Criterion Five: Engagement and Service Core Component 5a: The organization learns from the constituents it serves and analyzes its capacity to serve their needs and expectations.

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	While not designated as official “partnership” articulation agreements, many examples of liaisons exist between the College of Arts and Sciences and various community groups. In effect, the connections between the UMKC Theatre Department and several professional Kansas City theater companies (Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, Coterie Theatre, Actors Theatre KC, Kansas City Repertory Theatre and the New Theatre) are active partnerships that foster mutually beneficial relationships, with interactions extended to personnel, space usage, properties, costumes, scheduling and marketing. Kansas City’s annual outdoor summer event, the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, and the Actors Theatre KC, for example, use UMKC rehearsal rooms. In addition, UMKC Theatre does co-productions with the Coterie and the Unicorn Theatre, and the Coterie’s artistic director, Jeff Church, teaches Text Analysis for the Theatre Department every spring semester. The 16-year-old Festival and the Coterie hire UMKC faculty and students for all aspects of production. The New Theatre set up scholarships for UMKC Theatre Department, naming one of the awards for the theater’s founder, Patricia McIlrath. As a measure of our support, UMKC Theatre buys a table at the New Theatre’s annual fundraiser.
Also with established ties to the community, UMKC’s University Libraries, serves as a Federal Depository Library for the 5th U. S. Congressional District of Missouri, providing access for UMKC and the broader community to federal documents offered by the Government Printing Office. In partnership with the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum located in Independence, Mo., the University Libraries established a Presidential Studies Collection in the Miller Nichols Library on UMKC’s Volker campus. UMKC’s College of Arts and Sciences administers the partnership, along with the Truman Research Files Library Partners, which includes the Miller Nichols Library [MNL], Graceland College Library (Independence, Mo.), Maple Woods Community College Library and Mid-Continent Public Library. In addition, the University Libraries Courtesy Card Program provides direct on-site borrowing privileges for students, faculty and staff at participating academic/research libraries in the Kansas City area. One of these libraries is the neighboring Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology, one of the world’s preeminent libraries, which has had a long-standing partnership with our University Libraries. In 2008, more than 250 items from Linda Hall were circulated to UMKC student and faculty members through the Courtesy Card Program. Reciprocally, Linda Hall patrons checked out 156 items from MNL during the same period. Several Courtesy Card Program member libraries can use our library through the MOBIUS (statewide library catalog, including UMKC) Visiting Patron function. These MOBIUS Visiting Patrons are able to present their school ID to gain checkout privileges, so they do not need to present a courtesy card. Through the MOBIUS program, 1,028 items were checked out from MNL in 2008. Although Nelson Atkins Museum staff is not part of the Courtesy Card Program, we have an agreement with the Museum that allows their staff to use MNL and our Fine Arts Department Faculty (and specific students) to use the Museum’s library. In an effort to stay connected to potential donors, one of our University’s best sources for maintaining strong community outreach, UMKC’s Division of Advancement and Development, sponsors and promotes many activities and events to engage the University’s alumni and friends. In 2008, the division hosted 193 alumni and friends events. Three were high school prospective student recruitment events that drew approximately 50 students and their families. In 2007-08, as evidence of the goodwill being developed with our community, the division helped facilitate the activities of 2,000 volunteers, comprised of alumni and friends, who contributed 144,000 hours to benefit UMKC, with volunteer hours increasing by 150 percent since 2004. During the same period, our Alumni Fund attracted 1,052 new alumni donors, resulting in a giving increase of 37 percent. (Faculty and staff giving has also seen an increase. For example, the annual internal-giving program, Torchbearer, saw an 8 percent increase in 2008.) The division also regularly sponsors programs to bring alumni back to campus and the Kansas City community, particularly through the Department of Theatre in the College of Arts and Sciences. Alumni of the UMKC Theatre Department’s professional training programs have been hired back over the years to design sets, costumes, sound and lighting, and to perform in various productions.
Looking beyond the Kansas City area, the division held 22 alumni events across the U.S. during the past three years, with more than 400 alumni attending events in 2008. In addition to trips to Missouri cities outside Kansas City, UMKC leaders visited cities in California, Arizona, Florida, Washington D.C., Illinois, and New York. As part of those outreach efforts, the division contacted 7,926 alumni and friends who live and work in cities beyond metropolitan Kansas City. Through invitations, correspondence, personal phone calls, emails and face-to-face visits, we “touched” our out-of-town alumni and friends 13,860 times in 2008. Ongoing communication efforts include print and electronic publications. During 2008, for example, 182 alumni received personal letters of thanks from the Chancellor (Bailey, then Morton) or Interim Vice Chancellor Crespino. Perspectives magazine, an award-winning magazine published by the division, is mailed to more than 80,000 alumni and friends twice a year. E-Roos, an electronic alumni newsletter, reaches more than 30,000 alumni and friends each month. The division also regularly produces “In the Plus Column,” a brochure highlighting faculty and student honors and awards.