Building and Maintaining Partnerships for Community Engagement

1. Building and Maintaining Partnerships for Community Engagement Victor Rubin Vice President for Research, PolicyLink Engaged Institutions Cluster Meeting Austin, Texas January 22-24, 2007

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. Given this history, what is next? Or not! The next several years will reveal a lot about the long term sustainability of the progress toward community engagement.

8. Partnerships Examined • What are the characteristics of effective partnerships for engagement, and the elements that can enable them to grow and be sustained?

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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)

17. Contact Information: Victor Rubin Vice President for Research (510) 663-4333 vrubin@policylink.org PolicyLink Headquarters 1438 Webster Street, Suite 303 Oakland, CA 94612 Telephone: (510) 663-2333 Fax: (510) 663-9684 info@policylink.org