As Director of Engaged Scholarship in urbanCORE at UNC Charlotte, Dr. Tamara Johnson develops policies, structures, and programs that support community-based teaching and research for faculty, and that enrich the student experience through community-based learning, civic engagement, and international education. Tamara’s community engagement activities reflect wide-ranging experience from institutional strategic planning for community engagement to hands-on program design and management. She works collaboratively with academic and non-academic units to create strategic initiatives that align scholarship to urgent community needs, and to assess the University’s community engagement efforts.

Tamara has worked collaboratively to provide support to community-engaged faculty. This includes co-creating a Broader Impacts support process for research teams, designing faculty professional development opportunities, such as the biennial Engaged Scholarship Symposium, and supporting practice-based scholarship as a member of the editorial team for Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement.

Tamara has developed curriculum and programming for student community-based learning. For a decade, she has coordinated the 49er Democracy Experience strategy team. In 2016, she co-founded and directed Charlotte’s Bonner Leaders program, and now co-directs a community-based learning cohort program for first-year students.

She serves on the University's project-based learning implementation team, and, because she developed urbanCORE’s Community Engagement Pathway, she serves on a campus-wide micro-credentialing working group to create an institutional structure for co-curricular credentialing. She facilitates the Community Engagement Advisory Council, a coalition of more than 50 faculty and practitioners who champion the university’s engaged scholarship efforts.

Tamara has experience in institutional data collection, assessment, and strategic planning for community engagement. She was a member of UNC Charlotte’s 2015 Carnegie Community Engagement Reclassification team, and is now leading a ten-member core team for the 2026 reclassification. She co-chaired the task force that drafted the University’s Civic Action Plan.

Tamara served as adjunct faculty in Global Studies, teaching courses on global cities as well as education abroad courses on food justice in South Africa where she was a Peace Corps volunteer and a Fulbright scholar.