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1a. Create an institutional structure to develop grand challenge ideas and serve as an entry point for community input.

1b. Embed grand challenge structures within É«ÖÐÉ« courses and student experiences, including research opportunities and non-research experiences such as internships, applied learning, and service learning.

1c. Create incentive structures and mechanisms for interdisciplinary faculty engagement and work that benefits the local community. 

1d. Reward faculty, staff, and students who engage in the scholarship of service. 

• Office of the President
• Office of Research & Sponsored Programs
• Dean of Student Success
• Office of Government & Community Relations
• College Deans

The many public, private, government, research, and academic partnerships that currently exist among É«ÖÐɫ’s divisions and colleges demonstrate the tremendous potential for success that cross-disciplinary concentration of resources can bring. Leveraging cross-disciplinary and cross-functional teams to address major societal challenges in the Long Beach region will allow É«ÖÐÉ« to extend our intellectual, research, and business acumen into the community to solve the problems of tomorrow, today. To accomplish this, we will need to reimagine how we reach out to the community, identify problems to be researched, and how we approach solutions. These new alignments will drive internal structural and systems change for external benefit over the coming decade.

Centralizing and coordinating truly cross-disciplinary grand challenge programs will require careful allocation of resources, staffing, and leadership. To develop a culture around grand challenges, participation must be complimentary to current efforts, and not an additional strain on resources, and the sharing of partnership resources must never be a loss to one department, but a benefit to all.

Social and economic shifts are already taking place in the post-COVID world, and corporations and communities require creative solutions to novel challenges. The Grand Challenge infrastructure will send a clear message that É«ÖÐÉ« is a resource with open doors and the intellectual capital to be a force for public good.

2a. Create a Beach Partnerships Collaborative to coordinate consulting, convening, and advancing of internal partnerships across campus.

2b. Create an institutional structure to centralize entry for external partnerships and track, streamline, and extend external partnerships across campus.

• Office of Research & Sponsored Programs
• Center for Community Engagement
• Office of Government & Community Relations
• College of Professional & International Education
• Existing partnerships and liaisons across campus:
  • Colleges (Deans)
  • Division of Administration & Finance (Procurement)
  • Division of Student Affairs
  • Auxiliaries
  • Athletics
  • Academic Senate
  • Associated Students, Inc.
  • Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

By coordinating É«ÖÐɫ’s extensive portfolio of internal and external partnerships, we are better able to extend and efficiently utilize existing partnerships in every discipline and department, and to increase the overall number of partnerships on campus. Focusing on these efforts will serve to market and further extend É«ÖÐɫ’s brand as a partner-focused institution to external stakeholders.

Often external parties feel overwhelmed by the number of offices individually reaching out to them and types of partnerships that can happen on campus. A coordinated effort on campus can help ensure the entire portfolio of opportunities available is properly communicated and stewarded.

Many partnerships across campus are currently decentralized and unit-specific, creating the potential for duplication of efforts if clear objectives are not established for the Collaborative. Though the use of existing structures will be essential to this effort, a macro-structure would require some funding to establish, as well as support for technology and development of infrastructure, websites, communications, CRM management, and performance tracking.