Michigan State University has been named a regional winner of the 2026 W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award, positioning the university as a finalist for the top national honor in community-engaged higher education. Awarded by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, the honor recognizes MSU’s transformative, community-led public health partnership in Flint.
“The vision, the funding and the priorities for this department came from the Flint community,” said Jennifer Johnson, chair of the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health in the MSU College of Human Medicine. “The department itself is built and led with community because working together helps us tackle the concerns that matter most to Flint residents. A community-first approach to leadership, research and education creates a lasting impact that reaches far beyond any single person, team or program.”
MSU launched the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health to promote public health in Flint and across Michigan. In 2011, Flint community groups approached MSU’s College of Human Medicine, based 50 miles away in East Lansing, to propose creating a public health division in Flint to improve health. MSU agreed to build and lead the department with community input, creating the first academic department co-developed and co-led with the community.
Community members actively participate in departmental governance. They contribute to strategic planning, help determine organizational priorities, and maintain voting representation on major decision-making committees, including faculty and chair hiring committees.
“Our outcomes demonstrate that shared leadership of the department is not a burden, but rather a path to success,” said Sarah Bailey, of the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health Community Co-Governance Development Committee. “When we approached Michigan State University with a vision for a public health department rooted in local priorities and shared decision-making, we knew that what we were proposing was groundbreaking. My hope is that other academic institutions will recognize the profound value of community-partnered institutional leadership.”
Since its founding, the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health has reached thousands of people through community-based interventions. Additional highlights and accomplishments include:
- receiving more than $500 million in external funding;
- creating more than 300 jobs with an economic impact of $1.3 billion;
- delivering suicide prevention care to more than 26,000 people;
- providing mental health and substance use screenings to over 20,000 people;
- distributing fresh fruits and vegetables to more than 195,000 residents;
- providing enhanced prenatal and support services to thousands of individuals in Flint; and
- authoring more than 850 articles to disseminate findings and inform health policy.
“Congratulations to the winners of the Kellogg Community Engagement Scholarship Awards,” APLU President Waded Cruzado said. “Land-grant and public universities are laser-focused on working with their communities to identify and tackle challenges through their education, research and community engagement work. We’re delighted to lift up institutional efforts that are enhancing the health, quality of life and competitiveness of their regions.”
Since 2007, APLU and the Engagement Scholarship Consortium, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, have partnered to honor the engagement scholarships of four-year public and land-grant universities. The award recognizes programs that demonstrate how institutions have redesigned their learning, discovery and engagement missions to deepen their partnerships and achieve broader impacts in their communities. The national award is named for C. Peter Magrath, APLU president from 1992 to 2005. Other finalists for the 2026 Magrath Award include the University of Colorado Boulder, University of Louisville and Virginia Tech University.
