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About Us

The Office of Community Engagement and Outreach (OCEO) provides resources and support to more deeply integrate community engagement with its land-grant mission of teaching, research, and public engagement. We facilitate hundreds of connections between faculty, staff, students, and community partners.

OCEO fosters UT’s land-grant mission by connecting university and community knowledge to create lasting solutions for all Tennesseans. We provide resources to assist UT administration, academic departments, faculty and staff to address complex issues and support external partnerships that co-generate, apply, transmit and preserve knowledge.

UT is one of 28 universities to be designated by the Carnegie Foundation as “Community Engaged” with “Very High Research Activity.”

In all of our work, we emphasize these essential principles of community engagement: collaboration, equal participation, community empowerment, reciprocity, and sustainability.