Across Cornell, faculty, staff and community partners are collaborating to address pressing community needs while creating meaningful, hands-on learning experiences for students.
The four projects supported by the latest round of Engaged Opportunity Grants from the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement highlight the breadth of partnerships advancing this work.
One of two collaborations with Cayuga Health Partners, for example, brings together Cornell Health, Tompkins County Whole Health and the Human Services Coalition to address social factors affecting Cornell students’ health and well-being. Led by a master of public health student and supervised by Lara Parrilla — co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity (CCHEq) and director of health equity with Cayuga Health’s Center for Health Equity Transformation — the project is supported by the CCHEq undergraduate chapter. The team will develop and pilot a screening tool to better understand unmet needs related to housing, food access, transportation and interpersonal safety. Students will contribute to research, design and data analysis, with findings used to strengthen services, identify gaps and guide future programs on and off campus.
Another funded project hopes to spark enthusiasm for plant science. Plants are essential to life on Earth, yet botanical education has declined in K–12 curricula, contributing to limited plant awareness and decreasing enrollment in related fields. Developed through the Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS), CROPPS-in-a-Box reimagines how students learn about and connect with living systems through an interactive tool that allows users to send electrical inputs to plants and receive real-time responses. The project is guided by Darius Melvin, Anya Gruber and Elizabeth Jones of CROPPS, in collaboration with Margaret Frank, associate professor of integrative plant science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The team will refine the tool with feedback from Cornell undergraduates studying plant sciences and train up to ten students to demonstrate it to high schoolers in the horticulture program at McKinley High School in Buffalo, helping inspire future innovators in sustainable agriculture and plant science.
The other projects that were awarded 2026 Engaged Opportunity Grants are:
- Next Level Up Youth Project: Expanding pathways for local youth through sports, outdoor education and experiential learning
- Screening and Resource Navigation for Students: Connecting Cornell students to essential social and health resources
- Community-Based Blood Pressure Screening: Improving early detection of hypertension where people live, work, play, and pray
- CROPPS-in-a-Box: Opening a dialogue with plants through interactive learning
