Dr. Griffen's current project employs the action inquiry model (St. John, 2013) to understand how students who learned the model were empowered as researchers and community collaborators. It is widely believed that experiential learning is an important component in helping students in higher education to develop into responsible citizens. Conversations around the importance of service learning as a popular mechanism to help students connect theory to practice and make community impacts are not new (Bringle & Hatcher, 1996). While these programs have value in helping students understand the broader impact of community engagement, often they do not empower students with the tools to understand how to take these skills beyond their college experience and employ them to enact transformative change. While many service learning models embed program evaluation and program evaluation is important to facilitating improvements, few provide the research skills necessary to help students' grasp the importance of researched based decisions (Bringle & Hatcher, 1996; Giles, 1994; Rademaker, 2008). Many scholars (e.g. Rowell, Polush, & Riel, 2015; Mertler, 2016; St. John, 2013) are calling for the use of action research inside educational organizations to build communities of practice leading to grassroots change.