Community Engagement in Higher Education — with Barbara Holland

About Our Guest

Barbara Holland

Barbara A. Holland, Ph.D., is a professor, researcher and consultant recognized internationally for her scholarship and expertise on organizational change in higher education with a special focus on the strategic impacts of community engagement as a method of teaching, learning and research. Her current academic affiliations are Distinguished Community Engagement Professor of at University of Nebraska Omaha, and Senior Scholar at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and University of North Carolina Greensboro. She has served in senior academic administrative roles at several universities in the United States and Australia, held a visiting scholar role in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development headquarters for two years during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and was Executive Director of the federally-funded National Service-Learning Clearinghouse for seven years. The library collection, upon the closing of the Clearinghouse, was moved to the Criss Library at University of Nebraska Omaha in 2011 and is called The Barbara A. Holland Collection for Service-Learning and Community Engagement.

For her many research publications and impacts on the field of engagement, including the “Holland Matrix,” Barbara was the fourth scholar awarded the Research Achievement Award from the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (2006). In 2008 she was named as one of the first two Honorary Fellows named by the Engagement Australia association. She was Executive Editor of Metropolitan Universities, the journal of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities 1998–2016 and continues to serve in editorial roles for three other refereed journals. Since its inception in 2006, she has served as a member of the National Advisory Panel for the Carnegie Foundation Community Engagement Classification program. Barbara is also a frequent keynote speaker at academic conferences and has been invited to be an in-depth consultant and adviser to many academic institutions across six nations.

Barbara earned her Bachelor of Journalism and Master of Arts in Journalism at the University of Missouri, and a Ph.D. in Higher Education Policy at the University of Maryland. In 2017, University of Nebraska Omaha awarded Barbara an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. She resides in Portland, Oregon.