Societal Impact

Societal Impact

Strengthening connections with community 

Increase the engagement of COB faculty with community 

Our faculty are closely engaged with the community. Some examples since 2017 include:  

• John D. Burrow: Chairman of Fredericksburg Regional Military Affairs Council 
• Kim Gower: 2021 Richmond Animal Care and Control (RACC) Volunteer RACC Gives Back Program 
• Kim Gower: Richmond Animal Care and Control (RACC) Spokesperson 
• Kim Gower: East End Cemetery Clean Up and Restoration Advocate, 2018-present 
• Lance Gentry: Colonial Forge Community Association, lnc: Elected to board member by residents to serve one year term, then elected by board to serve as secretary. Served additional two months in 2021 beyond initial term at board request (September 2019 to February 2021). 

Empowerment of our community  

Help our local organizations (businesses and nonprofits) improve their performance    

Many of our faculty provide advice and consulting services for the local businesses. Evidence of our faculty activities in this area abounds. Some projects conducted since 2017 include: 

• Christopher J. Garcia: Helping Spotsylvania County develop a web-based analytics & decision support software platform for transportation project planning and analysis under Virginia’s Smart Scale scoring framework. 
• Christopher J. Garcia: Conducting an economic impact analysis of a $270 million project split across multiple sites within the state for Virginia Natural Gas.  
• Christopher J. Garcia: Conducting a statistical analysis of the Virginia Smart Scale Methodology (a methodology for scoring transportation projects competing for funding) for Fredericksburg Regional Alliance.  
• Dave Henderson: Projects conducted by Center for Business research  
• Alexandra Dunn: advisor to TI Verbatim Consulting to help answer questions from clients, design surveys, review literature, and guide projects in the right direction. Topics mainly focus around organizational culture, teamwork, and human resources.  
• Alexandra Dunn: HR trainer for Mary Washington Healthcare Human Resources; Worked with four human resources professionals and academics to deliver a four-part training to human resource business partners and middle management. Worked directly with VP of HR and Director of Learning and Development to conduct a needs assessment, design, and deliver training around communication and delivering feedback.  
• Kim Gower: Professional consulting services: working with for profit and not for profit firms, providing comprehensive business process, strategic, leadership, employee, team, coaching, marketing, and financial observations, recommendations, planning, training, and implementation 
• Lance Gentry: Fredericksburg Regional Alliance: Provided expertise as needed and desired. Requests usually pertain to demographics or traffic issues. Provided demographic forecast and information about commuter workforce. Aided Fredericksburg Regional Alliance in requesting that the US Census Bureau create a unique division for reporting demographics within the Northern Virginian Metropolitan Statistical Area (Spring 2015 to Present). 
• Lance Gentry: Ramoth Baptist Church: Created market research survey to help them better understand the desires and needs of parents and youth in their organization. Programmed and hosted online survey, then analyzed and reported the results to leaders at Ramoth Baptist Church (Fall 2018) 

Encourage our students’ contribution to solving community problems: 

• Lance Gentry:  
  • Eagle Resource Closet: Several teams created marketing plans to increase UMW student awareness of the Eagle Resource Closet, a local charity that provides food and clothing to struggling students. 
  • The Knowledge Exchange: Two student teams developed marketing strategies to both recruit more tutors for their program, which provides free tutoring for disadvantaged youth, and to increase awareness of the charity among potential donors. 
  • Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fredericksburg: Two groups of students provided a marketing plan and designed a website to modernize the organizations existing site and to allow them to engage in low cost,yet effective social media. 
  • Fredericksburg Parks and Recreation: Guided six students teams as they tackled the challenges of marketing and fund-raising for a local charitable fund. 

Contribute to our community’s knowledge and education  

• Alexandra Dunn: Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) Course Redesign grant project which aims to reduce the costs of higher education for Virginia students by eliminating textbook costs through creating an open source textbook to be used by faculty across the state.  
• Kim Gower: Higher education curriculum consulting services: specializing in effective pedagogical design, community-based learning and experiential and digital curriculum development tools and implementation; outcome-based assessment 
• Serving as speakers in major community events:  
  • John D. Burrow: Master of Ceremony at the Innovation Challenge @ Dahlgren ceremonies (Aug 2022)  
  • John D. Burrow: Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Leadership Conference Panama City, Florida (Oct 2021) 
  • John D. Burrow: Technology Enablers for Digital Engineering Conference, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, Virginia (Oct 2018) 

Conducting research with societal impact 

UMW actively promotes societal impacts from research by conducting pedagogical research that have had a positive societal impact. Some of the recent research projects are listed below: 

Select research in pedagogical innovation

• Allen, S.A., Gower, K., Allen, D. (2020). Teaching with Technology: Handbook for Leadership, Management, and Business. Allen, S., Gower, K., & Allen, D. Eds. Edward Elgar Publishing. Google Scholar. 
• Dunn, A. M. & Fallah, S. (2022). The future is scary!: Using scenario planning for student job searches and career development. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference. Ponoma, CA. 
• Mitchell, J. & Gower, K. (2020). A Move Towards Mastery: Leveraging Technology. In Teaching with Technology Handbook for Leadership, Management, and Business. Eds. Allen, S., Gower, K., & Allen, D. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, United Kingdom.  
• Gower, K. (2021). Let them eat cake: An Innovative Project to Teach the Valuable Skill of Self-Performance Appraisal. 2021 MOBTS Conference, Jacksonville, FL.