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Office of Community Engagement IU Indianapolis

Marie Mackintosh appointed Vice Chancellor for Workforce and Community Engagement at IU Indianapolis

Posted on by Teresa Francis

We are pleased to share that Marie Mackintosh has been appointed Vice Chancellor for Workforce and Community Engagement and will begin her new role on December 8, 2025. Marie brings more than 15 years of experience leading collaborative initiatives in education, workforce development, and systems innovation. In this role, she will oversee the university’s Office of Community Engagement, which will transition to the Office of Workforce and Community Engagement.

Marie Mackintosh. Photo by Faith Blackwell Photography.

Marie most recently served as President and CEO of EmployIndy, Indianapolis’s workforce development organization, where she led a $25 million enterprise connecting residents to high-quality jobs and businesses to skilled talent. During her tenure, she guided the organization through a period of post-pandemic transformation, strengthening its financial and operational foundation while advancing equitable, career-connected opportunities for thousands of Hoosiers.

Her leadership helped deliver more than 3,300 job placements, $5.5 million in wage gains, and engagement with over 700 employers across the region.

Prior to joining EmployIndy, Marie held senior roles with the Indiana Department of Workforce Development where she developed statewide strategies to prepare Indiana’s workforce for more than one million projected job openings.

As Vice Chancellor for Workforce and Community Engagement, Marie will advance IU Indianapolis’s mission by driving workforce readiness and strengthening community partnerships. She will lead strategies that align academic programs with employer needs, leveraging our strengths in education, research, and outreach to expand talent pipelines and strengthen the workforce that powers our city and state.

Following the retirement of longtime vice chancellor Amy Conrad Warner on October 31, Margie Smith-Simmons, senior executive advisor to the chancellor, will provide interim leadership for the Office of Community Engagement until Marie begins her new role on December 8. We are grateful for Amy’s many years of leadership and service to IU Indianapolis and the Indianapolis community.

IU Indianapolis Season of Giving 2025: Join us in supporting families this holiday season

Posted on by Teresa Francis

Season of Giving. Sharing holiday joy since 2000!

’Tis the Season of Giving once again! The IU Indianapolis Office of Community Engagement invites faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners to share holiday cheer with families in our community by joining the 2025 Season of Giving program.

'Tis The Season of Giving logoNow celebrating 25 years, the Season of Giving continues to grow. IU Indianapolis partners with Christamore House and Hawthorne Community Center to brighten the holidays for families across Indianapolis. Last year’s program was our most successful yet, nearly doubling our reach to support 233 children and parents from 63 families. Read more about the success of the 2024 Season of Giving.

Hawthorne Community Center staff (left) and Christamore House staff with donated gifts (right).

This year, we’re aiming even higher—our goal is to support 100 families through the generosity of IU Indianapolis faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners.

IU Indianapolis faculty, staff, students and the Season of Giving team in action—dropping off, sorting, and preparing gifts for families in the 2024 season.

Here’s how it works:

  • IU Indianapolis faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners are invited to sign up as sponsors by Monday, November 10. Most sponsors participate as part of a team—such as a department, school, or student organization—but individuals are encouraged to join too! When registering, sponsors will be prompted to indicate how many people they would like to sponsor.

  • Sponsors are paired with families identified by Christamore House and Hawthorne Community Center and receive wish lists for each family member. Lists may include toys, clothing, and household items.

  • Sponsors shop for gifts. Each sponsor is asked to spend a minimum of $75 per person.

  • Collection Day is Tuesday, December 9, 2025, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. in Taylor Hall, Room 104.

  • Gifts are delivered to Christamore House and Hawthorne Community Center to distribute to families.

Many groups find Season of Giving a meaningful way to celebrate the holidays and support neighbors in need.

Why become a sponsor? Watch the video to learn more. 

Visit our website to learn more about the 2025 Season of Giving. Together, we can make this holiday season brighter for even more families in our community. The deadline to sign up as a sponsor is Monday, November 10, 2025. Sign up today! For more information, contact Richard Bray at richbray@iu.edu or season@iu.edu.

From Survival Jobs to Sustainable Careers: How Community-Based Organizations Empower Newcomer Youth

Posted on by jrboehm

By Silvia Garcia, Director of Research and Assessment, IU Indianapolis Office of Community Engagement

New Skills: Development, occupation, knowledge, training, motivation, goal

What is the secret to helping youth who are new to the United States successfully transition from school to the workforce? A recent study confirms it is about much more than just job training. It is about “barrier-busting”—a holistic approach that addresses a person’s fundamental needs to create a stable foundation for career growth.

Silvia Garcia (top) and Nidhi Arun (bottom)

In March 2024, Silvia Garcia, Director of Research and Assessment in the IU Indianapolis Office of Community Engagement, and Nidhi Arun, a Policy Analyst in the Indiana University Public Policy Institute, received a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation to investigate how local organizations in Marion County, Indiana, support newcomer youth aged 16 to 24 in their transition into stable jobs. Their findings highlight the indispensable role that community-based organizations (CBOs) and ethnic community-based organizations (ECBOs)—organizations that support specific ethnic groups—play in building Indiana’s future demographic and economic strength.

The study sample included three immigrant-serving CBOs and three ECBOs in Marion County. In-depth interviews were conducted with organizational staff, workforce development leaders, and newcomer youth from Haiti, Afghanistan, Burma, and Latin America.

Here’s a look at the most impactful findings and recommendations from the research.

Key Takeaways

Organizations are employing promising strategies to support their young clients and families, ensuring that clients receive ongoing support throughout their training. These include:

  • Holistic and Culturally Responsive Support: All participating organizations provide comprehensive wraparound services—including food, housing, transportation, and legal aid—recognizing that stable employment is impossible without basic needs being met. CBOs use culturally responsive practices, such as hiring staff from the communities they serve and providing materials in multiple languages, to build trust and ensure services are accessible.

    Youth engaged in learning in a computer lab.
  • Building Pathways to Better Jobs: Through one-on-one employment coaching or staff support, organizations help youth build resumes, practice interviewing, and understand American workplace culture. They also actively build relationships with employers to advocate for their clients and some follow up after program completion to ensure that youth not only find a job but also retain it and advance in their careers.
  • Building Bridges to Opportunity: A crucial role of these organizations is building, bridging, and linking social capital—connecting youth with people and institutions outside their immediate community. CBOs and ECBOs connect individuals with employers through job fairs, job shadowing, and coaching, thereby opening doors to upward mobility.
  • Creating opportunities for family-sustaining careers: Some organizations offer structured career pathways that guide individuals through education and training for in-demand, family-sustaining careers, such as construction and welding.
Youth hone their woodworking skills as part of hands-on training.

The research identified several core challenges that define the experience of newcomer youth seeking employment in Marion County.

  • The “Any Job” vs. “Career” Dilemma: The research uncovered a fundamental conflict between a youth’s urgent need for any job to meet financial pressures and the organization’s goals of guiding them toward a sustainable career. While most organizations focus on a long-term approach, newcomer youth may see this as too slow and turn to less stable, informal work.
  • The ‘Social Capital Paradox’: Young newcomers overwhelmingly find their first jobs through informal networks of family and friends (bonding social capital). While this provides quick access to “any job,” it often traps them in low-wage jobs with little room for advancement. In contrast, CBOs work to build connections to broader networks (bridging and linking social capital) that lead to more stable careers. This more strategic approach can feel too overwhelming for youth facing urgent financial and social pressure.

    Illustration of social networks and connections, reflecting how community-based organizations help newcomer youth build bridges to opportunity.
  • A Major Awareness Gap: A primary barrier to success is that most young newcomers do not know that CBOs and their employment services exist. One youth, after living and working in Indiana for four years, was shocked to learn about the free career support available, stating, “I couldn’t believe that anyone had this kind of help. And it’s free!”
  • Critical Gaps in Services: There is a significant lack of employment programs targeting youth under 18, especially those who are not in education or working (opportunity youth). Those who arrive late to their school years are also underserved, as they may have missed opportunities to develop job skills during their time in school. Furthermore, key strategies such as bridge programs, career pathways, work-based learning (WBL), employer engagement in training, and entrepreneurship training are underutilized by most organizations, resulting in significant service gaps.
  • Systemic Barriers for CBOs: The organizations doing this vital work face their own hurdles. They are chronically underfunded, which limits their ability to expand services. Restrictive funding streams, requiring a work permit for eligibility, exclude many newly arrived youth. Finally, youth services are often “siloed,” with poor coordination between education, workforce, and social service systems, making it incredibly difficult for a young person to navigate services.

Key Recommendations

Addressing these challenges requires a coordinated, cross-sector effort. CBOs cannot do this alone. Here is how university and community partners can help.

    1. Tailor Programs for Younger Youth: It is critical to develop programs that specifically address the needs of the 16-24 age group. This includes creating flexible educational and work opportunities for those who may have missed out on technical education programs in high school.
    2. Boost the Entire Support System: Work must be done to break down silos. Funders, government agencies like EmployIndy, educational institutions, and CBOs must collaborate to build an integrated, client-centered system. This means sharing data, coordinating services, and aligning funding to create a smoother, more effective pathway for newcomer youth. Policies should prioritize increased and more stable funding for the community-based organizations that serve as a critical safety net.

      Hands representing the collective stewardship of partners working together to uplift and guide newcomer youth.
    3. Invest in Targeted Outreach: Organizations need support to conduct proactive outreach. This includes working with community liaisons and ECBOs to meet newcomer youth and their families where they are and engage them in available services.
    4. Expand Promising Programs: Funding and technical assistance should focus on expanding programs that have given promising results. This includes:
      • Bridge Programs: More access to High School Equivalency preparation, vocational English (English classes that include specialized vocabulary needed to succeed in a specific trade), and digital literacy courses to prepare youth for career training.
      • Work-Based Learning (WBL): Creating more pre-apprenticeships, internships, and job shadowing opportunities to provide invaluable hands-on experience and expand work connections.
      • Career Pathways: Pathways programs are a recommended workforce development practice as they guide individuals to family-sustaining careers aligned with local labor demand.  They are vital for youth and opportunity youth who face barriers to traditional routes.
      • Youth Entrepreneurship Training: Developing dedicated programs for youth interested in starting their own businesses, a growing trend among immigrant communities.
    5. Integrate Mental Health and Mentoring: The psychological toll of transitioning to a new country and workforce is immense. Employment programs should incorporate trauma-informed care approaches and practices and provide mentoring opportunities to support the well-being and engagement of newcomer youth.

As a next step to strengthen community-university collaborations, the key findings of this study will be shared with participant organizations, not just to report what was learned, but to engage in meaningful discussions and ensure the findings and recommendations resonate with their on-the-ground expertise. International migration is an important pillar of Indiana’s long-term economic and demographic survival strategy. Investing in community-based organizations and aligning systems, ensures that the next generation of Hoosiers is equipped to contribute fully to the state’s economic and civic life.

Elevating community voices: Building a survey to measure university engagement with the community

Posted on by jrboehm

By Silvia Garcia, Director of Research and Assessment, IU Indianapolis Office of Community Engagement

Help us gather feedback: invite your partners to participate

Map showing Indianapolis, Indiana, and surrounding areas, including parts of Anderson and Muncie

Indiana University Indianapolis has long recognized its role as an anchor institution, deeply woven into the fabric of the community and committed to community engagement through its mission and leveraging of financial, physical, intellectual, and human capital resources to support local needs and drive development. However, for too long, the evaluation of the campus’ impact has primarily focused on institutional outputs – number of hours, number of people, amount of funding – overlooking the true impact these engagements have on the community.

That is why, in 2022, three IU Indianapolis Office of Community Engagement staff members—Silvia Garcia, Director of Research and Assessment; Latosha Rowley, program manager; and Jim Grim, former director of community and school partnerships—embarked on a project to develop the Partner Survey, a tool that captures community voices and perceptions of engagement outcomes, allowing the community to define what matters in community-university partnerships. This project exemplifies the transformative power of involving community partners in the evaluation process. By actively engaging community voices, a survey tool was developed that more accurately captures engagement outcomes and is more relevant and understandable to community partners.

The challenge of measuring impact

Measuring community-university engagement outcomes is notoriously complex. The diverse nature of institutions, communities, and activities, coupled with the unique contexts of each engagement, makes a one-size-fits-all evaluation framework elusive. By involving local community partners in the process of developing a survey, invaluable knowledge and experience were gained, ensuring that the questions and methods developed are relevant to both the campus and the community.

To identify community partners to participate in the survey development, community engagement activities were mapped using the IU Indianapolis Collaboratory—a database where faculty and staff enter detailed information about their community-engaged activities—and Digital Measures Activity Insight (DMAI), now Elements at IU, the annual faculty activity reporting system. These sources enabled mapping that took into account stakeholders, geography, purpose and duration of the partnership, and interdisciplinarity.

A map of the activities in Collaboratory.
A map showing IU Indianapolis’ community-engaged activities in the Indianapolis area.

The collaborative effort to develop the Partner Survey involved four phases of development and validation.

Phase 1: Identifying meaningful outcomes

The survey development process began with interviews that provided a deep dive into community partner perspectives. Seven project coordinators (IUI faculty) were asked about their projects, intended and observed community impact, and community organizations they recommended provide input. This led to interviews with twelve community partners holding leadership positions across diverse organizations representing a historical museum, environmental organizations, neighborhood groups, youth-serving organizations, a technology for-profit, and agencies with re-entry initiatives. During these interviews, the results and impact of their collaborations with the campus were explored, as well as the positive and negative aspects of the campus involvement.

Phase 2: Analyzing and validating indicators

The interview data were analyzed and categorized using the Democracy Collaborative Framework for Anchor Institutions’ outcome areas. This process identified 102 codes and eight themes, with 70 codes classified as process indicators and 32 as outcome/impact indicators. Process indicators offer information on the quality of the engagement and other short-term results that contribute to outcomes. In contrast, outcome indicators measure long-term changes linked to engagement goals, including expected changes (impact) in the community.

To ensure external validity, outcome indicators were compared with the Long-Term Impact Code Book (Kuttner et al., in progress) based on the Collaboratory national dataset and the IU Indianapolis’ 2030 Strategic Plan goals. This comparison led to the inclusion of new outcome indicators, particularly those related to science, technology, and innovation.

A sample of the codes developed by Kuttner at al., 2023. Draft version shared by email with the investigators. Kuttner’s long-term impact codes were used to reorganize the survey.

Phase 3: Crafting the survey tool

With a robust list of validated outcome/impact indicators, an initial version of the Partner Survey, consisting of 97 items, was developed. It included sections on collaboration types, specific outcome items across various engagement areas (arts and culture, educated youth, health and wellbeing, environment and sustainability, community safety, science, technology, innovation, and community building), contribution to IU Indianapolis’ 2030 Strategic Plan goals, and questions to measure the quality of partnerships based on the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classification for Community Engagement’s Community Partner Survey.

Phase 4: Survey validation using focus group-based cognitive interviews

The next critical step was survey validation. Grant funding was received from the Community Engaged Alliance to support six focus group-based cognitive interviews (focus group CI) which gathered in-depth feedback from community partners, and IU Indianapolis staff and faculty, to understand how respondents comprehend survey questions. Eleven community partners, seven faculty and one staff member participated in the focus groups.

Phase 4 of the survey development process was supported by grant funding from the Community-Engaged Alliance.

This method allowed assessment of whether the survey accurately captured community partner perceptions of engagement outcomes and whether the outcomes were contextualized for their experiences. For example, there were discussions about whether the language was adequate and the categories used in the survey, such as areas of collaboration, aligned with how community partners experience these collaborations.

Participants completed the survey, noting questions they found easy or difficult to understand and providing written comments. Moderators asked questions to uncover participants’ interpretations and identify misunderstandings or ambiguities. They also encouraged participants to suggest modifications to questions based on their experiences. With this invaluable feedback, the survey was significantly modified. Key changes included:

  • Adding questions about the populations served by the organization.
  • Revising collaboration types to include more specific options like internships, professional assistance, professional development and training, project/program evaluation, technical assistance, event organization, and international exchange. Focus group participants also expressed that the survey’s use of the word ‘partnership’ in key questions failed to capture more casual forms of community-university collaborations, which could influence how they perceive engagement outcomes. Therefore, the new version consistently uses “collaboration” instead of “partnership” in survey questions.
  • Reducing the number of outcome items, simplifying language, and adding open-ended questions to capture perceived outcomes.
  • Reducing the number of items in the quality of partnerships section.
  • Expanding the question on community contributions to IU Indianapolis.
  • Adding two final open-ended questions about ways IU Indianapolis can develop more effective collaborations, and any other information that can help us understand their experiences in collaborating with IU Indianapolis.
Example survey question asking how much participants believe this collaboration contributes, directly or indirectly, to reducing health disparities.

Testing the tool

The next step was to further examine the validity and feasibility of the survey by piloting it with a small sample of community partners. Results were favorable, but more feedback from faculty and staff using the survey with their partners is being sought.

Faculty and staff are encouraged to invite community partners to complete the revised Partner Survey, building on the successful pilot test.

The Partner Survey is available here for faculty and staff to use with their community partners. For questions or to share feedback, please contact Silvia Garcia at sigarcia@iu.edu.

About Community-Engaged Alliance
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Community-Engaged Alliance is dedicated to advancing the field of community engagement through education, support, and collaboration with partners in higher education. Through funding, professional development, and collaboration opportunities, Community-Engaged Alliance supports capacity and enables students to graduate with the knowledge and skills necessary to create positive social change. Visit www.communityengagedalliance.org for more information.

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