Mission

Iowa and Minnesota Campus Compact strengthens the capacity of colleges and universities to fulfill the public purposes of higher education through its network of 56 campuses. This includes educating students through community and civic learning experiences and making an impact in communities through reciprocal partnerships that address community-identified goals. IAMNCC creates partnership opportunities, supports quality programming through professional development, and promotes the importance of the civic mission.

Minnesota Campus Compact was founded 1994 and Iowa Campus Compact in 2003. The two organizations joined a strategic alliance in 2019 and legally merged in October 2022. IAMNCC continues to be part of the National Campus Compact network.

Student-Ready Campus Strategy

Iowa & Minnesota Campus Compact began coordinating a broad organizational strategy to support campuses in addressing basic needs insecurity in Fall 2019. While our Minnesota VISTA program in particular has focused on combating basic needs insecurity on college campuses, the experiences and insight those VISTA members and sites shared, combined with The Hope Center’s “Real College” survey results and other input from our partners across both states, helped us to recognize the urgency of developing a more concerted strategy in this area. 

Our efforts so far have focused on developing partnerships and strategies to support this work on campus while also strengthening the infrastructure of community-based anti-poverty organizations. We’ve funded AmeriCorps VISTA and State positions on campuses to build capacity for food pantries, student resource centers, and data collection on student needs.

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Equity Committment

In 2020, Iowa & Minnesota Campus Compact began the process of making a concrete commitment to equity in our work and operations.

The civic mission, as well as the future of higher education, depends upon our consistent and persistent commitment to equity. Equity is essential to the future viability and effectiveness of our network.  To achieve our goals, we must create conditions for all people to thrive, experience a sense of belonging, and engage meaningfully in their institutions and communities. 

To actualize our vision of the civic mission, we must reckon with the systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and other oppressions entrenched in the institutions of higher education and other contexts we work within. We cannot strive to promote the public good of higher education without acknowledging who has been excluded from or exploited by the definitions of “public good” that have emerged out of institutions with legacies of Native American removal, racial segregation, and other white supremacist violence. 

Our approach is grounded in an ethic of full participation that recognizes the need for architectural approaches and systemic change. 

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