INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana – Dr. Kiesha Warren-Gordon, Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Ball State University, has been awarded the prestigious Gerald Bepko Faculty Community Engagement Grant Award by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.

The Bepko Award is awarded biennially to a faculty member at an Indiana institution of higher education who exemplifies the scholarship of community engagement. The Indiana Commission for Higher Education is a 14-member public body tasked with ensuring that Indiana’s higher education system meets the needs of students and the state.

As a Community-Engaged Alliance Faculty Fellow, Warren-Gordon has worked closely with the Whitely neighborhood in Muncie, Indiana, including the Whitely Community Council, led by President Frank Scott and Executive Director Ken Hudson. Warren-Gordon spearheaded efforts to bring members of the Whitely community together with the Muncie and Ball State Police Departments for events designed to create opportunities for dialogue and trust building between the groups, a project called Better Together.

"I'm extremely thankful for the opportunity this award provides to highlight and discuss how community-engaged pedagogy can transform the lives of our students and contribute to our local communities, and most especially the Whitely (IN) community,” said Warren-Gordon. “I want to thank the Whitely Community Council and especially Frank Scott and Ken Hudson for their unwavering support."

“We are so proud of Kiesha, her scholarship, and the work she is doing in the Whitely community,” said Elijah Howe, Executive Director of Community-Engaged Alliance. “This award is well deserved and an acknowledgment of the impact her work is having on the local community and the importance of faculty community engagement. Kiesha is the latest example of the way our work supports the scholarship of community engagement. Each year the Gerald Bepko Faculty Community Engagement Award recipient has been given to an alumnus of our faculty fellows program and we look forward to continuing that tradition.”

Community-Engaged Alliance’s Faculty Fellows program is an 18-month program that brings together a team of faculty from across the state to work on a research project designed to advance the understanding and practice of community engagement. Faculty Fellows are awarded a $7,500 grant for use in the pursuit of their research.

About Community-Engaged Alliance

Community-Engaged Alliance is a partnership of Indiana’s public, private, and community college higher education institutions focused on advocating, implementing, and improving community engagement efforts so that students graduate as well-informed, engaged, and productive members of society who are fully enabled to provide leadership and service that advances the public good in their communities.