Patricia Zahn, UMSL’s director of community engagement and outreach, was recently inducted as a member of the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)
When Patricia Zahn accepted a newly created role as director of community engagement and outreach at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2010, she felt she had found a position that perfectly aligned with her career – and life – goal of serving her community.
And her efforts relentlessly pursuing that goal over the past nearly 15 years have not only greatly benefitted UMSL and the surrounding community, but they’ve been noticed by others with similar roles in the University of Missouri System.
This spring, two of her colleagues from the University of Missouri–Columbia, Associate Extension Professor Emerita Mary Simon Leuci and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Development and Strategic Partnerships Susan Renoe, informed Zahn they would be nominating her for membership in the prestigious Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship.
In their nomination letter, they chronicled Zahn’s long list of accomplishments, the direct impact that she’s made on the UMSL community and how she has helped others learn to grow their impact on the community with programs such as UMSL’s Community Engaged Research workshops and Service-Learning Communities of Practice. To end their nomination letter, they wrote:
“Patricia brings a wealth of experience from her active engagement in Campus Compact for UMSL, her collaboration work with other universities and colleges in the region, successful engagement and development of student civic capacity, and oversight of the Des Lee Collaborative Vision to ACES. She is a collaborator, leader and doer who will also provide linkages to community and partners. It is our pleasure to nominate Patricia Zahn.”
Zahn found out the nomination had been accepted earlier this summer, and she was officially inducted into ACES on July 30. She was one of three members of the University of Missouri System to be inducted as part of ACES’ 24-member class of 2025, along with two faculty members from MU: Lisa Dorner, director of the Cambio Center, and Pilar Mendoza, the founding director of the International Research Center for Development.
“It’s a real honor,” Zahn said. “I am thrilled that, with this recognition, I get to celebrate the things we’re doing here, the things we’re doing really well. UMSL is a community-engaged university. That’s what we do. It’s part of our DNA.”
Zahn is excited to get started as a member of ACES.
“ACES is a group of people who meet together regularly and talk about the university community engagement that is taking place, about how we can leverage some of those things such as our anchor institution initiatives that we’re really involved with here at UMSL,” she said. “We’ll talk about how that translates elsewhere, even to other countries. I’m excited to be a part of those conversations, and to just being able to continue to build the work that we’re doing here on campus. And sometimes just being part of these organizations opens doors – you have conversations, find opportunities, and then you can build and grow things together.”
Zahn’s origin story with UMSL started simply. She was working for a statewide nonprofit agency, the Missouri Humanities Council, and became interested in pursuing a certificate in nonprofit management as a way to expand the impact she could make her chosen career. She was impressed with not only what UMSL offered, but with the faculty members she met. Not only did she complete the certificate, but she wound up pursuing her Master of Public Policy Administration, which she finished in 2007.
A few years later, she saw a job posting at UMSL that struck a chord.
“I read the job description for the Des Lee Collaborative Vision directorship, and it was about an academic institution saying, ‘Yes, we want to collaborate. We want to work with community partners,’” Zahn said. “I already knew that UMSL had a lot of community partners through the Nonprofit Management and Leadership Program, so I was familiar with that. Then I discovered that UMSL had these professorships that actually had funding to support the activities, so they were putting their money where their mouth is. I thought that was pretty profound, so I wanted to pursue that.”
The Des Lee program includes 30 endowed professorships in a wide array of areas, including music, nursing, art, science, public policy and zoology, and those professors partner with more than 100 organizations across the St. Louis region to offer educational and cultural opportunities. She has been instrumental in helping UMSL achieve recognition as a Community Engaged university through the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Zahn, who went on to earn her Doctor of Education from UMSL in 2022, serves on the Creating Whole Communities Leadership advisory team and was a member of the UMSL Nonprofit Management and Leadership Program advisory board for several years. She launched UMSL’s Community Connections newsletter and helped establish UniverCities Exchange, a collaborative project between UMSL and the University of Missouri–Kansas City. An integral member of the Economic and Community Development team, she also spearheads the UMSL Civic Engagement Coalition and co-developed and continues to foster the bi-annual UMSL Forum for Community Dialogue.
“I’m super involved in the civic engagement activities that we have here on campus as well, trying to make sure that we’re coordinating those efforts,” Zahn said. “Engagement is just part of my DNA. It is who I am. I think about how I can make a difference in the world, whether it’s through making a donation philanthropically or being actively involved. If I see a need and I see a place where I can help, I will. And it’s not always me who is the right person for a particular task. There are other people who might better support the efforts, and I want to help connect them to opportunities.”
In his letter of support for Zahn’s membership, Adriano Udani, who is now the Director of Community Engaged Research at the University of Minnesota, spoke to one of Zahn’s strengths, which is helping others learn how to reach their potential.
“After one of my research presentations, I remember feeling that I wanted to improve the relevance and reach of my research. As a new assistant professor, I did not have many options; new to St. Louis, I had minimal connections with which to work to expand my community engagement aspirations. Patricia was one of the first people to approach me and speak at length about my community engaged research agenda, goals, and how she might be able to support me. It was through this conversation that Patricia fostered a springboard for me to develop a robust network of community partners, grants and status as a community engaged research at UMSL.”
There are, Zahn has learned through experience, tested steps in the collaboration process.
“First, you create trusting space so people can share ideas, and then brainstorm them out, figure out what we’d like to try together, who has different roles in that collaboration, how we’re going to communicate these things, and then you implement,” she said. “You try it out and make things happen. And then during that time, the communication piece is key. In any of the workshops that I do, that is what I talk about. Constant communication. Over communicate. Talk to people about what we’re doing, if you’re feeling challenged. Are things going well? Do we need to pivot?”
Zahn likes to emphasize that nearly everything she does at UMSL in her various roles relies on people working together through partnerships and collaboration, and that’s one of the reasons she’s excited to become involved with ACES.
“What ACES does, and what it can continue to do, is lift up community engagement and the importance of that work in our in our academic institutions,” she said. “There are many people doing important research and writing about the meaningful work happening here. Our community-engaged teaching and scholarship are making a real difference in the communities we serve. By continuing to share and support these efforts, we can strengthen that impact. This is one key area where we can collaborate across institutions to support faculty and staff as well as community partnerships more effectively and create meaningful change in our world.”
