What is Amplify Your Impact?

Amplify Your Impact focuses on leadership and communication for the purpose of advancing community wellbeing. By providing our students with training and experience in public messaging as producers of knowledge, TWU will foster thought leaders who can help build public understanding and trust on topics that are critical for our collective wellbeing. Our graduate students are future scholars, practitioners, teachers, and leaders in their respective fields. Whether their studies are grounded in health, social equity, education, and/or community change, this initiative will help them learn communication skills critical to educating communities and engaging in informed advocacy.

Acknowledging that community wellbeing is multidimensional, interconnected, and nuanced across academic disciplines, Amplify Your Impact builds its framework off of the Okanagan Charter, an international charter for health promoting universities and colleges, that charges higher education to advance community wellbeing by being relevant to real-world outcomes (2015). While academic publication is an important mechanism for advancing knowledge, this QEP initiative focuses on more public-facing methods of communication, such as op-eds, podcasts, public lectures/workshops, videos, blogs/ essays, or policy document development. By fostering the communication techniques and strategies of our students, Amplify Your Impact aspires to develop equitable and thriving communities through the advancement of evidence-based, publicly-available information.

Public scholars are those people in communities and organizations that others turn to for their expertise. They inspire and influence others with their grounded knowledge and innovative thinking.

Amplify Your Impact will create a bridge between scholarly/creative work, public understanding, and public trust on topics that are critical to our collective wellbeing. Public facing methods of communication include op-eds, podcasts, public lectures/workshops, videos, blogs/ essays, and/or policy document development.

The QEP will focus on graduate students across all academic disciplines and campuses as our future scholars, practitioners, teachers, and leaders. Faculty, staff, and other graduate students will in turn serve as mentors for undergraduate students, supporting them with training specific to public-facing communication, technology, and student health and wellbeing, answering the call to make higher education relevant to real-world outcomes.

Graduate students represent 37% of Texas Woman’s enrollment. By building public-facing communication skills, these students will be better able to disseminate their knowledge to the public in an effort to build public trust and promote community wellbeing and support undergraduate students in doing the same.

Amplify Your Impact aims to meet two major goals over five years starting in fall 2023:

Student Learning Goal: Improve students’ ability to impact community wellbeing by developing their public communication skills. Student learning will be measured using the following student learning outcomes (SLOs):

• SLO 1: Students will be able to responsibly extend knowledge from academic study to social issues related to community wellbeing.
• SLO 2: Students will be able to apply effective communication strategies appropriate for public engagement.

Institutional Goal: Develop faculty’s abilities in providing effective instruction in public communication skills.