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Nominations for Awards
We invite faculty, staff, and students at area institutions of higher education to nominate individuals or organizations in any of the following categories:
Impact Award: our annual award recognizes a new partnership, program, or initiative bringing higher education and community partners together to make a significant impact on critical issues facing Spokane. Nominations in this category may focus on innovative service-learning, community-based research, philanthropy, or project-based work that creates a significant and demonstrable community impact while advancing knowledge creation and the greater good.
Mentor of the Year Award: This annual award recognizes a specific community leader who, in partnership with higher education, has advanced the learning of students, the research of faculty, or the capacity of campuses to have an impact on the local community. The recipient of the award is a co-educator and community scholar of practice in the fullest sense.
Community Partner of the Year: An award to recognize an agency or organization whose partnerships with Spokane campuses achieve a depth and breadth of collaboration and reciprocity. Recipient organizations are typically a part of the learning, volunteerism, philanthropy, and scholarship of multiple campuses, and they invest their time in both their mission as well as knowledge creation for community impact.
Community Innovation Award: This award recognizes and celebrates outstanding initiatives or projects that contributed to the improvement of our community through innovative solutions or approaches. This award is given to individuals, groups, organizations, or partnerships that have demonstrated creativity and ingenuity in addressing complex community challenges.
Engaged Faculty Award: This award honors a faculty member whose teaching, research, or partnership work meaningfully strengthens collaboration between campus and community. Recipients demonstrate a deep commitment to community‑engaged scholarship, advancing student learning while contributing to measurable community benefit.
Community Partner Awards
Impact Award
The Impact Award recognizes an innovative program of community engagement, bringing universities, students, faculty, and staff to support our community in a novel and effective manner.
The 2025 Community Impact Award is presented If you could Save Just One.
If You Could Save Just One is dedicated to empowering at-risk youth and their families in the Hillyard neighborhood and surrounding areas. The organization offers a variety of programs, including after-school activities, mentorship, and community service opportunities, all designed to provide a supportive environment where youth can explore their paths to success.
Just One's innovative approach addresses barriers to youth participation by offering free programs and resources, ensuring that all youth, regardless of circumstance, have access to enriching experiences that support their development.
Community Partner of the Year
The Community Partner of the Year Award recognizes an agency in our community that has partnered with universities at multiple levels, including service-learning, Community-Based Research, place-based initiatives, and reciprocal service.
The 2025 Community Partner of the Year award is presented to Feast World Kitchen.
Feast World Kitchen is a unique and vibrant community partner that brings people together through the universal language of food. Founded on the mission of providing opportunity and dignity to immigrants and refugees through culinary entrepreneurship, Feast offers Spokane a powerful example of cross-cultural connection, resilience, and hospitality. Each week, international chefs—many of whom are newcomers to Spokane—prepare meals that tell the story of their homelands, building bridges between cultures and creating a shared table for all.
Mentor of the Year
The Mentor of the Year Award recognizes an individual community partner for his/her excellence in advancing students’ learning and facilitating meaningful outcomes for our community.
The 2025 Mentor of the Year Award goes to Jene Ray, Director of The Zone at the Northeast Community Center.
Jene is an incredible partner who is committed to mentoring the students who serve with her at the Zone. The Zone has hosted a number of Wolff Fellows from Gonzaga University over the past eight years. They have been offered opportunities to work on projects like the Coffee to Careers workforce development program, health equity initiatives, housing diversion programs and much more. Students receive one-on-one support from Jene who offers them opportunities to grow knowledge and skills in community development and advocacy.
Community Innovation Award
The Community Innovation Award recognizes and celebrates outstanding initiatives or projects that contribute to the improvement of our community through innovative solutions or approaches. This award is given to individuals, groups, organizations, or partnerships that have demonstrated creativity and ingenuity in addressing complex community challenges.
The 2025 Community Innovation Award is presented to the Barton English Language School.
The Barton English Language School, a program that has transformed English as a Second Language (ESL) education in Spokane, was selected this year for their dedicated work to meet the needs of our community. Recognizing that traditional ESL classes often present challenges such as childcare constraints and rigid classroom settings, Barton offers flexible, individualized tutoring sessions. Dedicated volunteers tailor lessons to meet each student's unique needs, emphasizing practical English skills applicable to daily life. This approach not only enhances language proficiency but also fosters a sense of belonging, mutual learning, and confidence among participants.
CEI 2023 Faculty Awards
Faculty Awards
Excellence in Community-Based Teaching and Learning
The Award for Excellence in Community-Based Teaching and Learning is a recognition for excellence in a scholarship of community-based teaching and learning. Presenters in this area explored how their teaching and students work in the community helped to advance outcomes for our neighborhoods or around critical-issue areas.
The Peer-Review Board of the Community Engagement Institute recognizesEastern Washington University’ Dr. William Shaw and Dr. Brian Davenport and community partner, Spokane County Courts’ Ana Fortson were identified by their peers for excellence in community-based learning for their presentation entitled, Test Driving Career Through Community Engagement: A Guardianship Auditing Project. Through an innovative partnership between the EWU Accounting Department and Spokane County Courts, EWUs students are exploring career tracks while meeting community-defined needs and serving the greater good. Community engagement in accounting has a long history though it is typically found either through public accounting firm internships or, more recently through Voluntary Income Tax Assistance (VITA) (Carr, 1998). Realizing that not all students choose these paths, EWU continued to explore additional options for students to grow their experience. The partnership with the Spokane County Guardianship Monitoring Program (GMP) serves a significant pedagogical need, and, as well as, addressing a significant community need. The review board specifically applauded this project’s attention to responding to community needs while developing pedagogically impactful learning experiences for students. This work modeled the kind of reciprocity that reviewers desired to see practiced between colleagues in higher education and the community.
Excellence in Community-Based Research
The Award for Excellence in Community-Based Research recognizes a community-based research. Award recipients advanced a project applying disciplinary expertise to a problem in the community in order to address and solve a critical issue.
The review board has chosen Dr. Beth Halaas and Dr. Bipasha Biswas of Eastern Washington University and colleague and community partner Dr. Rumyana Kudeva for excellence in their community-engaged scholarship. Their presentation Co-Constructing Strategies for addressing Structural Inequality in Refugee and Immigrant (SSIRI) Communities in Spokane, Washington describes a study developed in response to the sense of alienation among refugees/immigrants worldwide. Spokane, WA, a UN designated refugee-resettlement city is no exception to this alienation. While the initial resettlement efforts under US Refugee Act of 1980 (Public Law 96-212) include referral for services (health and mental health, legal, housing assistance, and education), availability of culturally responsive services are extremely limited.
Their findings will inform service providers of the barriers experienced by resettled refugees and seek to improve community-based organizations’ service delivery models for this population.