Our Community

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Group of Highlander community members

Hello Creighton community, and non-Creighton community professionals and students! Welcome to the Creighton University at Highlander website!

Now that you have read a bit about our mission statement and vison, we would like to share with you what we envision your role can be with our growing community. 

The Creighton University at Highlander space is a multilevel, interprofessional community of practice aimed at culturally-responsive community engagement and true community partnership. 

Mindful Movement Series

Brittany Todd, Owner and Founder of Fluorescent Fitness, leads a nine-part virtual workout series exploring simple exercises that you can perform at home, to remain active year round.

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Brittany Todd, Owner and Founder of Fluorescent Fitness

Updates

At this time, Creighton University at Highlander is not accepting reservation or space requests. We will share more information on a reopening plan in the future. Please see our neighbors, The Venue, for more information to host an event.

What principles guide our work?

Community engagement, community partnership, and cultural humility are lifelong journeys. As we journey on this sometimes variable—but always rewarding—road, we have identified a roadmap. While it is not the only model for community engagement, we believe its breadth and depth are well-suited for our interprofessional community’s ability to work for and with our community partners.

Our on-the-ground practice is guided by the Healthy Places by Design Essential Framework, which emphasizes Community Engagement, Health Equity, Facilitative Leadership, a Culture of Learning, Strategic Communication, and Sustainable Thinking. More here.

How do we put our principles into practice?

As we embark on our journey towards community engagement, we see the role of the Creighton University at Highlander in three parts. We invite you to participate in these parts, and welcome feedback from you about how we improve them.

These parts are:

  1. Professional Development. As the conveners of this interprofessional community of practice, we see one of our roles is to help create and development a cadre of students and professionals who are trained in the theories and practice of community engagement, social justice, cultural responsivity, and who engage in regular self-reflection about their place(s() the historical, social, political and economic settings in which they practice. This professional development will take the form of shared resources, webinars, lunch and learns, internships and volunteer opportunities. We invite you to reach out with ideas/suggestions. Our professional development activities are usually open to all and are free. They are posted on our social media.
  2. The creation, implementation, and evaluation of community educational opportunities: In response to the generous and honest feedback of community members, our team has the opportunity to provide (or host for other groups) educational opportunities for community members that cover a number of topics: mental health, physical health, economic wellbeing, educational growth, interpersonal connections, and legal support. For events offered by our team, we endeavor to conduct more culturally-responsive evaluations, and plan to make available methodological and community insights we gain. We hope that others that use the space will be amenable sharing any insights with our community as well. We believe that this culture of learning will help improve the practice of our team and those in the community.
  3. Community Development/Capacity Building through true partnership. As the knowledge and skill level of our multilevel (all members of your organization’s staff) interprofessional community of practice grows, and as the trust and open communication blossoms with our community partners, we hope to create or facilitate projects that promote true partnership (i.e., community engagement from conception of a project to design, execution, and dissemination of results) and that promote skill-building and self-efficacy among priority communities. We acknowledge that true partnerships are aspirational, and it will take some time to get there, we are hopeful that our community of practice—with its community of learning—will spur incremental changes to our everyday practices that will eventually lead to a seismic shift to how we do engagement and research in Omaha and beyond.