Carolina Engagement Week 2025, a week-long celebration of collaborations, is happening February 24 through February 28. The event will bring together Carolina faculty, staff, and students with community partners to highlight partnerships between UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina communities via a series of more than 40 events, including skill-building workshops, research presentations, panel discussions and more. And three of these events will feature researchers from the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG).

Seeing Communities as Experts on their Own Data: A Research-Practice Partnership | February 24, 1:30pm - 3:00pm

During this hybrid (in-person and online) workshop, FPG Advanced Research Scientist Allison De Marco, PhD, along with several research team members from the Educare Learning network, will share examples of community engagement including data literacy practices and data walks, and they will lead participants through a sample data walk. They will highlight how their data walk events invite participants to contextualize findings and co-construct program and policy solutions.

Find out more about this workshop and how to register.

The Learning Community Approach: On-the-Ground Insights for Larger Organizational Change | February 25, 11:00am - 12:00pm

A learning community (LC) can help organizations gain input from their community, drawing on expertise of lived experience from community members. It’s a process of co-creation of vision and direction where LC members, organizational leadership, and the research/facilitation team are equal members of the team.

Presenters from FPG’s ERAC, including Nathan Jorgensen, PhD, TK Musa, and Danielle Allen, PhD, will discuss how they used the LC approach with an international home-visiting agency to implement new curriculum—during which community members were not just heard, but led the work.

Find out more about this presentation and how to register.

Pursuing Environmental Justice Through the Study of Community Voice and Photographs | February 28, 3:30pm - 4:30pm

Recent work shows that continual and repeated disruption disproportionately harms marginalized communities. The goals of this interactive session are to offer substantive opportunities for participants to engage with data―in the form of quotes and photographs―to support asset-based, theoretically grounded understandings of historically marginalized communities in the aftermath of climate disasters. Presenters of this interactive session, which will be held at the Carolina Student Union Art Gallery, include FPG Faculty Fellows Simona Goldin, PhD, and Iheoma Iruka, PhD.

Find out more about this interactive session and how to register.