About the University of Missouri-Columbia
The University of Missouri-Columbia, also affectionately known as Mizzou, is the flagship campus of the four-campus University of Missouri System. Mizzou is the largest public university in the state of Missouri, serving over 31,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. It is also a land grant university, meaning it is part of a federally mandated mission to use university research to benefit the larger Missouri community, which is the explicit charge of MU Extension. As part of Extension, MU has field faculty placed around the state who educate residents in all 114 counties plus the city of St. Louis.
MU engages with our community by focusing on three grand challenges across the state of Missouri: economic opportunity; educational access and excellence; and health and well-being. For more information about the University of Missouri—Columbia, visit the Mizzou about page. You can also find us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, see us on Instagram, and watch us on YouTube.
About Community Connect
UM System Community Connect sites tell the stories of partnerships with communities across the state and highlight ways to get involved.
In 2020, the UM System and each of its four universities launched their Community Connect platforms – tools designed to improve opportunities for communication and connection between the universities and various populations in the communities they serve.
Each Community Connect site features stories of community engagement, upcoming events, resources, services and campus contacts to support and facilitate community conversations. Each site also includes an Impact Report – key data about the impact the universities are making in their communities. At the UM System level, users can sort data by county or legislative district to see the programs, opportunities and impact data in targeted area in the report.
Users can also see how the Mizzou campus is impacting our community, by looking at our campus-specific Impact Report. If you have questions about the Mizzou Community Connect site, please contact our Engagement Leaders.
What is Engagement?
Fundamentally, engagement is a mutually-beneficial partnership between Universities and their communities. In this context, all the ways in which the University of Missouri System and the greater community partner to establish a relationship of value, share information and improve the lives of those in Missouri and beyond is considered engagement work.
The UM System Office of Engagement and Outreach recognizes and celebrates the engagement that happens organically through daily interactions between the public and each person, unit, department, office, and school at all four universities across the system. The Office of Engagement seeks to leverage these interactions and foster even stronger ties with the citizens of Missouri through strategic engagement, which can come in many forms.