Assessing Collaborative Veterinary Outreach Using the Principles of Veterinary Community Engagement

This case study evaluates a community engagement partnership between the Shelter Medicine Service at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine (SM) and Centro Hispano de East Tennessee (CH), two groups that collaborated to understand and address barriers to veterinary care among Knoxville’s Latino community. The purpose of this paper is to assess this partnership in accordance with the principles of veterinary community engagement (VCE) (Watson et al., 2024), a newly developed framework specific to the field of veterinary medicine. Our assessment supports the tenets of VCE as a methodology for designing and evaluating institutional-community collaborations and reveals how adaptive engagement strategies enabled the partnership to respond to disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.