Penn State recently received $1.8 million from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to bring faculty and community members together to find effective solutions to local community problems.

Through a proposed model system called FOCUS for Engagement: Forming Outreach Community University Systems for Engagement, faculty from different University Park colleges will be linked with community members to create elementary school readiness programs for children.

Faculty members Karen Bierman, a psychology professor, and Wayne Smutz, senior director of Continuing Education, lead the initiative to create FOCUS.

Smutz said the project uses the faculty expertise at Penn State, a land-grant university, to directly solve community problems within the commonwealth.

"We've been working on the issue of how to more effectively relate to the commonwealth for a while now," he said.

Although other programs of faculty-community involvement are in progress, Bierman said the Kellogg grant is different since it allows a broader range of faculty to be included in one joint effort.

"The difference about FOCUS ... is that often grants just fund a specific project," she said. "What Kellogg has done is fund our capacity to meet with community coalitions to have a joint plan."

Penn State is one of four land-grant universities nationwide to receive the grant.

The other institutions include the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Minnesota.

Bierman and Smutz will be coordinating teams of faculty from a wide range of colleges this summer.

The project is expected to be underway by the fall.

Bierman said there is a "menu" of things FOCUS can do to enhance school readiness, such as improving the quality of early childcare training, providing support for parents in poverty and improving preschool literacy.

"[FOCUS] is designed to strengthen the bridge between faculty keeping up to date in their fields, to making sure the outreach delivery systems are providing the most up-to-date information to communities," he said.

Since the grant only covers the next three years, the goal of FOCUS is to make sure the programs are sustainable.

Bierman said one way to do this is to improve programs that already exist -- many of which could benefit from a more up-to-date version.

"Some programs ... were done in the '70s -- there's been a lot of research since then," he said.

A key part of FOCUS is faculty and community members working together, since feedback from community members is needed to see which programs work best for them.

"The goal of FOCUS is to create more of a two-way street in partnerships with communities," Bierman said. "We want to look at these programs and see how they would be best tailored to fit the community's needs."

If their programs are successful, Smutz said Penn State and the other chosen universities will serve as a model to others.

"If we learn some things -- and we hope we will -- we hope to share them so other people don't have quite as far to go," he said.