
collaboration with UNC Greensboro.

Emily Janke, co-founder of Collaboratory and director of Institute for Community and Economic
Engagement at UNC Greensboro said issues the US faced was why they originally created Collaboratory.

“We created the Collaboratory, initially, because of an institutional need to tell our story better and to
collaborate more easily,” said Janke. “In the process of using it, we discovered that we had the
opportunity to establish a platform that, when used widely, can advance practice, administrative
understanding, and outcomes of community engagement and public service.”

For a community as diverse as Sunnyslope the need to tell the community's story is crucial. Brooke
Williams, Sunnyslopes diversity director said a lot of residents in the area speak other languages at home
and have a variety of ethnicities.
JMC 415: Writing Assignment 2 | Multimedia Press Release

“1.0% of Sunnyslope residents five years old and above primarily speak Native American languages at
home,” said Williams. “While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 97.5% of the
neighborhoods in America.”

Surveys from the area show that residents identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican, German, Irish
and Native American. In addition to this 12.4% of the residents of the neighborhood were born in a
country other than America. Surveys also showed that many residents in the area did not learn English as
their first language. Lucy Tomlinson, a professor at US said she has been trying to create a program
where students form a relationship with the nearby community.

“Since living here I have noticed that while the community is an established area many of the children
and parents in the area don’t speak English as their first language. I have been trying to create a program
where students can help teach members of the community English so children can feel confident with
their English when starting school,” said Tomlinson.

Since Collaboratory has the goal of empowering institutions to understand the full scope of their
community engagement and public service activities to improve practice Janke believes it has all the
resources to help further Tomlinson’s and track its progress.

When asked about how Collaboratory can help projects like Tomlinkson Janke said, “It was designed,
initially to serve UNCG’s need to track, report, and build awareness for hundreds of community
engagement and public service activities and relationships for planning, reporting and recognition
purposes.”

US will continue to be the one of the most innovative public research universities in the world as a client
of Collaboratory according to Janke because “together we foster the next generation of community-
engaged scholar, professionals, and alumni who have a greater understanding of and appreciation for the
public mission of higher education and its role within society.”

Collaboratory was initially developed at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and founded by
Barbara Holland, Kristin Medlin, and Emily Janke. Currently the company is located in Tampa, Florida
with a team of employees dedicated to collecting descriptive data on community engagement.
Collaboratory is the one-of-a-kind software that allows you to document, track, report on and understand
the diverse activities that happen between your institutions and the community you support. The
company's mission statement is to empower higher education institutions to document and understand the
full scope of their community engagement and public service activities to improve practice.
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