Public Impact

• Harness faculty scholarship, student engagement, and institutional research capacity to address urgent sustainability challenges—locally, regionally, and globally— through discovery, interdisciplinary collaboration, community partnerships, and evidence-based solutions.
• Advance the University’s commitment to environmental stewardship by modernizing campus infrastructure, optimizing energy use, and implementing eco-friendly design and operations that reduce the institution’s carbon footprint and operating costs.

Research-Driven Policy Leadership

• Enhance Kean’s knowledge-driven public impact to facilitate the flow of knowledge and innovation among faculty research interests, sponsored research infrastructure, policy-oriented infrastructure, and community partners
• Strengthen the research and advisory capacities of faculty experts to serve policymakers through seeding new centers of research excellence and pathways to impact such as the Watson Institute for Urban Policy and Research and Governmental Affairs
• Expand the Watson Institute’s interdisciplinary research portfolio to address emerging societal challenges and link people to policy
• Engage faculty and students in Community Engaged Learning Courses and community-based research in partnership with local, state, and global organizations
• Leverage Kean’s Anchor University mission to embed research in service of the public good, translating scholarship into action for communities in New Jersey and beyond

Applied Knowledge Transfer

• Develop integrative research-to-practice pathways that translate academic discoveries into community-based solutions
• Create sustainable models for university-community partnerships that leverage institutional resources to transform regional outcomes
• Collaborate with stakeholders and decision-makers to co-develop and implement research-informed solutions to complex public issues
• Assess the real-world impact of public policies to ensure they are equitable, evidence-based, and achieving their intended outcomes

Sustainability

• Embed sustainability challenges from local and global communities into coursework and capstone projects, fostering experiential learning and community-engaged scholarship.
• Invest in smart technologies such as energy-efficient lighting, buildingautomation systems, and real-time energy monitoring to reduce consumption and improve performance.

Educational Ecosystem and Capacity Development

• Strengthen the Transformational Learning unit to prepare students as agents of public impact through experiential education
• Establish collaborative frameworks between graduate and undergraduate academic programs and External Affairs to enhance public visibility of institutional contributions
• Build the capacity of community members, organizations, and institutions to actively engage in policymaking and shaping processes—laying the foundation for long-term, community-driven sustainability
• Develop the next generation of policy professionals equipped to leverage data, research, and public policy for scalable and sustainable impact in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors
• Embed civic engagement, systems thinking, and public problem-solving into curricula to cultivate a policy-literate, impact-driven academic ecosystem