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Building and Maintaining Partnerships for Community Engagement
Victor RubinVice President for Research, PolicyLink
Engaged Institutions Cluster MeetingAustin, Texas
January 22-24, 2007
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Overview
• Brief history of community-university partnerships and the scholarship of engagement
• The diversity of experiences and perspectives
• Essential qualities of effective partnerships and elements of university change
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History of community-university partnerships and scholarship of engagement
• Early religious motivations for service
• Original land-grant mission
• Development of extension and outreach functions, especially state universities, HBCU’s
• Growth of government funded research and dominance of standard research paradigm
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History of partnerships and engagement
• Application of science, and technical assistance, directed to urban and social problems
• Rethinking these models and roles begins
• Anchor institutions start changing their home neighborhoods, sometimes themselves as well
• Land Grant institutions start rethinking extension; start of Sea Grant program
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History, continued
• Many forms of research require more community cooperation and engagement for success
• Activist scholars and teachers extend support for community organizations and neighborhoods
• Funders start requiring community engagement in research
• Service learning grows significantly in response to students’ and communities’ needs
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Given this history, what is next?
• Federal and philanthropic funders start supporting partnerships in their own right
• Engagement becomes a more common central theme in university reform, growth, and revitalization
• Peer review of scholarship of engagement grows, albeit slowly
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Or not!
The next several years will reveal a lot about the long term sustainability of the progress toward community engagement.
Given this history, what is next?
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Partnerships Examined
• What are the characteristics of effective partnerships for engagement, and the elements that can enable them to grow and be sustained?
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Remarkable diversity of experiences and perspectives
• Partnerships will be with many communities:
– Adjacent neighborhoods
– Other local neighborhoods, or entire cities
– Places located far away from campus
– Communities of common interests or needs
– Organizations or individuals
– Governments, nonprofits, or business sector
– One key partner or many, serial or collaborative
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Remarkable diversity of experiences and perspectives, continued
• Collaboration across disciplines, professions, and units of the university can be as challenging as any community relationship
• Collaborations among institutions of higher education are also necessary.
– Respect the organizational needs of each partner
– Draw on the assets of each partner
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Remarkable diversity of experiences and perspectives, continued
• Some partnerships are directly in synch with university administration agendas
• Other provide advocacy or research support for community interests that may be of little direct concern, or even in opposition to, administration priorities
• Both stances are legitimate and important roles of the university in civil society
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Remarkable diversity of experiences and perspectives, continued
• Engagement involves research, teaching and/or service, and sometimes lead to fundamental rethinking of how those are conducted, but sometimes not
• Partnerships vary in how money and power are distributed, how decisions are made
• Some partnerships put building the capacity of community partners at the center of the picture
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What serious partnership requires
• Partners jointly explore common and separate goals and interests
• Each partner understands capacities, resources and expected contributions of every other partner
• Identify opportunities for early success
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What serious partnership requires
• Focus on the relationship, not only on tasks
• Shared control of partnership directions
• Commitment to continuous assessment of the partnership relationship itself
– B. Holland, “The Power of Partnerships,” HUD, 2005
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What effective engagement requires
• Address power dynamics; forge ways for voices of residents to help guide partnership
• Support for the long term: consistency and longevity are essential to good outcomes and positive relationships
• Effective communication and trust
• Greater capacity in community-based organizations to work with the university
• Greater skill and experience in higher education on managing partnerships
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What effective engagement requires, continued
• Clear and institutionalized incentives and rewards for faculty members and other staff
• Buy-in from multiplicity of departments
• Top-level campus leadership making tangible commitments with follow-through
• More external funding that supports partnership activities
– Adapted from D. Maurrasse, Beyond the Campus (2001)
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Contact Information:
Victor RubinVice President for Research
(510) [email protected]
PolicyLink Headquarters1438 Webster Street, Suite 303
Oakland, CA 94612Telephone: (510) 663-2333 Fax: (510) 663-9684