Brokering Community–campus Partnerships: An Analytical Framework

Academic institutions and community-based organizations have increasingly recognized the value of working together to meet their different objectives and address common societal needs. In an effort to support the development and maintenance of these partnerships, a diversity of brokering initiatives has emerged. We describe these brokering initiatives broadly as coordinating mechanisms that act as an intermediary with an aim to develop collaborative and sustainable partnerships that provide mutual benefit. A broker can be an individual or an organization that helps connect and support relationships and share knowledge. To date, there has been little scholarly discussion or analysis of the various elements of these initiatives that contribute to successful community–campus partnerships. In an effort to better understand where these features may align and diverge, we reviewed a sample of community–campus brokering initiatives across North America and the United Kingdom to consider their different roles and activities. From this review, we developed a framework to delineate characteristics of different brokering initiatives to better understand their contributions to successful partnerships. The framework is divided into two parts. The first examines the different structural allegiances of the brokering initiatives by identifying their affiliation, principle purpose, and who received primary benefits. The second considers the dimensions of brokering activities in respect to their level of engagement, platforms used, scale of activity, and area of focus. The intention of the community campus engagement brokering framework is to provide an analytical tool for academics and community-based practitioners engaged in teaching and research partnerships. When developing a brokering initiative, these categories describing the different structures and dimensions encourage participants to think through the overall goals and objectives of the partnership and adapt the initiative accordingly

Provoking Change in Researchers’ Roles: Using a Community-Based Research Approach to Address Research Needs in the Community

This article is based on a community-based research practicum conducted with a Headstart program in western Canada. The purpose of the text is to describe the progression of one researcher’s roles from inception to completion of a year-long research project while working in collaboration with a community partner. Following a brief review of principles of community-based research, a case study is used to show how principles were adhered to in a practicum. A variation of traditional role theory is introduced as a useful framework to navigate burgeoning researcher roles and role multiplicity. These are (a) researcher as researcher, (b) researcher as collaborator, (c) researcher as relationship builder, (d) researcher as teacher, and (e) researcher as learner. Considerations for ways to promote researchers—students and academics—to develop skills to correspond with changing researcher roles are presented, along with future directions to empirically examine researcher roles in community-based research

University students with reading difficulties : Do perceived supports and comorbid difficulties predict well-being and GPA?

We examined the impact of the number of comorbid difficulties, social support, and community support on life satisfaction and academic achievement among 120 university students or recent graduates with self-reported reading difficulties. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing perceived social support, perceived community support, the number of comorbid difficulties in addition to reading difficulty, life satisfaction, and academic achievement (grade point average). Results supported a main effect model in which the number of comorbid difficulties and social, but not community, support predicted life satisfaction. Social and community support did not moderate the relationship between the number of comorbid difficulties and life satisfaction, lending no support to the buffering effect hypothesis. However, a mediation model showed that social support partially mediated the relationship between the number of comorbid difficulties and life satisfaction. Academic achievement did not correlate with any included variable