In 1993 Duquesne University's president, Dr. John E. Murray, Jr., and provost, Dr. Michael P. Weber, set a course to stimulate the university to become more involved in serving communities in Pittsburgh. The university hired Dr. Emma C. Mosley to initiate the University-Community Collaborative Project at Duquesne. Dr. Mosley recommended that the university initially focus its efforts on the Hill District and East Liberty, two needy minority neighborhoods. Dr. Mosley convened meetings among administrators at the university and community leaders, especially the executive directors of the Kingsley (in East Liberty) and Hill House (in the Hill District) Associations, to identify the communities' principal needs and the resources that the university could make available to help address them. All parties strove to identify areas of collaboration that would at the same time solve significant problems in the communities and open educational and service opportunities to Duquesne's faculty and students.

In 1994 Duquesne University was among the first institutions of higher education in the United States to receive a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to establish a Community Outreach Partnership Center. In 1995, under the auspices of the new center, the university undertook a set of activities in close collaboration with community leaders and institutions in East Liberty and the Hill District. These activities included conflict resolution and mediation training with repeating juvenile offenders and with leaders in community correction centers serving the two neighborhoods to alleviate gang-related activity; science counseling and coaching in two middle schools serving the two communities; establishment of a nurse-managed wellness clinic in a low-income, independent-living high-rise serving primarily African-American elderly people in the Hill District; marketing and financial services to assist community economic development efforts in the Hill; and establishment of a Web-based information service to support community development efforts. All these activities proceeded under the guidance of a distinguished Community Advisory Committee. Most continue or have become part of the institutions that serve the community to the present day.

During the same period the Uptown Community Action Group, an association of residents and business and institutional leaders in the neighborhood including and immediately east of Duquesne, approached the university to request help with their revitalization efforts. Duquesne's Policy Center and Small Business Development Center, under the aegis of the Collaborative Project, became involved in strategic planning, land-use and market analysis and membership development in that neighborhood.

In 1997 Duquesne received an Institutionalization grant to support the activities of its Community Outreach Partnership Center for an additional year.

In 2000 Duquesne received a Community Outreach Partnership Centers New Directions grant to undertake a set of new activities in the Hill District and Uptown. These included an Honors College seminar focussed on addressing community problems; community budget analysts to assist the communities to develop recommendations, establish priorities, and provide better input to the city capital budget; a demonstration project that will begin to reforest vacant lots in Uptown; a program to train (with the cooperation of the city of PittsburghUs Bureau of Police) groups of police officers and community leaders in cooperative problem-solving and conflict resolution; expansion of the successful outreach branch of DuquesneUs Psychology Clinic to help meet the mental health needs of individuals in the Hill District; assignment of a Community Development Fellow from DuquesneUs Policy Center to assist the Uptown Community Action Group withhousing development, commercial revitalization, beautification, public safety, and organizational development; a student-run educational outreach program in public schools serving the communities, to teach about poisons, lead poisoning, management of child asthma, and substance abuse; and after-school tutoring to third- and fourth graders at Miller School in the Hill District to overcome measured deficiencies in mathematics performance in the upper grades at that school.