After 26 years at CU-Boulder, Anne Heinz is slated to retire on June 30, but not without leaving a significant legacy and an enduring impact on the university’s outreach and engagement initiatives.
“Anne expanded the outreach programs across the state and involved faculty from all disciplines,” said Chancellor Phil DiStefano. “Because of Anne’s work as Associate Vice Chancellor/Vice Provost for outreach and engagement, the reputation of CU-Boulder across the state has improved dramatically.”
In 2009, Chancellor DiStefano appointed Heinz as the university’s first Associate Vice Chancellor for Outreach and Engagement — and later Vice Provost — on the heels of Flagship 2030, the university’s strategic plan. Heinz led the outreach and engagement task force, and its recommendations focused on one of Flagship 2030’s core initiatives: “Serving Colorado, the Community, and our Graduates.”
Looking back, the Chancellor remembers the citizens who were interviewed by Heinz and other faculty as part of the Flagship 2030 planning process and how they were largely unaware of the role CU-Boulder was playing in local issues.
“Faculty were doing research on water, pine beetle kill, and snowmelt that definitely had an effect on the local population but the community did not know about the research,” Chancellor DiStefano said. “I decided to create the position of Associate Vice Chancellor for Outreach and Engagement to bring together and coordinate the many outreach programs that were going on and to provide seed grants for faculty who wanted to initiate new outreach programs.
“Anne was the perfect person to lead this initiative given her academic role as Dean of Continuing Education and the respect and trust that she carries with the faculty on campus.”
With Heinz’s guidance, the university has been making steady progress toward Flagship 2030’s outreach and engagement recommendations, including developing a new campus definition for outreach and engagement that informs the annual faculty outreach awards, creating a campus-wide website documenting outreach activities across the state, and laying the foundation for campus ‘welcome centers,’ such as the Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE), tentatively scheduled to begin construction this summer.
Heinz fondly remembers interviewing key stakeholders — mayors, newspaper publishers, school superintendents, chamber executives, parents, and community representatives — in communities across the state and the Flagship 2030 process.
“What was powerful about the exercise was it provided a campus-wide platform to talk about some of the issues that are often siloed in different areas of campus,” she said. “Through Flagship 2030, there was recognition this was the right thing to do. It was very gratifying.”
Long before Flagship 2030, outreach and engagement played a significant role in Heinz’s work as dean of Division of Continuing Education. After being appointed dean in 1996, she was charged with oversight of the outreach grant program. Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Bruce Ekstrand established the program in 1986 for faculty interested in delivering statewide outreach programs to Colorado communities. Heinz enhanced the awards process by commencing a peer-review process and establishing a faculty committee, formalizing project criteria and an outreach definition, and increasing annual funding.
“We were able to secure support from the Offices of the Chancellor and Provost,” she said. “It signifies their understanding of and appreciation for outreach and engagement work.”
Since 1999, the Outreach Committee has awarded more than 600 faculty projects and supported projects with more than $3.6 million in funds from the Offices of the Chancellor and Provost and the Division of Continuing Education.
These grants provide seed money for projects that are often leveraged for larger initiatives. For example, Engineering Professor Bernard Amadei was asked to help engineer a water pump for a small village in Belize in 2000 and an outreach grant supported his work. From that project grew Engineers Without Borders-USA, a well-known non-profit that now boasts more than 13,000 student, faculty, and professional members nationwide, and the support for that initial project led to the establishment of the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities. The project gave Amadei's scholarly work new meaning, but he admitted that departure from traditional work and research made for an initially rocky road.
“The two people who really helped me a lot were non-engineers, Anne Heinz from Continuing Education and Phil DiStefano,” he said. “I am grateful for their support and their vision. I think that is how you identify leaders, when they see something where nobody else sees it. To say ‘it is just a little seed now, but there is potential here.’ They provided the fertile ground for that seed to grow.”
After more than two decades serving CU-Boulder, Heinz has indeed cultivated fertile ground for a multitude of outreach and engagement initiatives to prosper and grow and she leaves a lasting legacy.
“It will be difficult for anyone to follow Anne as dean of Continuing Education and as vice provost for outreach and engagement,” Chancellor DiStefano said. “She set the bar extremely high for the next individual.”
Please join Vice Provost Heinz and the Outreach Staff Steering Committee for an interactive brown bag discussion for faculty and staff about how outreach and engagement initiatives fit with the university's mission and strategic plan: “Outreach & Engagement: The BIG Picture” April 23, noon- 1:30 p.m. UMC Aspen Rooms, 285, 287, 289 RSVP by April 17 to Jeanne McDonald |